Reading sadness beyond human faces

Human faces are the main emotion displayers. Knowing that emotional compared to neutral stimuli elicit enlarged ERPs components at the perceptual level, one may wonder whether this has led to an emotional facilitation bias toward human faces. To contribute to this question, we measured the P1 and N170 components of the ERPs elicited by human facial compared to artificial stimuli, namely non-humanoid robots. Fifteen healthy young adults were shown sad and neutral, upright and inverted expressions of human versus robotic displays. An increase in P1 amplitude in response to sad displays compared to neutral ones evidenced an early perceptual amplification for sadness information. P1 and N170 latencies were delayed in response to robotic stimuli compared to human ones, while N170 amplitude was not affected by media. Inverted human stimuli elicited a longer latency of P1 and a larger N170 amplitude while inverted robotic stimuli did not. As a whole, our results show that emotion facilitation is not biased to human faces but rather extend to non-human displays, thus suggesting our capacity to read emotion beyond faces.