Electrophysiological correlates of emotional and structural face processing in humans

In order to study brain potentials related to decoding of facial expression s of emotions and those, related to basic perception of faces 16 right-hand ed subjects performed tasks on facial emotion recognition and perception of blurred faces and objects. Electroencephalograph (EEG) recordings during p erformance of the tasks revealed similar event-related potentials during th e presentation of faces at 120 and 170 ms after stimulus onset in both of t he tasks but significant differences in amplitudes between 180 and 300 ms. Whereas faces in the emotion recognition task produced high amplitudes in t hat latency range, potentials in response to faces in the blurred object co ndition were virtually absent. These data point to the assumption that deco ding of facial expressions starts early in the brain and might be processed separately from basic stages of face perception. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.