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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 19, 2025

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

Published on: July 31, 2016

ERPs responses to dominance features from human faces.

Chengguo Miao¹, Xiaojun Li², Edmund Derrington³

¹Reward, Competition and Social Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychology, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China.

Scientific Reports

|December 2, 2022

Summary

Social dominance perception is a late-stage cognitive process. Event-related potentials show that facial dominance cues are evaluated later in the brain, not during early face recognition (N170), but during later processing (LPP).

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Social Psychology
Cognitive Science

Background:

Social dominance is a key aspect of social interactions.
Facial cues are crucial for judging social dominance.
The neural mechanisms of facial dominance evaluation are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the temporal dynamics of facial dominance evaluation.
To identify the neural correlates of processing facial dominance cues.
To understand how the brain processes facial features related to dominance.

Main Methods:

Used event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity.
Participants passively viewed faces with varying dominance levels.
Analyzed the N170 and Late Positive Potential (LPP) components of ERPs.

Main Results:

Dominance levels did not affect the early N170 component of face processing.
Dominance levels significantly modulated the later Late Positive Potential (LPP) component.
Highly dominant and highly submissive faces elicited greater LPP amplitudes than neutral faces.

Conclusions:

Facial dominance evaluation occurs at a late stage of cognitive processing.
The brain processes social dominance cues after initial facial feature recognition.
These findings offer insights into the neurocognitive basis of social judgment from faces.