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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2008 3(3):270-278; doi:10.1093/scan/nsn021
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Rapid influence of emotional scenes on encoding of facial expressions: an ERP study

Ruthger Righart1 and Beatrice de Gelder1,2

1Cognitive and Affective Neurosciences Laboratory, Tilburg University, The Netherlands and 2Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Bldg. 36, Main St., Charlestown, MA 02129, USA

In daily life, we perceive a person's facial reaction as part of the natural environment surrounding it. Because most studies have investigated how facial expressions are recognized by using isolated faces, it is unclear what role the context plays. Although it has been observed that the N170 for facial expressions is modulated by the emotional context, it was not clear whether individuals use context information on this stage of processing to discriminate between facial expressions. The aim of the present study was to investigate how the early stages of face processing are affected by emotional scenes when explicit categorizations of fearful and happy facial expressions are made. Emotion effects were found for the N170, with larger amplitudes for faces in fearful scenes as compared to faces in happy and neutral scenes. Critically, N170 amplitudes were significantly increased for fearful faces in fearful scenes as compared to fearful faces in happy scenes and expressed in left-occipito-temporal scalp topography differences. Our results show that the information provided by the facial expression is combined with the scene context during the early stages of face processing.

Keywords: context; face perception; emotion; event-related potentials; P1; N170

Correspondence should be addressed to Beatrice de Gelder, Cognitive and Affective Neurosciences Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Warandelaan 2, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail: B.deGelder{at}uvt.nl.

Received April 15, 2008. Accepted July 8, 2008.


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