An experimental study of facial emotional valence advantage in the process of recognition under stress in university students / 中华行为医学与脑科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate whether there is emotional memory advantage bias to negativc emotion facial expressions in stress.Methods A learning-recognition paradigm was used in this study,and 2 groups (stress/non stress)× 3 facial emotional valence (positive/neutral/negative) mixed designs were adopted to compare the reaction time deviations to different facial emotion expressions in stress participants and relaxing participants.Results It was shown by repeated measurement ANOVA that the main effect(E(2.59)=5.13,P=0.007) in facial emotional response time and the interaction effect (F(2.59) =6.02,P=0.003)between groups and facial emotional expression were found.The main effect in recognition of accuracy was observed(F(2.59)=14.47,P=0.000).Further analysis showed,for stress participants,that the reaction time to detect stimulus of positive facial expression ((645.84± 52.65) ms) was faster than negative ((721.46± 101.76) ms) and neutral faces ((692.99 ± 63.17) ms) (P＜0.05) and the recognition of the latter expressions was not significant.Interestingly,the accuracy to recognized of positive facial expression (0.68 ± 0.08) was the highest (P ＜ 0.05) for stress participants.Conclusion Positive faces advantage to facial expression is shown at the stage of face recognition in stress group.