Event-related brain potential in responses to social messages via human faces.
In two experiments participants were presented a sequence of facial photographs to examine effects of pleasantness of facial expressions, namely, pleasant and unpleasant, and task relevance on P300 component of event-related brain potentials in the 3-stimulus version of the oddball task. Exp. 1 showed that, although the amplitudes of P300 were the largest in response to task-relevant target stimuli and moderate in response to task-irrelevant nontargets, the Pleasantness of stimuli did not affect the amplitudes of P300 when the stimuli were task-relevant or irrelevant. Data in Exp. 2 suggested that the emotional significance rather than physical characteristics of stimuli might be responsible for generation of P300 by task-irrelevant nontargets.
Ogawa
Tokihiro
T
National Research Institute of Police Science in Japan, Chiba. t-ogawa@nrips.go.jp
Morioka
Yousuke
Y
Suzuki
Naoto
N
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D018913:Event-Related Potentials, P300 / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology