Social content mitigates the negativity bias in affective scene processing – a co-registered EEG and eye movements study

How does our brain represent visual exploration when images contain multiple relevant aspects? While the importance of emotionally evocative stimuli has been emphasized in the past, current perspectives emphasize the intrinsic relevance of social cues. However, the precise neural mechanisms involved in such processing remain unclear. We investigated the dynamics of social and emotional relevance processing using event-related potentials and eye-tracking measures while participants viewed complex social and non-social scenes that varied in emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral). At the neural level, both relevance processes unfolded over time: EPN amplitudes were increased by social content, while subsequent P300 and LPC were largest for negative image content. This well-established negativity bias was mitigated at initial sensory processing stages, as indicated by boosted P1 amplitudes for images depicting positive social content. Eye movement measures revealed faster initial saccades for social images and an interaction of both relevancies in fixation patterns, suggesting equal exploration of positive and negative social images. This argues against a general negativity bias and suggests separate and interactive effects of both social and emotional relevance at different stages of processing. While social content influenced earlier stages, emotional valence played a more substantial role at later stages of processing.