title: Long-term academic stress enhances early processing of facial expressions.
abstract: Exposure to long-term stress can lead to a variety of emotional and behavioral problems. Although widely investigated, the neural basis of how long-term stress impacts emotional processing in humans remains largely elusive. Using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the effects of long-term stress on the neural dynamics of emotionally facial expression processing. Thirty-nine male college students undergoing preparation for a major examination and twenty-one matched controls performed a gender discrimination task for faces displaying angry, happy, and neutral expressions. The results of the Perceived Stress Scale showed that participants in the stress group perceived higher levels of long-term stress relative to the control group. ERP analyses revealed differential effects of long-term stress on two early stages of facial expression processing: 1) long-term stress generally augmented posterior P1 amplitudes to facial stimuli irrespective of expression valence, suggesting that stress can increase sensitization to visual inputs in general, and 2) long-term stress selectively augmented fronto-central P2 amplitudes for angry but not for neutral or positive facial expressions, suggesting that stress may lead to increased attentional prioritization to processing negative emotional stimuli. Together, our findings suggest that long-term stress has profound impacts on the early stages of facial expression processing, with an increase at the very early stage of general information inputs and a subsequent attentional bias toward processing emotionally negative stimuli.
authors: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors: Liang
authors: L
authors: Zhang
authors: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors: Shaozheng
authors: S
authors: Qin
authors: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors: Zhuxi
authors: Z
authors: Yao
authors: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors: Kan
authors: K
authors: Zhang
authors: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Electronic address: wujh@psych.ac.cn.
authors: Jianhui
authors: J
authors: Wu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000503:physiopathology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Event-related potentials; Facial expression; Long-term stress; P1; P2