Brief facial emotion aftereffect occurs earlier for angry than happy adaptation

Prolonged exposure to an emotional face biases our judgement of subsequent face stimulus toward the opposite emotion. This emotion aftereffect has been suggested to occur as early as 35 ms exposure duration in cartoon faces. In the current study, we are interested in investigating the time-course of brief emotional face adaptation, and the relationship between brief emotional face adaptation and prolonged emotional face adaptation. We adapted the subjects from 17 ms to 1000 ms with a happy or angry adapting face. We found that a facial emotion adaptation aftereffect started from 17 ms adapting duration for angry face adaptation, and from 50 ms for happy face adaptation. Factor analysis on the adaptation effects highlighted three different components: brief angry adaptation (17 ms, 34 ms, and 50 ms), prolonged angry adaptation (100 ms and 1000 ms), and happy face adaptation (from 17 ms to 1000 ms). We found that the brief angry face adaptation was negatively associated with the awareness of the adapting face, and the prolonged angry face adaptation was stronger in subjects who perceived the angry adapting face as more negative in valence. Together, these findings suggest that (1) facial emotion adaptation can be induced by brief (17 ms) adapting face presentation; (2) brief angry face adaptation may be related to early visual processing, whereas prolonged angry face adaptation may be related to adaptation at later and higher-level visual emotional processing; and (3) brief and prolonged adaptations may adapt different neural populations. Our findings thus shed light on the current understanding of the neural mechanisms of emotional face adaptation.