On dissociating the neural time course of the processing of positive emotions

Providing evidence for categorical theories of emotion mandates the inclusion of discrete emotion categories beyond the typical six “basic” emotions. Traditional neurophysiological investigations of emotion typically feature the six basic emotions with happiness as the lone positive exemplar. Here we studied how event-related potentials (ERPs) might differentiate between two positive emotional expressions: happiness and pride, and if so, at what time interval. Furthermore, given divergent findings in the ERP literature with respect to viewing emotional expressions, we explicitly examined how task type modulates neurophysiological responses when the same stimuli are viewed. While a continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded, 20 healthy participants completed two tasks: an implicit task where participants judged whether or not a face featured a brown spot (freckle), and an explicit task where they judged the face as portraying a “happy,” “proud,” or “neutral” expression. Behavioral performance exceeded 90% accuracy on both tasks. In the explicit task, participants responded faster and more accurately for Happy compared to Proud and Neutral expressions. Neurophysiologically, amplitudes for N170, VPP and P250 ERPs differentiated emotional from neutral expressions, but not from each other. In contrast, the late SPW component significantly differentiated Happy and Proud expressions from each other. Moreover, main effects of Task were found for the VPP, P250, LPP and SPW; additionally, Emotion X Task interactions were observed for P250 and SPW. Our data stress that task demands may magnify or diminish neural processing differences between emotion categories, which therefore cannot be disentangled with a single experimental paradigm. Additionally, some ERP differences may also reflect variations in categorization difficulty.