Emotional conflict in facial expression processing during scene viewing: an ERP study

Facial expressions are fundamental emotional stimuli as they convey important information in social interaction. In everyday life a face always appears in complex context. Scenes which faces are embedded in provided typical visual context. The aim of the present study was to investigate the processing of emotional conflict between facial expressions and emotional scenes by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). We found that when the scene was presented before the face-scene compound stimulus, the scene had an influence on facial expression processing. Specifically, emotionally incongruent (in conflict) face-scene compound stimuli elicited larger fronto-central N2 amplitude relative to the emotionally congruent face-scene compound stimuli. The effect occurred in the post-perceptual stage of facial expression processing and reflected emotional conflict monitoring between emotional scenes and facial expressions. The present findings emphasized the importance of emotional scenes as a context factor in the study of the processing of facial expressions.