Emotion-action incompatibility in an approach-avoidance task: behavioral costs and ERP dynamics of accuracy...

Facial expressions can bias people toward approach or avoidance, yet current goals sometimes require the opposite action. We examined how such emotion-action conflict affects performance and event-related potentials (ERPs) in a modified approach-avoidance task. Thirty-four young adults responded to happy and disgusted faces with approach or avoidance keypresses; 28 contributed sufficient artifact-free trials for ERP analyses. Participants were slower and less accurate when the required action conflicted with the facial expression's usual action meaning, particularly when approaching disgusted faces. An early positive ERP over frontocentral scalp sites, the P200, showed an Emotion × Response interaction driven primarily by larger positivity for Disgust-Approach than Disgust-Avoidance. Later central positivity also showed an Emotion × Response interaction and a sustained effect from 486 to 799 ms. In a between-participant analysis, each participant contributed one P200 interaction score and one accuracy-cost score. Larger P200 effects were associated with greater accuracy loss under incompatible actions, r(28) = -.448, p =.017, whereas N2 and later central activity showed no comparable associations. These findings show that acting against the action tendency signaled by a facial expression impairs performance and engages temporally distinct neural processes. Early frontocentral activity captures between-person differences in susceptibility to response errors, whereas later central activity accompanies prolonged processing during implementation of the conflicting action.