This paper presents a study about how Beijing Opera influences spatial processing of facial emotions using analysis of event-related potentials. Music listening has been suggested to have short-term benefit for performance on cognitive tasks. However, physiological mechanism underlying these associations between music and cognition is unknown. In our study, a spatial search task with crowds of neutral and emotionally cartoon faces was performed in two conditions (before and after listening to 2-min audio clip of Beijing Opera) by 16 normal subjects. Event-related potentials were recorded and analyzed in response to different facial expressions (positiveegative) in different conditions. The results revealed that: 1) After listening to Beijing Opera, the reaction times of positive and negative stimuli were shorter than before. 2) In the right posterior of brain, the amplitude of N2, N400 and late component was increased and the latency of N400 was shorter after listening to the Beijing Opera clip than before. 3) Compared with positive stimuli, the negative stimuli need shorter time to search and evoked shorter latency of N400 and larger amplitude of late component in posterior region. Our findings demonstrate Beijing opera has a positive effect on spatial attention and emotional processing not only in behavioral performance but also in electrophysiological activity.
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