AUTHOR=Liu Tongran , Xiao Tong , Shi Jiannong TITLE=Automatic Change Detection to Facial Expressions in Adolescents: Evidence from Visual Mismatch Negativity Responses JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=7 YEAR=2016 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00462 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00462 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

Adolescence is a critical period for the neurodevelopment of social-emotional processing, wherein the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions is crucial for the development of interpersonal communication. Two groups of participants (an adolescent group and an adult group) were recruited to complete an emotional oddball task featuring on happy and one fearful condition. The measurement of event-related potential was carried out via electroencephalography and electrooculography recording, to detect visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) with regard to the automatic detection of changes in facial expressions between the two age groups. The current findings demonstrated that the adolescent group featured more negative vMMN amplitudes than the adult group in the fronto-central region during the 120–200 ms interval. During the time window of 370–450 ms, only the adult group showed better automatic processing on fearful faces than happy faces. The present study indicated that adolescent’s posses stronger automatic detection of changes in emotional expression relative to adults, and sheds light on the neurodevelopment of automatic processes concerning social-emotional information.