Processing emotions from faces and words measured by event-related brain potentials.

Affective aspects of a stimulus can be processed rapidly and before cognitive attribution, acting much earlier for verbal stimuli than previously considered. Aimed for specific mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), expressed in facial expressions or word meaning and evoked by six basic emotions - - relative to emotionally neutral stimuli were analysed in a sample of 116 participants. Brain responses in the occipital and left temporal regions elicited by the sadness in facial expressions or words were indistinguishable from responses evoked by neutral faces or words.

Subjectively different emotional schematic faces not automatically discriminated from the brain's bioelectrical responses.

The present study investigates how the brain automatically discriminates emotional schematic faces, as indicated by the mismatch responses, and how reliable these brain responses are. Thirty-three healthy volunteers participated in the vMMN EEG experiment with four experimental sets differing from each other by the type of standard (object with scrambled face features) and the type of deviants (Angry, Happy and Neutral schematic faces) presented. Conscious subjective evaluations of valence, arousal and attention catching of the same stimuli showed clear differentiation of emotional expressions.