| Abstract/Results: | ABSTRACT:
The externalization consists in a spectrum of personality that encompasses anti-social behaviors, personality traits associated with disinhibited and aggressive behavior and the abuse of licit and illicit substances. The etiology of this disorder is still not consensual. In addition to other problems, this population shows difficulties in emotional regulation, namely through the interpretation and demonstration of emotions. Therefore, this research aimed to investigate whether there are differences in the processing of facial expressions of emotion between individuals with different levels of externalization, using behavioral measures (reaction times and percentage of correct responses) and electroencephalographic measures (analysis of event-related potentials). Regarding the latter, the waves P100 and N170 were studied, as well as 11 temporal windows of 50ms each, between 230ms and 780ms after stimulus onset. Participants were 54 students from the University of Aveiro, divided in groups of high, medium and low externalization, based on their score on the Externalizing Inventory. Participants performed an emotional categorization task that aimed to assess their ability to discriminate between faces displaying emotional expressions and neutral faces. The study included the basic emotions happiness, fear, anger, sadness, disgust and surprise. Behavioral results seem to point to difficulties in recognizing facial expressions of sadness compared with other emotions and neutral facial expressions. Regarding the results obtained for the P100 and N170, these point to the existence of differences in emotional processing at short latencies. At long latencies, some differences between the experimental groups to the emotions of fear and anger were also observed. For the emotion ‘fear’, there were differences between the processing of emotional faces and faces with neutral expression. Overall, it was observed that the right hemisphere showed larger amplitudes than the left. Given the reduced number of studies in the literature concerning the study of externalization and its effects on the processing of facial emotions, it will be important to conduct further research to explore these aspects. In particular it would be interesting to explore how facial processing of emotions occurs in facial stimuli whose emotional intensity is variable. However, the present study already contributes to a better understanding of the behavioral and psychophysiological aspects associated with the processing of emotional expressions in individuals with high externalization.
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