People, places, and things: The impact of scene animacy on emotional modulation of the early posterior negativity

Abstract The early posterior negativity (EPN) is a mid-latency event-related potential (ERP) component reliably enhanced by emotionally arousing visual cues. Recent work suggests that modulation of the EPN might depend to some extent on evocative cues featuring animate content. We tested this possibility by recording EEG while 80 participants viewed pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant scenes depicting people, objects, or landscapes. People and object scenes were selected to be comparable in composition and arousal ratings, to enable a direct assessment of the impact of scene animacy, separate from emotional intensity. Results showed robust EPN modulation by emotional content across both people and object scenes, with no significant interaction across arousal-matched scenes. This finding further dissociates the EPN from proximal event-related potential components associated with face and body perception and supports its value as an early marker of emotional perception, reliably driven by emotional intensity across multiple domains of visual cues.