Abstract: How to reveal the cognitive neural correlates underlying emotional face processing has always been the popular topic for psychology and social neuroscience. Previous studies mainly used single facial expressions as the stimuli to induce and present emotions, but there is still a lack of attention and the investigation for the crowd emotion. Thus, the present project plans to reveal the neural correlates underlying the processing of crowd emotional faces through the combination of behavioral, ERP, fMRI, and TMS experiments, in which the emotional information (valence and intensity), face direction (frontal, lateral and inverse view), integrity (partial presentation, complete presentation) and spatial frequency (complete, high frequency, low frequency) will be investigated to reveal the temporal dynamics and brain activation patterns of the processing of crowd facial expressions. Finally, our work will be expected to beneficially serve the comprehensive understanding of the nature of the perception and recognition of crowd emotion, which is also of practical significance towards updating social interactions.

Key words: facial expression, emotional processing, crowd emotion, ensemble perception