Neuropsychologia
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The recognition of faces across incidences is a complex function of the human brain and a crucial ability for communication and daily interactions. This first study on ERP correlates of emotional face learning in social anxiety disorder (SAD) investigates whether the known attentional bias for threatening faces leads to a corresponding memory bias. Therefore, 21 patients with SAD and 21 healthy controls (HCs) learned faces with emotional facial expressions (neutral, happy, and angry) and were later asked to recognize these out of novel identities all presented with a neutral facial expression. ⋯ In contrast to what had been expected, sustained hypervigilance to the emotional content seems to have impaired the processing of the facial identity, resulting in a happy face advantage at the behavioral level. This could be explained by prominent models assuming separate processing of facial emotion and identity. Hypervigilance in SAD might be a disadvantage in those studies focusing on other aspects of face processing than emotion.