Abstract
Integration of information from face and voice plays a central role in social interactions. The present study investigated the modulation of emotional intensity on the integration of facial-vocal emotional cues by recording EEG for participants while they were performing emotion identification task on facial, vocal, and bimodal angry expressions varying in emotional intensity. Behavioral results showed the rates of anger and reaction speed increased as emotional intensity across modalities. Critically, the P2 amplitudes were larger for bimodal expressions than for the sum of facial and vocal expressions for low emotional intensity stimuli, but not for middle and high emotional intensity stimuli. These findings suggested that emotional intensity modulates the integration of facial-vocal angry expressions, following the principle of Inverse Effectiveness (IE) in multimodal sensory integration.
Highlights
Successful social interaction requires a precise understanding of the feelings, intentions, thoughts, and desires of other people (Sabbagh et al, 2004)
The present study tested the modulation of emotional intensity on facial-vocal emotion, thereby examined whether bimodal emotion integration follows the principle of Inverse Effectiveness (IE)
The present study manipulated the emotional salience of the stimulus itself and tested the facial-vocal emotional integration with the criterion of superadditivity
Summary
Successful social interaction requires a precise understanding of the feelings, intentions, thoughts, and desires of other people (Sabbagh et al, 2004). The phenomenon of bimodal emotion integration has been clearly depicted (Klasen et al, 2012; Chen et al, 2016a,b), the influence of emotional features thereof, such as emotional intensity, has seldom been tested. This is of importance as emotional intensity has been proved to be a key factor influencing emotional perception (Sprengelmeyer and Jentzsch, 2006; Yuan et al, 2007; Dunning et al, 2010; Wang et al, 2015) and the modulation of emotional intensity is one important way to test the principle of Inverse Effectiveness (IE), that is, multisensory integration is more effective when its constituent modality is less salient (Collignon et al, 2008; Stein and Stanford, 2008; Stein et al, 2009; Jessen et al, 2012). It was observed that bimodal emotional cues reduced the amplitude of the early
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