Are Happy Faces Attractive? The Roles of Early vs. Late Processing

You're Beautiful When You Smile: Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) Evidence of Early Opposite-Gender Bias in Happy Faces

Studies of social cognition have shown gender differences regarding human face processing. One interesting finding is the enhanced processing of opposite-gender faces at different time stages, as revealed by event-related brain potentials. Crucially, from an evolutionary perspective, such a bias might interact with the emotional expression of the face. To investigate this, 100 participants (50 female, 50 male) completed an expression-detection task while their EEG was recorded. In three blocks, fearful, happy and neutral faces (female and male) were randomly presented, with participants instructed to respond to only one predefined target expression level in each block. Using linear mixed models, we observed both faster reaction times as well as larger P1 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes for women compared to men, supporting a generally greater female interest in faces. Highly interestingly, the analysis revealed an opposite-gender bias at P1 for happy target faces. This suggests that participants' attentional templates may include more opposite-gender facial features when selectively attending to happy faces. While N170 was influenced by neither the face nor the participant gender, LPP was modulated by the face gender and specific combinations of the target status, face gender and expression, which is interpreted in the context of gender-emotion stereotypes. Future research should further investigate this expression and attention dependency of early opposite-gender biases.

Of ugly gains and happy losses: An event-related potential study of interactions of the intrinsic and acquired valence of emotional pictures

During the last decades, event-related potential research on the processing of intrinsic and acquired valence has made great progress, but the two dimensions rarely varied simultaneously. Only that way, however, can we investigate whether the acquisition of extrinsic valence varies with intrinsic valence and whether intrinsic and acquired valence share the same brain mechanisms. Forty-five participants performed associative learning of gains and losses, using pictures varying on intrinsic valence (positive, negative) and outcome (90 % gain, 50 %/50 %, 90 % loss). 64-channel EEG was recorded. During acquisition, one picture from each valence/outcome combination was repeatedly presented, followed by abstract outcome information (+10 ct, -10 ct) at the predefined probability. In the test phase, participants pressed buttons to earn the real gains and avoid the real losses associated with the pictures. Here, effects of outcome and/or its congruence with intrinsic valence were observed for RT, error rate, frontal theta power, posterior P2, P300, and LPP. Moreover, outcome systematically affected post-test valence and arousal ratings. During acquisition, a contingency effect (90 % > 50 %) on amplitude of a frontal negative slow wave accompanied the progress of learning, independently of outcome, valence, and congruence. The relative absence of outcome effects during acquisition suggests "cold" semantic rather than genuinely affective processing of gains and losses. However, with real gains and losses in the test phase, "hot" affective processing took place, and outcome and its congruence with intrinsic valence influenced behavior and neural processing. Finally, the data suggest both shared and distinct brain mechanisms of intrinsic and acquired valence.

Neuroelectric Correlates of Human Sexuality: A Review and Meta-Analysis

Many reviews on sexual arousal in humans focus on different brain imaging methods and behavioral observations. Although neurotransmission in the brain is mainly performed through electrochemical signals, there are no systematic reviews of the electrophysiological correlates of sexual arousal. We performed a systematic search on this subject and reviewed 255 studies including various electrophysiological methods. Our results show how neuroelectric signals have been used to investigate genital somatotopy as well as basic genital physiology during sexual arousal and how cortical electric signals have been recorded during orgasm. Moreover, experiments on the interactions of cognition and sexual arousal in healthy subjects and in individuals with abnormal sexual preferences were analyzed as well as case studies on sexual disturbances associated with diseases of the nervous system. In addition, 25 studies focusing on brain potentials during the interaction of cognition and sexual arousal were eligible for meta-analysis. The results showed significant effect sizes for specific brain potentials during sexual stimulation (P3: Cohen's d = 1.82, N = 300, LPP: Cohen's d = 2.30, N = 510) with high heterogeneity between the combined studies. Taken together, our review shows how neuroelectric methods can consistently differentiate sexual arousal from other emotional states.

Brain potentials related to violent video clips

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether affective video can elicit ERPs related to emotional processing. Compared with neutral video clips, violent video clips elicited delayed but amplitude-similar N1 component. The most conspicuous finding was enhanced EPN and LPP components for violent than neutral video clips. These data indicate the possibility of using affective video as stimulus to elicit ERPs and provide new evidence for processing affective stimuli, using real-life video clips with better ecological validity.

The relationship between aesthetic preferences of people for ceramic tile design and neural responses: An event-related potential study

Introduction

The aesthetic preferences of people can determine the success of a design and are often closely related to design features. The discovery of designs that match user preferences can provide a reference for designers. Ceramic tiles are widely used in environmental design; however, little attention has been paid to the aesthetic preferences of people for tiles. This study aimed to explore the relationship between aesthetic preferences for tile design and neural responses.

