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. 2023 May 10;18(1):nsad021.
doi: 10.1093/scan/nsad021.

It's who, not what that matters: personal relevance and early face processing

Mareike Bayer  1   2 , Tom Johnstone  3   4 , Isabel Dziobek  1   2
Affiliations

It's who, not what that matters: personal relevance and early face processing

Mareike Bayer et al. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. .

Abstract

The faces of our friends and loved ones are among the most pervasive and important social stimuli we encounter in our everyday lives. We employed electroencephalography to investigate the time line of personally relevant face processing and potential interactions with emotional facial expressions by presenting female participants with photographs of their romantic partner, a close friend and a stranger, displaying fearful, happy and neutral facial expressions. Our results revealed elevated activity to the partner's face from 100 ms after stimulus onset as evident in increased amplitudes of P1, early posterior negativity, P3 and late positive component, while there were no effects of emotional expressions and no interactions. Our findings indicate the prominent role of personal relevance in face processing; the time course of effects further suggests that it might not rely solely on the core face processing network but might start even before the stage of structural face encoding. Our results suggest a new direction of research in which face processing models should be expanded to adequately capture the dynamics of the processing of real-life, personally relevant faces.

Keywords: ERPs; emotion; faces; familiarity; personal relevance.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declared that they had no conflict of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Effects of personal relevance in ERPs. Grand mean ERP waveforms for Partner, Friend and Stranger at electrodes PO8 and Pz (A). Scalp distributions for Partner, Friend and Stranger, as well as difference topographies for indicated ERP components and time intervals (B).
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Stimulus ratings of valence, arousal and attractiveness (means and standard errors). Attractiveness ratings were collected for neutral facial expressions.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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