A psychophysiological examination of cognitive processing of and affectiveresponses to social expectancy violations

Several models of person perception that expectancy violations have both af fective and cognitive consequences for the perceiver. Although extant evide nce generally supports these claims, the temporal solution of self-report m easures has limited researcher's ability to convincingly link underlying ph ysiological processes with observed outcomes. In this study, we examined th ese issues by measuring brain (event-related brain potentials) and peripher al (facial electromyogram) electrophysiological activity while participants read positive and negative expectancy-consistent, expectancy-violating, ex pectancy-irrelevant, and semantically incongruent behavioral sentences abou t fictitious characters. The electromyogram results indicated that negative (but not positive) expectancy-violating behaviors elicited enhanced negati ve affect as early as 100 to 300 ms poststimulus. The event-related potenti als showed enhanced positivities with latency exceeding 300 ms in response to expectancy violations and negative behaviors. Semantically incongruent s entence endings influenced a separate negative component (N400) suggesting fundamental differences between semantic- and behavior-consistency processi ng. This difference also was evident in participants' recall. Implications for theoretical models of expectancy violation are discussed.