Materials and methods

In this study, two groups of tiles with different preference levels were randomly presented to 16 participants, and their electroencephalograms were recorded. The mean amplitudes of event-related potentials were analyzed by ANOVA.

Results

The results showed that: (1) the aesthetic preferences of people for tiles could modulate brain activity; (2) tiles that people liked triggered higher N100 amplitudes; and (3) tiles that people disliked triggered higher P200 and late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes.

Discussion

These results suggest that N100, P200, and LPP are significantly related to the aesthetic preferences of people for ceramic tiles. The difference in N100 and P200 amplitudes indicates that participants developed aesthetic perceptions of the tiles in the early and middle stages of vision and formed different attention allocations to tiles with varying levels of aesthetic preference; in the middle and late stages of visual processing, the difference in the LPP amplitude indicates that the impression of people for tiles is further deepened in the later stage, forming a top-down emotion-driven evaluation. Exploring the relationship between the aesthetic preferences of people and neural responses is significant in establishing objective aesthetic judgment indicators for tiles and understanding the process of aesthetic cognition. This study provides relevant information for quantitative aesthetic assessments of environmental design, interior design, and marketing involving ceramic tiles.

Light makeup decreases receivers' negative emotional experience

Makeup is widely used in modern society and has a positive effect on perceived attractiveness. However, little is known about the other possible outcomes of makeup use. In this study, we investigated whether makeup enhances a receiver's emotional experience. Dynamic faces with or without makeup are presented in Experiments 1 and 2. Participants were asked to imagine themselves video chatting with a target person (expresser) with different expressions: neutral, angry, sad, or happy, and then to appraise their own subjective emotional experience. Emotional valence, arousal, and willingness to communicate were also assessed in Experiment 2. The results showed that makeup improved perceived facial attractiveness and increased the willingness to communicate. More importantly, it revealed that wearing makeup could weaken receivers' negative experiences arising from the angry and sad conditions, which is not the case for the non-makeup condition, but could not affect the happy contagion. Furthermore, incremental changes in the amount of makeup were not accompanied by incremental changes in emotional appraisal (valence and arousal). Overall, we found that makeup may affect emotional contagion and interpersonal communication. Whether the alleviated negative experience due to makeup is adaptive may need further discussion.

Neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty

The judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty objectively refer to the perception and evaluation of moral traits, which are generally influenced by facial attractiveness. For centuries, people have equated beauty with the possession of positive qualities, but it is not clear whether the association between beauty and positive qualities exerts a similarly implicit influence on people's responses to moral goodness and moral beauty, how it affects those responses, and what is the neural basis for such an effect. The present study is the first to examine the neural responses to facial attractiveness in the judgments of moral goodness and moral beauty. We found that beautiful faces in both moral judgments activated the left ventral occipitotemporal cortices sensitive to the geometric configuration of the faces, demonstrating that both moral goodness and moral beauty required the automatic visual analysis of geometrical configuration of attractive faces. In addition, compared to beautiful faces during moral goodness judgment, beautiful faces during moral beauty judgment induced unique activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and midline cortical structures involved in the emotional-valenced information about attractive faces. The opposite comparison elicited specific activity in the left superior temporal cortex and premotor area, which play a critical role in the recognition of facial identity. Our results demonstrated that the neural responses to facial attractiveness in the process of higher order moral decision-makings exhibit both task-general and task-specific characteristics. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the essence of the relationship between morality and aesthetics.

Is an anthropomorphic app icon more attractive? Evidence from neuroergonomomics

Exploring what types of app icons are attractive has been a topic of great interest in recent years. The main purpose of this study was to explore the neural mechanism of attention capturing of the anthropomorphic app icons based on neuroergonomics. Participants' perception of different app icons was investigated by using event-related potentials (ERPs) and attractiveness evaluation. The results showed that anthropomorphic app icons were evaluated more attractive and elicted larger P2, P3 and LPP amplitude than non-anthropomorphic app icons, which indicated an attention bias to attractive anthropomprphic app icons. The time course of the attention towards anthropomorphic app icons includes three main processes: an early stimulus-driven perceptual detection of app icon features (P2 during 160-200 ms), an involuntary allocation of attention to evaluate and categorize app icons (P3 during 300-500 ms), and experiencing different emotions to anthropomorphic versus non-anthropomorphic app icons (LPP during 500-800 ms). That is, the process of users' perception and attention toward app icons combines "bottom-up" and "top-down" processes. Our findings suggest a new perspective to use ERP components (P2, P3, and LPP) to deep understanding of app icon design. A practical implication is that app icons could be designed using anthropomorphic elements to attract users.

