Stage-specific changes in schematic facial emotion recognition following childhood trauma: an ERP study

Childhood trauma has been linked to emotional face processing, but its association with stages of emotional face processing remains unclear. The present study used schematic emotional facial cues as simplified stimuli and event-related potentials to examine early face sensitive activity and later evaluative processing within this stimulus context.

Adults with and without childhood trauma completed an emotion classification task with happy, sad, and neutral schematic faces during EEG recording. Reaction times and accuracy were analyzed as behavioral measures. ERP analyses focused on the N170 and VPP in the early window and the P300/LPP complex in the later window.

The childhood trauma group showed longer reaction times than the control group, with no significant difference in accuracy. In the early window, the childhood trauma group showed earlier N170 but later VPP peak timing. Early amplitude patterns also differed, with posterior N170 sad-happy differentiation in controls and happy-dominant VPP modulation in the childhood trauma group. In the later window, the childhood trauma group showed overall larger overall P300/LPP amplitudes and longer latencies than the control group. P300/LPP amplitude also varied by group and emotion, with a sad-over-happy pattern in the childhood trauma group and a happy-over-sad pattern in controls.

Childhood trauma was associated with slower responding and stage-specific ERP differences during schematic emotional face processing. These differences appeared across both the early N170, VPP and later P300/LPP windows, rather than as a uniform change in responsiveness. The findings suggest altered timing and emotion-specific weighting across ERP windows, including enhanced late positive responses to sad relative to happy schematic faces in the childhood trauma group.