Attentional Bias to Facial Aggression Cue is Influenced by Face Emotion

The current study investigated the neural dynamics of attentional bias toward facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) using N2pc and Pd components. In Experiment 1, 44 students (20 females; age range: 19-26 years; mean age: 21.05 ± 1.70 years) were presented with neutral emotional faces and completed a dot-probe task. In Experiment 2, 31 students (17 females; age range: 19-25 years; mean age: 21.90 ± 2.26 years) were presented with angry and fearful faces and performed the same task.This dataset contains behavioral and electrophysiological data from both experiments, organized into two files: (1) behavioral results and (2) EEG data.Electrophysiological recordings were obtained using a 64-channel Ag-AgCl electrode system (NeuroScan, Charlotte, NC, United States). Vertical electrooculography (VEOG) was recorded via two electrodes placed supraorbital and infraorbital to the left eye, while horizontal electrooculography (HEOG) used two electrodes positioned 1.5 cm lateral to the outer canthi of both eyes. All electrode impedances were maintained below 5 kΩ. Data were acquired at a sampling rate of 500 Hz with a 0.05-100 Hz band-pass filter, using a physical reference electrode located between Cz and CPz according to the 10-20 system. For preprocessing, EEG data were analyzed using Letswave toolbox in MATLAB R2015a (The MathWorks, Natick, MA). Epochs were extracted from -200 to 600 ms relative to stimulus onset, with a 200 ms pre-stimulus baseline correction. Data were band-pass filtered (0.1-30 Hz) and re-referenced to the average of all electrodes (Reutter et al., 2017). Ocular artifacts were removed through independent component analysis (ICA), with components exceeding ±75 μV amplitude rejected. Forty ICA components were evaluated per participant, with a mean of two components removed per subject. No trials were excluded based on behavioral performance due to high response accuracy.