Brain Activation in Contrasts of Microexpression Following Emotional Contexts

Ming Zhang; Ke Zhao; Fangbing Qu; Kaiyun Li; Xiaolan Fu

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.00329

Brain Activation in Contrasts of Microexpression Following Emotional Contexts

Front Neurosci. 2020 Apr 29:14:329. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00329. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Ming Zhang¹, Ke Zhao¹, Fangbing Qu^{1

2}, Kaiyun Li^{1

3}, Xiaolan Fu^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² College of Preschool Education, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.
³ School of Education and Psychology, University of Jinan, Jinan, China.
⁴ Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

The recognition of microexpressions may be influenced by emotional contexts. The microexpression is recognized poorly when it follows a negative context in contrast to a neutral context. Based on the behavioral evidence, we predicted that the effect of emotional contexts might be dependent on neural activities. Using the synthesized microexpressions task modified from the Micro-Expression Training Tool (METT), we performed an functional MRI (fMRI) study to compare brain response in contrasts of the same targets following different contexts. Behaviorally, we observed that the accuracies of target microexpressions following neutral contexts were significantly higher than those following negative or positive contexts. At the neural level, we found increased brain activations in contrasts of the same targets following different contexts, which reflected the discrepancy in the processing of emotional contexts. The increased activations implied that different emotional contexts might differently influence the processing of subsequent target microexpressions and further suggested interactions between the processing of emotional contexts and of microexpressions.

Keywords: activation; emotion context; fMRI; microexpression; recognition.