Between Emotions – Modulation of Event Related Potentials as an Early Stage Indicator of Processing Fluency.
-
1
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Poland
-
2
Polish Academy of Science, Poland
-
3
University of California, San Diego, United States
AIMS
In this study we investigated the brain underpinnings of social judgments that are based on processing ease (fluency). Behaviorally, we tested the hypothesis that the ease of facial expression processing enhances trust judgments. We based this hypothesis on the previous findings that highly fluent stimuli elicit more positive affect and are evaluated more positively, as compared to disfluent stimuli. Physiologically, we examined the temporal and spatial characteristics of ERP components associated with face processing. This can inform about the processing stages at which perception, fluency and evaluation effects occur.
METHOD
We tested thirty-one healthy participants (11 males, age range 19-29, M= 22.2, SD= 2.5). We presented emotional facial expressions and manipulated processing difficulty by varying the degree of emotional ambiguity and participants’ task. Presented faces exhibited either clear emotional states (pure anger or happiness) or morphed expressions gradually changing from one to another. In the control condition participants assessed the gender of presented faces—an easy task for all expressions. In the experimental condition, participants categorized the facial expressions into happy or angry. This makes processing of “pure” expressions easy, but mixed expression difficult. Afterwards, in both conditions, we collected trustworthiness ratings. During entire procedure we recorded EEG signal.
RESULTS
Behavioral results indicate that categorization of ambiguous stimuli (morphed expressions) causes processing disfluency, as revealed in longer reaction times. Moreover, consistent with processing fluency, “pure/fluent” faces received more positive ratings in emotion categorization condition, as compared to gender categorization condition. Physiologically, we found that ambiguous faces caused smaller P1 amplitude comparing to clear facial expressions. Also at N170 potential we found the difference in processing of mixed faces, between emotion and gender condition. With smaller amplitude of N170 potential for mixed faces in emotion condition compared to gender condition.
CONCLUSIONS
Altogether these findings suggest that recognition of atypical (mixed expressions) stimuli starts at the very early stages of visual processing. However processing of category dependent evaluation occurs later. We suggest that these differences observed in Event Related Potentials impact the stimuli evaluation processes as well as social judgments observed in behavioral data.
References
Batty, M., & Taylor, M. J. (2003). Early processing of the six basic facial emotional expressions. Cognitive Brain Research, 17(3), 613-620.
Vuilleumier, P., & Pourtois, G. (2007). Distributed and interactive brain mechanisms during emotion face perception: evidence from functional neuroimaging. Neuropsychologia, 45(1), 174-194.
Winkielman, P., Olszanowski, M., & Gola. M. (2015). Faces in between: Evaluative responses to faces reflect the interplay of features and task-dependent fluency. Emotion, 15, 232-242
Keywords:
face perception,
Processing fluency,
ERP (event related potentials),
social judgments,
abiguity
Conference:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Sydney, Australia, 2 Dec - 4 Dec, 2015.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Psychophysiology
Citation:
Kamińska
OK,
Olszanowski
M,
Brzezicka
A,
Gola
MK and
Winkielman
P
(2015). Between Emotions – Modulation of Event Related Potentials as an Early Stage Indicator of Processing Fluency..
Conference Abstract:
ASP2015 - 25th Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.219.00058
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
21 Sep 2015;
Published Online:
30 Nov 2015.
*
Correspondence:
MD. Olga K Kamińska, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, 03-815, Poland, olgakaminsk@gmail.com