Implicit emotion regulation deficits in individuals with high schizotypal traits: an ERP study

Schizotypy is associated with poor emotion regulation that is thought to contribute to the development of psychotic symptoms and to indicate a predisposition to schizophrenia. Having focused primarily on the relationship between schizotypy and explicit emotion regulation, existing studies have, until now, neglected to acknowledge the potentially important role of implicit emotion regulation. Our aim in the current study was to investigate implicit emotion regulation deficits in schizotypy. To this end, we used a newly developed Priming-Identification (PI) ERP paradigm, consisting of a priming phase and an emotion identification phase, to test 30 individuals with schizotypy and 30 healthy controls while also acquiring EEG data. During the priming phase, we aimed to manipulate emotion regulation goals (i.e., to bring about an intended emotional state) by presenting a category of words related to emotion regulation alongside a category of control words. Associated brain responses occurring during the subsequent stage were indexed according to three ERP components: N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). Results showed that, in the control group, priming words associated with emotion regulation led to enhancements in the early N170 amplitude and the middle EPN during expression identification. The same pattern was not observed in the schizotypy group. In summary, our results suggest the presence of deficits in the early and middle stages of the implicit emotion regulation process among individuals with high schizotypal traits.

The Effects of Facial Attractiveness and Familiarity on Facial Expression Recognition

The classic theory of face perception holds that the invariant (e.g., identity and race) and variant (e.g., expression) dimensions of face information are independent of one another. Two separate neural systems are involved in face processing. However, the dynamic theory of face perception indicates that these two neural systems interact bidirectionally. Accordingly, by using the emotion categorization task and morph movies task, we investigated the influence of facial attractiveness on facial expression recognition and provided further evidence supporting the dynamic theory of face perception in both the static and dynamic contexts. In addition, this research used familiar celebrities (including actors, television personalities, politicians, and comedians) and explored the role of familiarity in face perception. In two experiments, the participants were asked to assess the expressions of faces with different levels of attractiveness and different levels of familiarity. We found that regardless of being in a static or dynamic face situation, happy expressions on attractive faces can be recognized more quickly, highlighting the advantage of happy expression recognition. Moreover, in static and dynamic familiar face situations, familiarity has a greater impact on expression recognition, and the influence of attraction on expression recognition may be weakened or even unaffected. Our results show that facial attractiveness influences the recognition of facial expressions in both static and dynamic contexts and highlight the importance of familiarity in face perception.

Negative association between resilience and event-related potentials evoked by negative emotion

Individuals with low level of resilience are documented to be less capable of regulating negative emotion. To investigate the underlying neurophysiology, the present study examined the relationship between resilience and the late positive potential (LPP) evoked by emotionally negative pictures. Fifty-four participants watched negative and neutral pictures passively while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded to assess LPP. Participants also completed the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) for assessment of their resilience levels. We found that resilience was negatively correlated with the LPP response to negative emotional pictures. Additionally, this negative correlation was mainly driven by optimism, one of the three composite factors that contribute to resilience. Our results showed a neurophysiological correlate for the effect of resilience on negative emotion, and suggested a predictive value of optimism in identifying individuals potentially sensitive to affective interruptions.

Perceived Gaze Direction Modulates Neural Processing of Prosocial Decision Making

Gaze direction is a common social cue implying potential interpersonal interaction. However, little is known about the neural processing of social decision making influenced by perceived gaze direction. Here, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) method to investigate 27 females when they were engaging in an economic exchange game task during which photos of direct or averted eye gaze were shown. We found that, when averted but not direct gaze was presented, prosocial vs. selfish choices were associated with stronger activations in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) as well as larger functional couplings between right STG and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Moreover, stronger activations in right STG was associated with quicker actions for making prosocial choice accompanied with averted gaze. The findings suggest that, when the cue implying social contact is absent, the processing of understanding others’ intention and the relationship between self and others is more involved for making prosocial than selfish decisions. These findings could advance our understanding of the roles of subtle cues in influencing prosocial decision making, as well as shedding lights on deficient social cue processing and functioning among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Neural Process of the Preference Cross-category Transfer Effect: Evidence from an Event-related Potential Study

In business practice, companies prefer to find highly attractive commercial spokesmen to represent and promote their products and brands. This study mainly focused on the investigation of whether female facial attractiveness influenced the preference attitudes of male subjects toward a no-named and unfamiliar logo and determined the underlying reasons via neuroscientific methods. We designed two ERP (event-related potential) experiments. Experiment 1 comprised a formal experiment with facial stimuli. The purpose of experiment 2 was to confirm whether the logos that were used did not present a significant difference for the subjects. According to the behavioural results of experiment 1, when other conditions were not significantly different, the preference degree of the logos correlated with attractive female faces was increased compared with the logos correlated with unattractive faces. Reasons to explain these behavioural phenomena were identified via ERP measures, and preference cross-category transfer mainly caused the results. Additionally, the preference developed associated with emotion. This study is the first to report a novel concept referred to as the “Preference Cross-Category Transfer Effect”. Moreover, a three-phase neural process of the face evaluation subsequently explained how the cross-category transfer of preference occurred and influenced subject preference attitude toward brand logos.