Temporal dynamics of affective scene processing in the healthy adult human brain

Understanding how the brain distinguishes emotional from neutral scenes is crucial for advancing brain-computer interfaces, enabling real-time emotion detection for faster, more effective responses, and improving treatments for emotional disorders like depression and anxiety. However, inconsistent research findings have arisen from differences in study settings, such as variations in the time windows, brain regions, and emotion categories examined across studies. This review sought to compile the existing literature on the timing at which the adult brain differentiates basic affective from neutral scenes in less than one second, as previous studies have consistently shown that the brain can begin recognizing emotions within just a few milliseconds. The review includes studies that used electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) in healthy adults to examine brain responses to emotional versus neutral images within one second. Articles of interest were limited to the English language but not to any publication year. Excluded studies involved only patients (of any diagnosis), participants under age 18 (since emotional processing can differ between adults and younger individuals), non-passive tasks, low temporal resolution techniques, time intervals over one second, and animals. Of the 3045 screened articles, 19 met these criteria. Despite the variations between studies, the earliest onset for heightened brain responses to basic affective scenes compared to neutral ones was most commonly observed within the 250–300 ms time window. To the best of our knowledge, this review is the first to synthesize data on the timing of brain differentiation between emotional and neutral scenes in healthy adults.