Emotional Scenes Research Articles

Complex emotion processing and early life adversity in the Healthy Brain Network sample

ObjectiveEarly life adversity (ELA) has shown to have negative impacts on mental health. One possible mechanism is through alterations in neural emotion processing. We sought to characterize how multiple indices of ELA were related to naturalistic neural socio-emotional processing. MethodIn 521 5–15-year-old participants from the Healthy Brain Network Biobank, we identified scenes that elicited activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN), Ventral Attention Network (VAN), Cingulo-Opercular Network (CON) and amygdala, all of which are networks shown to be associated with ELA. We used linear regression to examine associations between activation and ELA: negative parenting, social status, financial insecurity, neighborhood disadvantage, negative experiences, and parent psychopathology. ResultsWe found DMN, VAN, CON and amygdala activation during sad/emotional, bonding, action, conflict, sad, or fearful scenes. Greater inconsistent discipline was associated with greater VAN activation during sad or emotional scenes. ConclusionFindings suggest that the DMN, VAN, CON networks and the amygdala support socio-emotional processing consistent with prior literature. Individuals who experienced inconsistent discipline may have greater sensitivity to parent–child separation signals. Since no other ELA–activation associations were found, it is possible that unpredictability may be more strongly associated with complex neural emotion processing than socio-economic status or negative life events.

The role of gender in emotional reactions elicited by music: Autonomic reactivity, facial expression, and self-reports

Studies in the field of emotions have yielded mixed findings regarding differences between women’s and men’s emotional reactivity. In the majority, emotional scenes, facial expressions, and movies were used as stimuli. However, music has been less frequently used, despite its capacity to evoke strong emotional responses in the listeners. In this study, we aimed to explore the role of gender in emotional reactivity to music. A sample of 110 healthy participants (60 women) listened to 42 excerpts (14 pleasant, 14 neutral, 14 unpleasant) from the Film Music Stimulus Set (FMSS) for 8 s, while their autonomic reactivity and facial expression were continuously recorded. Participants then rated each excerpt on affective dimensions (hedonic valence, tension arousal, and energy arousal), discrete emotions (happiness, anger, fear, tenderness, and sadness), musical preference, and familiarity. Some differences were found between women’s and men’s reactivity to the stimuli, such that women showed a greater deceleration of heart rate while listening to both emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) and neutral music, and rated unpleasant excerpts as less preferred. Women also scored higher on trait anxiety compared to men. These results suggest that women may have heightened sensitivity to emotional stimuli, particularly unpleasant music, which could have implications for better understanding clinical pathologies that vary in prevalence based on gender.

Emotional scenes as context in emotional expression recognition: The role of emotion or valence match.

Emotion recognition is influenced by contextual information such as social category cues or background scenes. However, past studies yielded mixed findings regarding whether broad valence or specific emotion matches drive context effects and how multiple sources of contextual information may influence emotion recognition. To address these questions, participants were asked to categorize expressions on male and female faces posing happiness and anger and happiness and fear on pleasant and fearful backgrounds (Experiment 1, conducted in 2019), fearful and disgusted expressions on fear and disgust eliciting backgrounds (Experiment 2, conducted in 2022), and fearful and sad expressions on fear and sadness eliciting backgrounds (Experiment 3, conducted in 2022). In Experiment 1 (where stimuli varied in valence), a broad valence match effect was observed. Faster recognition of happiness than fear and anger was more pronounced in pleasant compared to fearful scenes. In Experiments 2 and 3 (where stimuli were negative in valence), specific emotion match effects were observed. Faster recognition occurred when expression and background were emotionally congruent. In Experiments 1 and 3, poser sex independently moderated emotional expression recognition speed. These results suggest that the effect of emotional scenes on facial emotion recognition is mediated by a match in valence when broad valence is task-relevant. Specific emotion matches drive context effects when participants categorize expressions of a single valence. Looking at the influence of background contexts and poser sex together suggests that these two sources of contextual information have an independent rather than an interactive influence on emotional expression recognition speed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Reexamining the Kuleshov effect: Behavioral and neural evidence from authentic film experiments.

