title: Early visual ERPs are influenced by individual emotional skills.
abstract: Processing information from faces is crucial to understanding others and to adapting to social life. Many studies have investigated responses to facial emotions to provide a better understanding of the processes and the neural networks involved. Moreover, several studies have revealed abnormalities of emotional face processing and their neural correlates in affective disorders. The aim of this study was to investigate whether early visual event-related potentials (ERPs) are affected by the emotional skills of healthy adults. Unfamiliar faces expressing the six basic emotions were presented to 28 young adults while recording visual ERPs. No specific task was required during the recording. Participants also completed the Social Skills Inventory (SSI) which measures social and emotional skills. The results confirmed that early visual ERPs (P1, N170) are affected by the emotions expressed by a face and also demonstrated that N170 and P2 are correlated to the emotional skills of healthy subjects. While N170 is sensitive to the subject's emotional sensitivity and expressivity, P2 is modulated by the ability of the subjects to control their emotions. We therefore suggest that N170 and P2 could be used as individual markers to assess strengths and weaknesses in emotional areas and could provide information for further investigations of affective disorders.
authors.affiliation: UMR Inserm U930, Université François Rabelais de Tours, CHRU de Tours, Centre Universitaire de Pédopsychiatrie, 37044 Tours Cedex 9, France Emilie.Meaux@unige.ch.
authors.forename: Emilie
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Meaux
authors.affiliation: UMR Inserm U930, Université François Rabelais de Tours, CHRU de Tours, Centre Universitaire de Pédopsychiatrie, 37044 Tours Cedex 9, France.
authors.forename: Sylvie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Roux
authors.affiliation: UMR Inserm U930, Université François Rabelais de Tours, CHRU de Tours, Centre Universitaire de Pédopsychiatrie, 37044 Tours Cedex 9, France.
authors.forename: Magali
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Batty
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011581:Psychological Tests; D066107:Social Skills; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: emotional skills; facial expression of emotion; healthy adults; visual ERPs