RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Temporal Dynamics of Neural Processing of Facial Expressions and Emotions
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.05.12.443280
DO 10.1101/2021.05.12.443280
A1 Sanjeev Nara
A1 Dheeraj Rathee
A1 Nicola Molinaro
A1 Naomi Du Bois
A1 Braj Bhushan
A1 Girijesh Prasad
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/14/2021.05.12.443280.abstract
AB Emotion processing has been a focus of research in psychology and neuroscience for some decades. While the evoked neural markers in human brain activations in response to different emotions have been reported, the temporal dynamics of emotion processing has received less attention. Differences in processing speeds, that depend on emotion type, have not been determined. Furthermore, behavioral studies have found that the right side of the human face expresses emotions more accurately than the left side. Therefore, accounting for both the content of the emotion and the visual angle of presentation from the perspective of the viewer, here we have investigated variability in the discrimination of happy and sad faces when the visual angle of presentation was Positive (right side of the face) compared to Negative (left side of the face). Furthermore, the temporal dynamics involved in processing happy and sad emotions have been compared. Regardless of visual angle, happy emotions were processed faster than sad emotions. However, the evoked response to sad emotions significantly increased in amplitude compared to that for happy emotions, when faces were presented at Positive visual angles only. Source reconstruction from sensor-level ERFs show localized activities in ventral and dorsal stream, including fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, putamen and Pre and Post central gyrus. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) confirmed these findings – demonstrating successful decoding of happy and sad emotions only occurred when the facial expression was viewed from a positive visual angle, and that happy emotions were processed faster than sad emotions.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.