Film cognition explores the influence of cinematic elements, such as editing and film color, on viewers' perception. The Kuleshov effect, a famous example of how editing influences viewers' emotional perception, was initially proposed to support montage theory through the Kuleshov experiment. This effect, which has since been recognized as a manifestation of point-of-view (POV) editing practices, posits that the emotional interpretation of neutral facial expressions is influenced by the accompanying emotional scene in a face-scene-face sequence. However, concerns persist regarding the validity of previous studies, often employing inauthentic film materials like static images, leaving the question of its existence in authentic films unanswered. This study addresses these concerns by utilizing authentic films in two experiments. In Experiment 1, multiple film clips were captured under the guidance of a professional film director and seamlessly integrated into authentic film sequences. 59 participants viewed these face-scene-face film sequences and were tasked with rating the valence and emotional intensity of neutral faces. The findings revealed that the accompanying fearful or happy scenes significantly influence the interpretation of emotion on neutral faces, eliciting perceptions of negative or positive emotions from the neutral face. These results affirm the existence of the Kuleshov effect within authentic films. In Experiment 2, 31 participants rated the valence and arousal of neutral faces while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The behavioral results confirm the Kuleshov effect in the MRI scanner, while the neural data identify neural correlates that support its existence at the neural level. These correlates include the cuneus, precuneus, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, post cingulate gyrus, orbitofrontal cortex, fusiform gyrus, and insula. These findings also underscore the contextual framing inherent in the Kuleshov effect. Overall, the study integrates film theory and cognitive neuroscience experiments, providing robust evidence supporting the existence of the Kuleshov effect through both subjective ratings and objective neuroimaging measurements. This research also contributes to a deeper understanding of the impact of film editing on viewers' emotional perception from the contemporary POV editing practices and neurocinematic perspective, advancing the knowledge of film cognition.

Selective and prolonged attention to emotional scenes in humans and bonobos.

Perceiving emotions in others is at the foundation of higher-order social cognition. The importance of emotions is evidenced by the fact that they receive prioritized attention at early stages of processing the environment in humans and some other primates. Nevertheless, we do not fully understand how emotion modulates attention over longer durations in primates, particularly in great apes. Bonobos, one of our closest relatives, stand out in emotion processing and regulation among great apes. This makes them an interesting comparison species and a valuable model for studying the evolution of emotion perception in hominids. We investigated how bonobos and humans spontaneously attend to emotionally valent scenes in a preferential looking task using eye-tracking. With Bayesian mixed modelling, we found that bonobos and humans generally looked longer at emotional scenes, mainly of conspecifics. Moreover, while bonobos did not have a bias toward emotional human scenes, humans sustained their attention toward bonobos playing, grooming and having sex. Furthermore, when exploring an immediate bias for emotions, humans showed a bias toward affiliative human scenes, and bonobos showed a bias away from bonobos-in-distress scenes. These findings suggest that emotions modulate attention at early and later attentional stages in bonobos, similar to humans.

Modulation of response times in early-stage Parkinson’s disease during emotional processing of embodied and non-embodied stimuli

Valence (positive and negative) and content (embodied vs non-embodied) characteristics of visual stimuli have been shown to influence motor readiness, as tested with response time paradigms. Both embodiment and emotional processing are affected in Parkinson’s disease (PD) due to basal ganglia dysfunction. Here we aimed to investigate, using a two-choice response time paradigm, motor readiness when processing embodied (emotional body language [EBL] and emotional facial expressions [FACS]) vs non-embodied (emotional scenes [IAPS]) stimuli with neutral, happy, and fearful content. We enrolled twenty-five patients with early-stage PD and twenty-five age matched healthy participants. Motor response during emotional processing was assessed by measuring response times (RTs) in a home-based, forced two-choice discrimination task where participants were asked to discriminate the emotional stimulus from the neutral one. Rating of valence and arousal was also performed. A clinical and neuropsychological evaluation was performed on PD patients. Results showed that RTs for PD patients were longer for all conditions compared to HC and that RTs were generally longer in both groups for EBL compared to FACS and IAPS, with the sole exception retrieved for PD, where in discriminating fearful stimuli, RTs for EBL were longer compared to FACS but not to IAPS. Furthermore, in PD only, when discriminating fearful respect to neutral stimuli, RTs were shorter when discriminating FACS compared to IAPS. This study shows that PD patients were faster in discriminating fearful embodied stimuli, allowing us to speculate on mechanisms involving an alternative, compensatory, emotional motor pathway for PD patients undergoing fear processing.

