Electrophysiological Evidence Reveals Differences between the Recognition of Microexpressions and Macroexpressions

Xunbing Shen, Qi Wu, Ke Zhao, Xiaolan Fu

Microexpressions are fleeting facial expressions that are important for judging people's true emotions. Little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the recognition of microexpressions (with duration of less than 200 ms) and macroexpressions (with duration of greater than 200 ms). We used an affective priming paradigm in which a picture of a facial expression is the prime and an emotional word is the target, and electroencephalogram (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine neural activities associated with recognizing microexpressions and macroexpressions. The results showed that there were significant main effects of duration and valence for N170/vertex positive potential. The main effect of congruence for N400 is also significant. Further, sLORETA showed that the brain regions responsible for these significant differences included the inferior temporal gyrus and widespread regions of the frontal lobe. Furthermore, the results suggested that the left hemisphere was more involved than the right hemisphere in processing a microexpression. The main effect of duration for the event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) was significant, and the theta oscillations (4 to 8 Hz) increased in recognizing expressions with a duration of 40 ms compared with 300 ms. Thus, there are different EEG/ERPs neural mechanisms for recognizing microexpressions compared to recognizing macroexpressions.