ИСТИНА

Background. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a relatively long-term investigated psychological concept, which neurobiological mechanisms only recently started to be actively examined. The effects of EI levels on several ERPs components in response to facial expressions have been already demonstrated (Raz et al., 2013). However the question of how people with high and low EI perceive emotional and neutral faces has not yet been investigated. In this study we analyzed the effects of EI on the late positive potential (LPP) of the brain in response to emotional and neutral facial expressions through a facial emotion recognition task. Methods. Thirty five healthy individuals (26F, 9M) took part both in EI testing and EEG recording. For defining EI levels, the performance-based Emotional Intelligence Test (EIT, Sergienko et. al., 2019) was administrated. For the facial emotion recognition task we used 40 grayscale photographs (20 male and 20 female faces) from WSEFEP Database and Chicago Face Database (Ma, Correll, Wittenbrink, 2015) as stimuli, presented randomly for 600 ms each. The participants were asked to recognize facial expressions by choosing one of the suggested options (1 - neutral expression, 2 - happiness and 3 - anger). In parallel EEG brain responses were registered with 64 active electrodes, placed according to the international 10-10 system, recorded with Brain Products ActiChamp amplifier (BrainProducts, Munich, Germany). Results. In line with previous study, our findings showed significant differences between EI groups in the mean amplitude area of LPP (340-500 ms) in response to angry (p=0.051) and neutral faces (p=0.046) at parietal areas (Pz channel specifically). The same analysis for frontal and occipital channels, in contrast to previous work, revealed no significant differences (p>0.05). Thus, the current study reveals the effect of EI level on brain parietal areas’ activity during facial emotion recognition. Conclusion. Our results may suggest greater recruitment of resources to process all emotional and non-emotional faces at early and late processing stages among individuals with higher EI. So, ERP technique may be used as a sensitive measure to study emotional stimuli processing.