中国科学院心理研究所机构知识库

面孔在社会交往中发挥重要作用，人类对威胁面孔的记忆优势能帮助我们更好地规避风险、适应环境.根据影响记忆的几个重要因素，揭示威胁面孔加工的行为和神经机制是理解威胁面孔记忆优势的关键，也是心理学研究的重要问题。目前的行为研究探讨了威胁面孔的记忆优势主要源自编码阶段的注意和知觉优势;神经机制研究揭示了威胁面孔的记忆优势在威胁身份面孔和威胁表情面孔加工中的体现。与非威胁面孔记忆的比较研究发现，威胁面孔记忆有着独特的以杏仁核、颗上沟、眶额叶和脑岛为主的神经加工机制。未来研究需要考虑不同的威胁种类，区分记忆的不同阶段以及情绪和知觉因素在其中发挥的作用，并尝试采用多种技术手段来探索威胁面孔记忆优势背后的认知神经机制，有助于进一步完善本领域的研究。

Human face plays an important role in social activities, and the advantage of memory for threatening faces can help us avoid risk and adapt to the environment. Faces can convey threat messages through facial identity and facial expressions. Threatening identity indicates that the person is a long-term threat to others, while threat expression indicates that the person may be a temporary threat. According to several important factors that affect memory, revealing the behavior and neural mechanism of threat face processing is the key to understand memory advantage of the threatening face, and is also an important problem in psychological research. Recent behavior, brain imaging, and ERPs studies have revealed the memory advantage of threatening faces is mainly due to the attention and perception advantage in the face coding process, and is embodied in the process of the threatening identity and threatening facial expression. In comparison with non-threatening face memory, it is found that threat face memory has a unique neural processing mechanism dominated by amygdala, superior temporal sulcus, orbito frontal cortex and insula. Specifically, studies of the identity of threatening faces have found that faces of both defectors and untrustworthy individuals have a memory advantage. The reason could be that remembering the threatening people is more important for self-protection and is rare in life. At the same time, the research of neural mechanism shows that the face with threatening identity will attract more attention, and the recognition of the face will spontaneously recall the information related to the threat identity, with greater activation of the anterior paracentric gyrus, superior temporal sulcus, and insula. Studies of the emotionally threatening faces have found that such faces have higher processing efficiency and quality, and looser recognition response criteria. Compared with an unthreatening face, it is found that threatening emotional face memory has a unique neural processing mechanism including amygdala-anterior cingulated gyrus network and insula. The ERPs studies found that threat emotion faces had larger amplitude on N2pc, P1, and P300 components, indicating that threat expression enhanced the attention bias of threat faces through attention capture and attention maintenance. Due to the different attention to identity and facial expression, the results of relevant literature are relatively scattered. Nevertheless, we can explain the memory advantage effect of the threatening identity and threatening facial expression from the perspectives of evolutionary dominance hypothesis and emotional arousal hypothesis. According to the evolutionary hypothesis, the evolutionary pressure has shaped the automatic threat detection system, and the direct-driven, bottom-up and automated attention capture advantage of the threatening faces leads to the memory advantage of threat faces. While emotional hypothesis suggests that the threatening face can quickly enter the arousal system and improve the individual arousal level, thus improving the effort and efficiency in the task process. That is to say, threat faces improve the processing efficiency by improving the arousal level of individuals, and allocate attention resources to more important threat faces through the top-down meaning assessment system, so as to promote the memory of threat faces. Previous studies have confirmed that the superior memory effect of threatening faces is reflected in two aspects, face identity and facial expression. And this memory advantage can be derived from the aspects of threatening face attracting attention, having higher perceptive discernibility, significance and so on. The future research is encouraged to clarify if the relationship between facial expression and facial identity is independent or interactive, consider the differences between instant and potential threatening faces, and distinguish the different stages of memory and the role of emotional and perceptual factors during threatening face processing. Using a variety of technical means and a unified research paradigm will be helpful to observe the cognitive and neural mechanisms behind the threatening face memory advantage.