Facial age and anger expression : An event-related brain potential study

Abstract: The perception of human faces is affected by different facial features. For example, older faces are processed differently to younger ones and faces expressing diverse emotions are also processed differently. Research shows that angry faces are more attended to compared to neutral or other expressive faces, which is known as the ‘threat advantage’. This is evidenced by research on the late positive potential (LPP). The LPP is an event-related potential (ERP) component associated with affective processing, which seems to strongly respond to threats. The literature has indicated that older faces can elicit larger LPPs compared to young and neutral faces, and the LPP is more sensitive to emotional faces. The current experiment investigated subjective ratings in addition to the LPP in response to neutral and angry faces of young and old individuals, to examine how facial age influences the perception of anger. In a facial rating task, both the young and the old angry faces were rated as threatening faces, while old neutral faces were indicated to be more threatening than young neutral faces. Similarly, participants had a higher LPP for old angry faces. This data, in combination, suggests a higher emotional salience of old angry faces compared to either young angry or (young or old) neutral faces.