Emotional Facial Expression Processing of Emoticon: an ERP Study

This study examined the processing of emotional facial expression of emoticon compared to those of human. With pictures of emoticon faces and human faces expressing happy, angry, fearful, and neutral emotions along with pictures of houses and scrambled faces, 24 participants were required to do location-judgment about two gaps on contour of facial and control stimuli (non-attention) or were required to do pleasantness-judgment about the stimuli (focused attention). Face-specific N170 to ignored facial expressions showed emotion effect only for fearful expression of human face and showed no emotion effect for all emoticon facial expressions at both hemispheres. But, to attended facial expressions, N170 showed emotion effect for all emoticon expressions as well as for all human expressions at right hemisphere, and showed limited emotion effect for emoticon and human expressions at left hemisphere. These results suggest that attended facial expressions of emoticon are processed in a similar way as those of human, but, ignored facial expressions of emoticon can hardly be processed, suggesting the processing of emotional facial expression of emoticon depends on more attentional resources than those of human