Fearful faces heighten the cortical representation of contextual threat

Perception of facial expressions is typically investigated by presenting isolated face stimuli. In everyday life, however, faces are rarely seen without a surrounding visual context that affects perception and interpretation of the facial expression. Conversely, fearful faces may act as a cue, heightening the sensitivity of the visual system to effectively detect potential threat in the environment. In the present study, we used steady-state visually evoked potentials (ssVEPs) to examine the mutual effects of facial expressions (fearful, neutral, happy) and affective visual context (pleasant, neutral, threat). By assigning two different flicker frequencies (12 vs. 15 Hz) to the face and the visual context scene, cortical activity to the concurrent stimuli was separated, which represents a novel approach to independently tracking the cortical processes associated with the face and the context. Twenty healthy students viewed flickering faces overlaid on flickering visual scenes, while performing a simple change-detection task at fixation, and high-density EEG was recorded. Arousing background scenes generally drove larger ssVEP amplitudes than neutral scenes. Importantly, background and expression interacted: When viewing fearful facial expressions, the ssVEP in response to threat context was amplified compared to other backgrounds. Together, these findings suggest that fearful faces elicit vigilance for potential threat in the visual periphery.