Effects of subliminal emotional facial expressions on language comprehension as revealed by event-related brain potentials

Abstract

Abstract Emotional facial expressions often take place during communicative face-to-face interactions. Yet little is known as to whether natural spoken processing can be modulated by emotional expressions during online processing. Furthermore, the functional independence of syntactic processing from other cognitive and affective processes remains a long-standing debate in the literature. To address these issues, this study investigated the influence of masked emotional facial expressions on syntactic speech processing. Participants listened to sentences that could contain morphosyntactic anomalies while a masked emotional expression was presented for 16 ms (i.e., subliminally) just preceding the critical word. A larger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) amplitude was observed for both emotional faces (i.e., happy and angry) compared to neutral ones. Moreover, a larger LAN amplitude was found for angry faces than for happy faces. Finally, a reduced P600 amplitude was observed only for angry faces when compared to neutral faces. Collectively, the results presented here indicate that first-pass syntactic parsing is influenced by emotional visual stimuli even under masked conditions and that this effect extends also to later linguistic processes. These findings constitute evidence in favor of an interactive view of language processing as integrated within a complex and integrated system for human communication.

Keywords

• LAN
• P600
• Syntax
• Emotional facial expression
• Multimodal language
• EEG