The processing of fearful facial expressions is prioritized by the human brain. This priority is maintained across various information processing stages as evident in early, intermediate and late components of event-related potentials (ERPs). However, emotional modulations are inconsistently reported for these different processing stages. In this pre-registered study, we investigated how feature-based attention differentially affects ERPs to fearful and neutral faces in 40 participants. The tasks required the participants to discriminate either the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the sex of the face or the face’s emotional expression, increasing attention to emotion-related features. We found main effects of emotion for the N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). While N170 emotional modulations were task-independent, interactions of emotion and task were observed for the EPN and LPP. While EPN emotion effects were found in the sex and emotion tasks, the LPP emotion effect was mainly driven by the emotion task. This study shows that early responses to fearful faces are task-independent (N170) and likely based on low-level and configural information while during later processing stages, attention to the face (EPN) or—more specifically—to the face’s emotional expression (LPP) is crucial for reliable amplified processing of emotional faces.

中文翻译：

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注意力条件对恐惧和中性面孔的早期、中期和晚期神经反应有不同的影响。


人类大脑优先处理恐惧的面部表情。这种优先级在各个信息处理阶段都得到维持，这在事件相关电位 (ERP) 的早期、中期和晚期组成部分中很明显。然而，这些不同处理阶段的情绪调节报告不一致。在这项预先注册的研究中，我们调查了 40 名参与者基于特征的注意力如何对恐惧和中性面孔的 ERP 产生不同的影响。这些任务要求参与者区分面部线条的方向、面部的性别或面部的情绪表达，从而增加对情绪相关特征的关注。我们发现情绪对 N170 的主要影响是早期后消极性 (EPN) 和晚期正电位 (LPP)。虽然 N170 情绪调节与任务无关，但在 EPN 和 LPP 中观察到情绪和任务的相互作用。 EPN 情绪效应在性别和情绪任务中被发现，而 LPP 情绪效应主要由情绪任务驱动。这项研究表明，对恐惧面孔的早期反应是与任务无关的（N170），并且可能基于低级和配置信息，而在后期处理阶段，对面孔的关注（EPN）或更具体地说是对面孔的情绪表达（ LPP）对于情绪面孔的可靠放大处理至关重要。