Electrical stimulation of smiling muscles reduces visual processing load and enhances happiness perception in neutral faces

Theories of embodied cognition suggest that after an initial visual processing stage, emotional faces elicit spontaneous facial mimicry and that the accompanying change in proprioceptive facial feedback contributes to facial emotion recognition. However, this temporal sequence has not yet been properly tested, given the lack of methods allowing to manipulate or interfere with facial muscle activity at specific time points. The current study (N = 52, 28 women) investigated this key question using EEG and facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES)—a technique offering superior control over which facial muscles are activated and when. Participants categorised neutral, happy and sad avatar faces as either happy or sad and received fNMES (except in the control condition) to bilateral zygomaticus major muscles during early visual processing (−250 to +250 ms of face onset), or later visual processing, when mimicry typically arises (500–1000 ms after face onset). Both early and late fNMES resulted in a happiness bias specific to neutral faces, which was mediated by a reduced N170 in the early window. In contrast, a modulation of the beta-band (13–22 Hz) coherence between somatomotor and occipital cortices was found in the late fNMES, although this did not predict categorisation choice. We propose that facial feedback biases emotion recognition at different visual processing stages by reducing visual processing load.