Oral Oxytocin Blurs Sex Differences in Amygdala Responses to Emotional Scenes

BackgroundSex differences are shaped both by innate biological differences and the social environment and are frequently observed in human emotional neural responses. Oral administration of oxytocin (OXT), as an alternative and noninvasive intake method, has been shown to produce sex-dependent effects on emotional face processing. However, it is unclear whether oral OXT produces similar sex-dependent effects on processing continuous emotional scenes. MethodsThe current randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled neuropsychopharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment was conducted in 147 healthy participants (OXT = 74, men/women = 37/37; placebo = 73, men/women = 36/37) to examine the oral OXT effect on plasma OXT concentrations and neural response to emotional scenes in both sexes. ResultsAt the neuroendocrine level, women showed lower endogenous OXT concentrations than men, but oral OXT increased OXT concentrations equally in both sexes. Regarding neural activity, emotional scenes evoked opposite valence-independent effects on right amygdala activation (women > men) and its functional connectivity with the insula (men > women) in men and women in the placebo group. This sex difference was either attenuated (amygdala response) or even completely eliminated (amygdala-insula functional connectivity) in the OXT group. Multivariate pattern analysis confirmed these findings by developing an accurate sex-predictive neural pattern that included the amygdala and the insula under the placebo but not the OXT condition. ConclusionsThe results of the current study suggest a pronounced sex difference in neural responses to emotional scenes that was eliminated by oral OXT, with OXT having opposite modulatory effects in men and women. This may reflect oral OXT enhancing emotional regulation to continuous emotional stimuli in both sexes by facilitating appropriate changes in sex-specific amygdala-insula circuitry.

Attentional biases to signals of negative information: Reliable measurement across three anxiety domains

Cognitive models propose that individuals with elevated vulnerability to experiencing negative emotion are characterised by biased attentional responding to negative information. Typically, methods of examining these biases have measured attention to pictures of emotional scenes, emotional faces, or rewarding or feared objects. Though these approaches have repeatedly yielded evidence of anxiety-linked biases, their measurement reliability is suggested to be poor. Recent research has shown that attentional responding to cues signalling negative information can be measured with greater reliability. However, whether such biases are associated with emotion vulnerability remains to be demonstrated. The present study conducted three experiments that recruited participants who varied in trait and state anxiety (N = 134), social anxiety (N = 122), or spider fear (N = 131) to complete an assessment of selective attention to cues signalling emotionally congruent negative information. Analyses demonstrated that anxiety and fear were associated with biased attentional responding to cues signalling negative information, and that such biases could be measured with acceptable reliability (rsplit-half = .69–.81). Implications for research on the relation between emotion and attention are discussed.

Additive effects of emotional expression and stimulus size on the perception of genuine and artificial facial expressions: an ERP study

Seeing an angry individual in close physical proximity can not only result in a larger retinal representation of that individual and an enhanced resolution of emotional cues, but may also increase motivation for rapid visual processing and action preparation. The present study investigated the effects of stimulus size and emotional expression on the perception of happy, angry, non-expressive, and scrambled faces. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral responses of N = 40 participants who performed a naturalness classification task on real and artificially created facial expressions. While the emotion-related effects on accuracy for recognizing authentic expressions were modulated by stimulus size, ERPs showed only additive effects of stimulus size and emotional expression, with no significant interaction with size. This contrasts with previous research on emotional scenes and words. Effects of size were present in all included ERPs, whereas emotional expressions affected the N170, EPN, and LPC, irrespective of size. These results imply that the decoding of emotional valence in faces can occur even for small stimuli. Supra-additive effects in faces may necessitate larger size ranges or dynamic stimuli that increase arousal.

Sex differences in the effects of individual anxiety state on regional responses to negative emotional scenes

BackgroundMen and women are known to show differences in the incidence and clinical manifestations of mood and anxiety disorders. Many imaging studies have investigated the neural correlates of sex differences in emotion processing. However, it remains unclear how anxiety might impact emotion processing differently in men and women.MethodWe recruited 119 healthy adults and assessed their levels of anxiety using State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) State score. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined regional responses to negative vs. neutral (Neg-Neu) picture matching in the Hariri task. Behavioral data were analyzed using regression and repeated-measures analysis of covariance with age as a covariate, and fMRI data were analyzed using a full-factorial model with sex as a factor and age as a covariate.ResultsMen and women did not differ in STAI score, or accuracy rate or reaction time (RT) (Neg-Neu). However, STAI scores correlated positively with RT (Neg-Neu) in women but not in men. Additionally, in women, STAI score correlated positively with lingual gyrus (LG) and negatively with medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and superior frontal gyrus (SFG) activity during Neg vs. Neu trials. The parameter estimates (βs) of mPFC also correlated with RT (Neg-Neu) in women but not in men. Generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) analysis in women revealed mPFC connectivity with the right inferior frontal gyrus, right SFG, and left parahippocampal gyrus during Neg vs. Neu trials in positive correlation with both STAI score and RT (Neg-Neu). In a mediation analysis, mPFC gPPI but not mPFC activity fully mediated the association between STAI scores and RT (Neg-Neu).ConclusionWith anxiety affecting the behavioral and neural responses to negative emotions in women but not in men and considering the known roles of the mPFC in emotion regulation, we discussed heightened sensitivity and regulatory demands during negative emotion processing as neurobehavioral markers of anxiety in women.

