Threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were presented to test the hypothesis of the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Dense sensor event-related brain potentials were measured while subjects viewed facial stimuli. Subjects had no explicit task for emotional categorization of the faces. Assessing early perceptual stimulus processing, threatening faces elicited an early posterior negativity compared with nonthreatening neutral or friendly expressions. Moreover, at later stages of stimulus processing, facial threat also elicited augmented late positive potentials relative to the other facial expressions, indicating the more elaborate perceptual analysis of these stimuli. Taken together, these data demonstrate the facilitated perceptual processing of threatening faces. Results are discussed within the context of an evolved module of fear (A. Öhman & S. Mineka, 2001).

The human face displays a wealth of psychologically relevant information. For instance, gender, age, and visual identity can be rapidly extracted from cranial and facial appearances of the face. Furthermore, and even more important for the present context, faces also supply information regarding the attentional focus and motivational and emotional states. Thus, facial expressions are central to nonverbal social exchange as markers of internal states and as signals of intentions. This dual role of facial expressions is readily illustrated by considering anger expressions. Whereas angry expressions are characterized by frowning brows, starring eyes, and a shut mouth with tense lips (Ekman & Friesen, 1975), these expressions also signal a readiness for physical or symbolic attack for the observer of such a face. The present study focused on the signaling rather than the expressive role of facial expressions, and therefore, these faces are referred to as threatening rather than angry faces. For similar reasons, happy expressions are referred to as friendly faces (cf. Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001). Considered from an evolutionary perspective, Öhman (1986) proposed that threatening faces are prototypical for activating the human fear system. Consistent with this notion, fear-relevant threatening faces demonstrate superior fear conditioning compared with friendly faces (reviewed in Öhman & Mineka, 2001). However, although...