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Emotions represent an important key for the social relationships. They produce physiological responses for preparing the organism to adopt a behavioral actions related with survival. Facial expressions provide the most important clues in the emotional states in other individuals. However, it is not well understood the neural basis of facial expression processing. Due to their excellent temporal resolution, event-related potentials (ERPs) allow us to investigate the temporal course of the various stages implied in processing a cognitive function. Many studies have explored the ERPs to facial emotional expressions reporting different effects over the ERP components. This paper is aimed to determine the effect of emotional facial expression over the early face specific component N170, using a paradigm in which emotional expression is an infrequent condition in a gender detection oddball task. The paradigm was built using frequently presented (70 %) male faces without emotional expression (neutral faces), randomly mixed with female faces that appeared to a smaller frequency (30 %). The results show significant differences of amplitude between N170 component obtained under fear or happiness infrequent condition and the neutral infrequent condition. The modulation of this component represents a physiological response to the recognition of the facial emotional expressions and could reflect the automatic activation of the emotional neural system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]