Facial identity and emotional expression as predictors during economic decisions.
Two sources of information most relevant to guide social decision making are the cooperative tendencies associated with different people and their facial emotional displays. This electrophysiological experiment aimed to study how the use of personal identity and emotional expressions as cues impacts different stages of face processing and their potential isolated or interactive processing. Participants played a modified trust game with 8 different alleged partners, and in separate blocks either the identity or the emotions carried information regarding potential trial outcomes (win or loss). Behaviorally, participants were faster to make decisions based on identity compared to emotional expressions. Also, ignored (nonpredictive) emotions interfered with decisions based on identity in trials where these sources of information conflicted. Electrophysiological results showed that expectations based on emotions modulated processing earlier in time than those based on identity. Whereas emotion modulated the central N1 and VPP potentials, identity judgments heightened the amplitude of the N2 and P3b. In addition, the conflict that ignored emotions generated was reflected on the N170 and P3b potentials. Overall, our results indicate that using identity or emotional cues to predict cooperation tendencies recruits dissociable neural circuits from an early point in time, and that both sources of information generate early and late interactive patterns.
['Alguacil|Sonia|S|', 'Madrid|Eduardo|E|', 'Espín|Antonio M|AM|', 'Ruz|María|M|']
D000293:Adolescent D000328:Adult D001921:Brain D003220:Conflict, Psychological D003657:Decision Making D004569:Electroencephalography D004644:Emotions D005071:Evoked Potentials D005149:Facial Expression D000066499:Facial Recognition D005260:Female D006801:Humans D007398:Interpersonal Relations D007600:Judgment D008297:Male D011930:Reaction Time D012201:Reward D012919:Social Behavior D013997:Time Factors D035502:Trust D055815:Young Adult
Emotion Conflict N170 Decision-making Reward