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Emotional expressions on faces are present in our everyday life and often have important consequences for our behavior. The temporal processing of the different facial expressions in the human brain can be measured through the EEG. Many studies have shown that emotional and neutral facial expressions are processed differently, with larger ERPs (N170, early posterior negativity (EPN), late positive potential (LPP)) for emotional expressions (Frühholz et al., 2011; Hinojosa et al., 2015). In addition to the emotional content, modulation of attention towards the stimuli can also influence the amplitudes of ERPs such as EPN and P3/ LPP (Schupp et al., 2003, 2007). While many studies already explored interactions between emotional content and attention to different categories of stimuli (e.g. gender; Valdés-Conroy et al., 2014; Wronka and Walentowska, 2011), only few studies investigated interactive effects of emotion and attention to a specific level of emotion (i.d. valence detection). So far, in these valence detection tasks, interactions of emotion and attention to a specific level of emotion have been found only for later components, in particular the LPP. For example, Schupp et al. (2007) and Schindler and Straube (2020) detected an interaction between the emotional content of pictures and explicit attention to a valence level while Schindler and Kissler (2016) reported a similar interaction in emotional words. However, so far, no early interactions between emotion and attention have been found. Recently, Gibbons et al. (in revision) showed that specific attention to a valence level might already interact with the emotional content of a word as early as in the P1 window. This finding might be explained through preactivation of the task specific valence level (facial expression with target status). However, this preactivation might not be working for complex pictures of natural scenes, but rather only for simpler structures such as emotional words or faces. Using the same task, we here explore whether early components (P1 and N170) already show interactions of emotion and attention to a valence level in human faces or if these interactions are only restricted to late components (s. Schindler and Straube, 2020). We aim to address the following questions: • Do behavioral responses (reaction times and accuracy) differ between happy, neutral and fearful faces? • Do neural responses, measured through ERPs, differ between happy, neutral and fearful faces? • Do neural responses, measured through ERPs, differ between faces with target and nontarget status? • Do emotional expressions and target status interact, and at what time?

This is an EEG/ERP study to test the contribution of attentional, anticipatory, and preparatory processes to deception. To this end, we will run an experiment involving instructed intentional false responses to targets that are preceded by a cue indicating whether the upcoming target belongs to a critical category requiring deceptive responses or to control categories requiring truthful responses. We will investigate ERP components in response to the cue (to assess the neurocognitive processes involved in the detection of the need to lie as well as in the preparation of a subsequent lie) and in response to the target (to assess the neurocognitive mechanisms of processing a target requiring a deceptive vs. truthful response). We will first ask participants to respond truthfully and without any time pressure to twelve personal questions belonging to a total of four categories (education, origin, vacation, address). Subsequently, in the actual experiment, participants will be asked to respond to yes/no questions based on their previous answers. Each trial will contain a cue indicating the category of the upcoming question (e.g., education), while the subsequent imperative target will contain a short-form question (e.g., "degree = high school?") to which participants have to respond by button press (yes vs. no). Participants are instructed to respond truthfully to all nine questions from three of the four categories, while they are asked to lie in response to all three questions from one critical category. All questions are presented multiple times and in various forms (e.g., in varying spatial arrangements: "high school = degree?" would be the alternative depiction of the example provided above). Moreover, all questions will be asked such that a negatory response is required (e.g., showing the wrong place of birth when participants are required to respond truthfully to all questions pertaining to their origin) as well as in a way requiring an affirmative response (e.g., showing the right place of a participant's last vacation when participants are required to respond truthfully to all questions pertaining to their last vacation).

In a valence-detection task with emotional adjectives, 57 participants selectively responded to a predefined target level of valence (negative, positive, or neutral). Event-related potentials of ignored nontargets were examined for a novel type of emotion–attention interaction between a nontarget’s valence and valence of the attentional set. Findings support an extension of the model of evaluative space [Cacioppo, J. T., Gardner, W. L., & Berntson, G. G. (1997). Beyond bipolar conceptualizations and measures: The case of attitudes and evaluative space. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1(1), 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0101_2], proposing associations of negative and positive stimuli/attentional sets with high and low arousal, respectively. Consistently, in the neutral attentional set involving low arousal, false alarms were more frequent and an average-referenced EPN-like posterior negativity (150–250 ms) was smaller for positive than negative nontarget words. The late positive potential was reduced for positive nontargets in the negative attentional set, but not the reverse, indicating conjoint effects of a negativity bias and distractor-target distance in terms of valence. Finally, data suggest a sensitivity of mastoid-referenced lateral-posterior N170 to inhibition of task-irrelevant affect.