The Effects Of Emotion Cues On College Students' Holistic Face Processing:Behavioral And ERP Evidence

Face recognition is the basic cognitive ability of an individual person.In social interaction,each college student have to deal with countless face information.Efficient processing of face inform ation is an important skill for individuals to carry out interpersonal communication and maintain a good psychological state.The overall processing of the face is a process in which the perceptual system selectively integrates various information on the face to form an overall internal representati on.The overall processing level of the face is positively correlated with the ability of face recognition and will be regulated by the individual's emotional state.Based on the “potency” dimension of emotions,some researches showed that positive emotions enhanced us to expand the scope of att ention and promote the overall processing of faces.Negative emotions,such as depression and anx iety,will isolate the stimulating features,weaken the overall processing of the face,and prolong th e average response time to face stimuli.Recently,another dimension of emotion,the intensity of motivation(close to oravoiding the impulse intensity of stimuli),provides a new interpretation of how emotions affect perception;whereas high motivational emotion states(fear,desire)narrow perc eptions regardless of emotional valence range.Social interaction process can effectively arouse the emotional experience of the participants,thus it is particular important to examine the relationship between the emotional state and the overall processing of the face.This study combines behavioral and event-related potential methods to explore the effects of high-motivation emotional backgroun d on the overall processing of the face and its neural mechanisms from a neural mechanism.Studying the desires,fears and neutral expression images selected from the Chinese Emotional Picture System(CAPS),the International Emotional Picture System(IAPS)and the Internet as emotion-inducing materials,selected 26 subjects in three situational moods Perform a combined face task under the picture launch condition,Ask the participants to ignore the lower half of the face,which is always different,and judge the consistency of the upper part of the face.At the same time,the EEG signal was recorded using a 64-electrode cap extended by the International 10-20 system.For ERP data,the main focus was on N1,N170,N250 r and P3.The results showed that:(1)Behavioral studies showed that the interaction between emotion type and face combination was significant.The combined face effect appeared under neutral emotional conditions: the accuracy of the discrimination of the staggered face was significantly higher than that of the aligned face.The combined face effect disappeared under the condition of high moti vational emotions: there was no significant difference in the discrimination accuracy between the st aggered face and the aligned face under the condition of high motivation and negative emotion;T here was no significant difference in the accuracy of discrimination between staggered faces and aligned faces under high motivational positive emotion conditions.(2)ERP results showed that the N1 amplitude induced by high motivation negative emotion was significantly greater than that of neutral and high motivation positive emotion,and there was no significant difference in the N1 am plitude induced by high and positive emotions.On the N170 component,regardless of the emotion al condition,the N170 amplitude induced by the staggered face was significantly larger than the aligned face,showing a combined face effect.On the N250 r component,there was no significant dif ference in the N250 r amplitude between the aligned face and the staggered face under the conditio n of the right occipital temporal lobe and high motivational negative emotions;Under sexual condi tions,N250 r produced by aligned faces is significantly larger than staggered faces;under high-moti vation positive emotion conditions,the N250 r amplitude generated by aligned faces is significantly larger than the staggered faces.On the P3 component,under neutral mood conditions,the P3 ampl itude generated by the aligned faces was significantly larger than that of the staggered faces;under high negative conditions,aligned faces and staggered faces There was no significant difference in the amplitude of P3 generated;there was no significant difference in P3 amplitude between aligned faces and staggered faces under high motivational positive emotion conditions.Research conclusions: The approaching(desire)and avoiding(fear)emotions with high motivat ional nature reduce the overall processing level of face recognition relative to neutral emotions.And the effect of high avoidance(fear)emotion on the overall processing of the face is in the middle and late stages(N250r,P3),while the effect of high approaching(desire)emotion on the overall processing of the face is only in the late stage(P3).It shows that there is a high correlation between face processing and emotional processing,revealing that the degree of arousal of emotion has a stronger influence on face processing.It further reveals the differences in neural mechanisms of different emotional conditions on the overall processing of college students' faces.