Dataset Information

Perceptual encoding of emotions in interactive bodily expressions.

ABSTRACT: For social species, e.g., primates, the perceptual analysis of social interactions is an essential skill for survival, emerging already early during development. While real-life emotional behavior includes predominantly interactions between conspecifics, research on the perception of emotional body expressions has primarily focused on perception of single individuals. While previous studies using point-light or video stimuli of interacting people suggest an influence of social context on the perception and neural encoding of interacting bodies, it remains entirely unknown how emotions of multiple interacting agents are perceptually integrated. We studied this question using computer animation by creating scenes with two interacting avatars whose emotional style was independently controlled. While participants had to report the emotional style of a single agent, we found a systematic influence of the emotion expressed by the other, which was consistent with the social interaction context. The emotional styles of interacting individuals are thus jointly encoded.

SUBMITTER: Christensen A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10755352 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Perceptual encoding of emotions in interactive bodily expressions.

Christensen Andrea A Taubert Nick N Huis In 't Veld Elisabeth M J EMJ de Gelder Beatrice B Giese Martin A MA

iScience 20231128 1

For social species, e.g., primates, the perceptual analysis of social interactions is an essential skill for survival, emerging already early during development. While real-life emotional behavior includes predominantly interactions between conspecifics, research on the perception of emotional body expressions has primarily focused on perception of single individuals. While previous studies using point-light or video stimuli of interacting people suggest an influence of social context on the per ...[more]

PMID: 38161419

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Project description:Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), a component in event-related potentials (ERPs), can be elicited when rarely presented "deviant" facial expressions violate regularity formed by repeated "standard" faces. vMMN is observed as differential ERPs elicited between the deviant and standard faces. It is not clear, however, whether differential ERPs to rare emotional faces interspersed with repeated neutral ones reflect true vMMN (i.e., detection of regularity violation) or merely encoding of the emotional content in the faces. Furthermore, a face-sensitive N170 response, which reflects structural encoding of facial features, can be modulated by emotional expressions. Owing to its similar latency and scalp topography with vMMN, these two components are difficult to separate. We recorded ERPs to neutral, fearful, and happy faces in two different stimulus presentation conditions in adult humans. For the oddball condition group, frequently presented neutral expressions (p = 0.8) were rarely replaced by happy or fearful expressions (p = 0.1), whereas for the equiprobable condition group, fearful, happy, and neutral expressions were presented with equal probability (p = 0.33). Independent component analysis (ICA) revealed two prominent components in both stimulus conditions in the relevant latency range and scalp location. A component peaking at 130 ms post stimulus showed a difference in scalp topography between the oddball (bilateral) and the equiprobable (right-dominant) conditions. The other component, peaking at 170 ms post stimulus, showed no difference between the conditions. The bilateral component at the 130-ms latency in the oddball condition conforms to vMMN. Moreover, it was distinct from N170 which was modulated by the emotional expression only. The present results suggest that future studies on vMMN to facial expressions should take into account possible confounding effects caused by the differential processing of the emotional expressions as such.

Project description:According to embodiment theories, language and emotion affect each other. In line with this, several previous studies investigated changes in bodily responses including facial expressions, heart rate or skin conductance during affective evaluation of emotional words and sentences. This study investigates the embodiment of emotional word processing from a social perspective by experimentally manipulating the emotional valence of a word and its personal reference. Stimuli consisted of pronoun-noun pairs, i.e., positive, negative, and neutral nouns paired with possessive pronouns of the first or the third person ("my," "his") or the non-referential negation term ("no") as controls. Participants had to quickly evaluate the word pairs by key presses as either positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the subjective feelings they elicit. Hereafter, they elaborated the intensity of the feeling on a non-verbal scale from 1 (very unpleasant) to 9 (very pleasant). Facial expressions (M. Zygomaticus, M. Corrugator), heart rate, and, for exploratory purposes, skin conductance were recorded continuously during the spontaneous and elaborate evaluation tasks. Positive pronoun-noun phrases were responded to the quickest and judged more often as positive when they were self-related, i.e., related to the reader's self (e.g., "my happiness," "my joy") than when related to the self of a virtual other (e.g., "his happiness," "his joy"), suggesting a self-positivity bias in the emotional evaluation of word stimuli. Physiologically, evaluation of emotional, unlike neutral pronoun-noun pairs initially elicited an increase in mean heart rate irrespective of stimulus reference. Changes in facial muscle activity, M. Zygomaticus in particular, were most pronounced during spontaneous evaluation of positive other-related pronoun-noun phrases in line with theoretical assumptions that facial expressions are socially embedded even in situation where no real communication partner is present. Taken together, the present results confirm and extend the embodiment hypothesis of language by showing that bodily signals can be differently pronounced during emotional evaluation of self- and other-related emotional words.

Dataset Information

Perceptual encoding of emotions in interactive bodily expressions.

Publications

Perceptual encoding of emotions in interactive bodily expressions.

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