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Published on: July 31, 2016
Age-related differences in event-related potentials for early visual processing of emotional faces
Matthew R Hilimire1, Andrew Mienaltowski2, Fredda Blanchard-Fields2
1Psychology Department, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, 23187 VA, USA, Department of Psychology and Center for the Study of Lifespan Development, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, 42101 KY, USA, School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 30332 GA, USA, and School of Psychology, University of Auckland, 1142 Auckland, New Zealand mhilimire@gmail.com.
Abstract:
With advancing age, processing resources are shifted away from negative emotional stimuli and toward positive ones. Here, we explored this 'positivity effect' using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants identified the presence or absence of a visual probe that appeared over photographs of emotional faces. The ERPs elicited by the onsets of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces were recorded. We examined the frontocentral emotional positivity (FcEP), which is defined as a positive deflection in the waveforms elicited by emotional expressions relative to neutral faces early on in the time course of the ERP. The FcEP is thought to reflect enhanced early processing of emotional expressions. The results show that within the first 130 ms young adults show an FcEP to negative emotional expressions, whereas older adults show an FcEP to positive emotional expressions. These findings provide additional evidence that the age-related positivity effect in emotion processing can be traced to automatic processes that are evident very early in the processing of emotional facial expressions.
