Vocal emotions are crucial in guiding visual attention toward emotionally significant environmental events, such as recognizing emotional faces. This study employed continuous electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to examine the impact of linguistic and nonlinguistic vocalizations on facial emotion processing. Participants completed a facial emotion discrimination task while viewing fearful, happy, and neutral faces. The behavioral and ERP results indicated that fearful nonlinguistic vocalizations accelerated the recognition of fearful faces and elicited a larger P1 amplitude, whereas happy linguistic vocalizations accelerated the recognition of happy faces and similarly induced a greater P1 amplitude. In recognition of fearful faces, a greater N170 component was observed in the right hemisphere when the emotional category of the priming vocalization was consistent with the face stimulus. In contrast, this effect occurred in the left hemisphere while recognizing happy faces. Representational similarity analysis revealed that the temporoparietal regions automatically differentiate between linguistic and nonlinguistic vocalizations early in face processing. In conclusion, these findings enhance our understanding of the interplay between vocalization types and facial emotion recognition, highlighting the importance of cross-modal processing in emotional perception.

Social anxiety is a prevalent issue among college students, adversely affecting their overall well-being. Drawing from the cognitive model of social anxiety and attention control theory, heightened levels of social anxiety may correspond to poorer attention control ability. However, little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms of the relationship between social anxiety and attention control. To address this research gap, the current study recruited a sample of 156 college students (56 women) who underwent self-report measures of social anxiety, cognitive flexibility, and attention control, followed by a resting-state EEG recording. The results revealed a significant negative predictive effect of social anxiety on attention control, with cognitive flexibility partially mediating this relationship. Furthermore, resting-state theta power emerged as a significant moderator, accentuating the negative impact of social anxiety on cognitive flexibility among individuals with lower theta power. In addition, frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) demonstrated a moderating effect, with lower FAA intensifying the predictive influence of cognitive flexibility on attention control. Taken together, these results suggested that social anxiety can predict attention control either directly or indirectly via the mediating role of cognitive flexibility, and lower theta power and FAA has a risk amplification effect, which provide novel insights into the treatment and prevention of social anxiety and its negative impact on college students.

In conditional reasoning, the reasoner must draw a conclusion based on a conditional or “If…, then…” proposition. Previous studies have reported that reversing the premises can effectively promote modus tollens reasoning (a form of conditional reasoning), but subsequent experimental studies have found no such effect. Therefore, to further examine this issue and reveal the cognitive mechanism of conditional reasoning, we asked two groups of healthy volunteers (traditional and inverted premise order groups) to evaluate a set of visually presented conditional tasks (modus ponens/modus tollens) under fMRI. The results indicated that the inverted condition activated more brain regions associated with working memory, including the angular gyrus (BA 39), precuneus (BA 7), inferior parietal lobe, and middle frontal gyrus. The resulting common activation map was used to define the ROIs and perform dynamic causal modeling for the effective connectivity analysis, containing the medial frontal gyrus, hippocampus, cerebellum, and middle occipital gyrus in the right hemisphere and the inferior occipital gyrus in the left hemisphere. The results of intrinsic connections in the optimal model selected by Bayesian model selection showed that the connection strength was stronger in the inverted group rather than in the traditional group, which may indicate that the reversal of the premise order promotes connectivity between brain regions. Despite the lack of a premise order effect, we did discover a neuronal separation between the inverted and traditional conditions, which lends support to the mental model theory to some extent.