The mindful gaze: trait mindful people under an instructed emotion regulation goal selectively attend to positive stimuli

ABSTRACT Trait mindfulness confers emotional benefits and encourages skillful emotion regulation, in part because it helps people more deliberately attend to internal experiences and external surroundings. Such heightened attentional control might help skillfully deploy one’s attention towards certain kinds of stimuli, which may in turn help regulate emotions, but this remains unknown. Testing how trait mindful people deploy attention when regulating their emotions could help uncover the specific mechanisms of mindfulness that confer its emotional benefits. The present study aimed to determine whether high trait mindfulness is associated with sustained attention biases to (i.e. longer gaze at) emotional scenes, when all participants are given the emotion regulation goal of staying in a positive mood. To measure this, we used eye tracking to assess selective attention to positive, neutral, and negative photographs. Higher trait mindfulness was associated with both a stronger attention bias for positive (vs. neutral and vs. negative) images, as well as greater success staying in a positive mood during viewing. Surprisingly, this attention bias towards the positive images did not mediate the relationship between mindfulness and maintenance of positive mood. Future work should compare visual attention to other emotion regulation strategies that may maximise positive affect for mindful people.

Research Improvements on a Visual Search Task

Based on the above summary of theoretical foundations, the present experiment builds on the work of previous study by developing hypotheses and designing relevant experiments to investigate and discuss the effects of four influential variables of visual search. The cited article The Influence of Stimuli Valence, Extraversion, and Emotion Regulation on Visual Search Within Real-World Scenes demonstrates that emotion regulation is closely related to the development of affective disorders. Therefore, emotion regulation therapy is used in clinical treatment. However, the factor of extroversion has not been validated in previous articles. Accordingly, the extroversion variable was changed to neuroticism in this article. In addition, in previous studies, real-world emotional scenarios, including positive, negative and neutral scenarios have been shown to affect visual search tasks. Similarly, the experimental approach of conducting a visual search for targets in real-world emotional scenes was used in this article. This study of the effects of neuroticism and emotional regulation on attention may have significant implications for providing more effective interventions for individuals with affective disorders.

Attention toward emotions is modulated by familiarity with the expressor: A comparison between bonobos and humans.

Why can humans be intolerant of, yet also be empathic toward strangers? This cardinal question can be tackled by studying emotions in our closest living relatives, bonobos. Their striking xenophilic tendencies make them an interesting model for reconstructing the socioemotional capacities of the last common ancestor of hominids. Within two dot-probe studies, we compared bonobos' and humans' attention toward scenes depicting familiar (kith and kin) or unfamiliar individuals with emotional or neutral expressions. Results show that the attention of bonobos is biased toward emotional scenes depicting unfamiliar bonobos, but not toward emotional groupmates (Study 1). In contrast, Study 2 shows that human attention is biased toward emotional rather than neutral expressions of family and friends, but not toward unfamiliar others. On the one hand, our results show that an attentional bias toward emotions is a shared phenomenon between humans and bonobos, but on the other, both species have their own unique evolutionarily informed biases. These findings support previously proposed adaptive explanations for xenophilia in bonobos that potentially biases them toward emotional expressions of unfamiliar conspecifics, and parochialism in humans, which makes them sensitive to the emotional expressions of close others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Automatic Assessment of Depression and Anxiety through Encoding Pupil-wave from HCI in VR Scenes

At present, there have been many studies on the methods of using the deep learning regression model to assess depression level based on behavioral signals (facial expression, speech, and language); however, the research on the assessment method of anxiety level using deep learning is absent. In this article, pupil-wave, a physiological signal collected by Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that can directly represent the emotional state, is developed to assess the level of depression and anxiety for the first time. In order to distinguish between different depression and anxiety levels, we use the HCI method to induce the participants’ emotional experience through three virtual reality (VR) emotional scenes of joyful, sad, and calm, and construct two differential pupil-waves of joyful and sad with the calm pupil-wave as the baseline. Correspondingly, a dual-channel fusion depression and anxiety level assessment model is constructed using the improved multi-scale convolution module and our proposed width-channel attention module for one-dimensional signal processing. The test results show that the MAE/RMSE of the depression and anxiety level assessment method proposed in this article is 3.05/4.11 and 2.49/1.85, respectively, which has better assessment performance than other related research methods. This study provides an automatic assessment technique based on human computer interaction and virtual reality for mental health physical examination.

