ABSTRACT
The complex multidimensional visual patterns of facial expression is particularly well sui ted for studying perception and the processes underlying perceptual integration of component parts into a meaningful whole.With the high resolution in milliseconds,event-related potential (ERP) may be an excellent technique to track the time course of cognitive processing for facial emotions.Facial affective stimuli elicit particular ERP components involved in early processing of facial expressions,including:early sensory processing of visual stimuli:the P100;early structural encoding of facial features:the N170;second-order sustained activities necessary for consequent deeper processing:the posterior P2 and decoding of facial features to identify emotional content:the N250.We reviewed above mentioned ERP components respectively,in order to add the knowledge about ERP components as indicators of neural dynamics of facial emotion processing,and to provide a point of reference for further exploration on facial emotion processing that may be useful for understanding human cognition development and pathology.