Ensemble coding of crowd facial emotion in Internet gaming disorder under the emotional interference condition: An ERP study

IGD participants exhibited weaker ensemble coding ability of crowd facial expressions. They showed an automatic processing bias towards angry crowd faces in the early stage, as well as insensitivity to happy crowd faces in the subsequent selective processing stage during mean emotion extraction. In the later stage, IGD participants failed to actively adopt appropriate cognitive strategies to inhibit interference. This study first provided electrophysiological evidence for the characteristics of crowd facial emotion ensemble coding in IGD and contributed to clarifying how IGD affects social cognition.