Brain Activation in Contrasts of Microexpression Following Emotional Contexts

Frontiers in Neuroscience

Fangbing Qu¹  Xiaolan Fu²  Ming Zhang³  Ke Zhao³  Kaiyun Li⁴ 

[1] College of Preschool Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China;Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;School of Education and Psychology, University of Jinan, Jinan, China;

关键词: emotion context;    microexpression;    recognition;    activation;    fMRI;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnins.2020.00329

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The recognition of microexpressions may be influenced by emotional contexts. The microexpression is recognized poorly when it follows a negative context in contrast to a neutral context. Based on the behavioral evidence, we predicted that the effect of emotional contexts might be dependent on neural activities. Using the synthesized microexpressions task modified from the Micro-Expression Training Tool (METT), we performed an functional MRI (fMRI) study to compare brain response in contrasts of the same targets following different contexts. Behaviorally, we observed that the accuracies of target microexpressions following neutral contexts were significantly higher than those following negative or positive contexts. At the neural level, we found increased brain activations in contrasts of the same targets following different contexts, which reflected the discrepancy in the processing of emotional contexts. The increased activations implied that different emotional contexts might differently influence the processing of subsequent target microexpressions and further suggested interactions between the processing of emotional contexts and of microexpressions.

【 授权许可】

Unknown