Facial expression decoding as a function of emotional meaning status: ERP evidence.

To further specify the time course of (emotional) face processing, this study compared event-related potentials elicited by faces conveying prototypical basic emotions, nonprototypical affective expressions (grimaces), and neutral faces. Results showed that prototypical and nonprototypical facial expressions could each be differentiated from neutral expressions in three different event-related potential component amplitudes (P200, early negativity, and N400), which are believed to index distinct processing stages in facial expression decoding. On the basis of the distribution of effects, our results suggest that early processing is mediated by shared neural generators for prototypical and nonprototypical facial expressions; however, later processing stages seem to engage distinct subsystems for the three facial expression types investigated according to their emotionality and meaning status.