| Abstract |
| Expression mismatch negativity (EMMN) describes an event-related potential difference waveform elicited by irregular, task-irrelevant changes in facial expression. This waveform can jointly reflect physical stimulus differences, repetition-related adaptation, structural face processing, attention allocation, emotional salience, and regularity violations. Thus, the presence of EMMN alone does not establish a specific processing function or underlying mechanism. This narrative methodological review examines traditional, identity-varying, reverse, and sequence oddball paradigms, alongside equiprobable and cascade controls, with a particular focus on emotional specificity, latency, and predictive coding. The accumulated evidence indicates that identical-stimulus comparisons and controls for repetition-related adaptation support interpretations of EMMN in terms of regularity violation. Nevertheless, early responses can overlap more strongly with N170 and repetition-related effects, whereas later responses must also be interpreted in consideration of the paradigm and comparison condition. Emotional deviants might elicit larger or earlier mismatch responses than neutral changes, suggesting that EMMN reflects the influence of emotional salience beyond general change detection. With appropriate control designs and time-resolved analyses, EMMN can provide a useful neurophysiological measure of the temporal dynamics of facial expression change detection and socioemotional predictive processing, as well as differences associated with clinical characteristics and individual variability. |
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| Key Words |
| EMMN, Facial Expression, Oddball Paradigm, Repetition Adaptation, Emotional Specificity, 얼굴표정, 오드볼 패러다임, 반복 순응, 정서 특이성 |
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