Spatio-temporal attention toward emotional scenes across adulthood.

Research on emotion suggests that the attentional preference observed toward the negative stimuli in young adults tends to disappear in normal aging and, sometimes, to shift toward a preference for positive stimuli. The current eye-tracking study investigated visual exploration of paired natural scenes of different valence (Negative-Neutral, Positive-Neutral, and Negative-Positive pairs) in three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults). Two arousal levels of stimuli (high and low arousal) were also considered given role of this factor in age-related effects on emotion. Results showed the automatic attentional orienting toward the negative stimuli was relatively preserved in our three age groups although reduced in the elderly, in both arousal conditions. A similar negativity bias was also observed in initial attention focusing but shifted toward a positivity bias over time in the three age groups. Moreover, it appeared the spatial exploration of emotional scenes evolved over time differently for older adults compared with other age groups. No difference between young adults and middle-aged adults in ocular behavior was observed. This study confirms the interest of studying both spatial and temporal characteristics of oculomotor behaviors to better understand the age-related effects on emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of acute stress on humanitarian supplies management

Humanitarian workers often operate under highly stressful conditions, view emotional scenes, and face high time pressures. This may bias managerial decision‐making in humanitarian logistics, but evidence is lacking. We model humanitarian logistics decisions in an adapted newsvendor setting. We experimentally expose participants to time pressure, noise, and emotional pictures. Using physiological and self‐reported data, we confirm that these manipulations have different effects on two components of the stress response (negative valence and arousal) and on decision‐making quality. Specifically, medium levels of arousal seem to boost decision‐making quality, independent of affective valence. However, high time pressure (characterized by high levels of arousal) leads to a collapse in decision‐making quality. Our results highlight that some level of stress may be beneficial for decision‐making owing to its action‐activating properties. However, excessive time pressure sharply overrides and outweighs these benefits. We discuss the generalizability of our results to other emergency situations (e.g., firefighters) and managerial contexts (e.g., crisis responses).

Emotion Classification Algorithm for Audiovisual Scenes Based on Low-Frequency Signals

Since informatization and digitization came into life, audio signal emotion classification has been widely studied and discussed as a hot issue in many application fields. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence, in addition to speech and music audio signal emotion classification technology, which is widely used in production life, its application is also becoming more and more abundant. Current research on audiovisual scene emotion classification mainly focuses on the frame-by-frame processing of video images to achieve the discrimination of emotion classification. However, those methods have the problems of algorithms with high complexity and high computing cost, making it difficult to meet the engineering needs of real-time online automatic classification. Therefore, this paper proposes an automatic algorithm for the detection of effective movie shock scenes that can be used for engineering applications by exploring the law of low-frequency sound effects on the perception of known emotions, based on a database of movie emotion scene clips in 5.1 sound format, extracting audio signal feature parameters and performing dichotomous classification of shock and other types of emotions. As LFS can enhance a sense of shock, a monaural algorithm for detecting emotional scenes with impact using a subwoofer (SW) is proposed, which trained a classification model using SW monaural features and achieved a maximum accuracy of 87% on the test set using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. To expand the application scope of the above algorithm, a monaural algorithm for detecting emotional scenes with impact based on low-pass filtering (with a cutoff frequency of 120 Hz) is proposed, which achieved a maximum accuracy of 91.5% on the test set using a CNN model.

Infrequent facial expressions of emotion do not bias attention.

Despite the obvious importance of facial expressions of emotion, most studies have found that they do not bias attention. A critical limitation, however, is that these studies generally present face distractors on all trials of the experiment. For other kinds of emotional stimuli, such as emotional scenes, infrequently presented stimuli elicit greater attentional bias than frequently presented stimuli, perhaps due to suppression or habituation. The goal of the current study then was to test whether such modulation of attentional bias by distractor frequency generalizes to facial expressions of emotion. In Experiment 1, both angry and happy faces were unable to bias attention, despite being infrequently presented. Even when the location of these face cues were more unpredictable-presented in one of two possible locations-still no attentional bias was observed (Experiment 2). Moreover, there was no bottom-up influence for angry and happy faces shown under high or low perceptual load (Experiment 3). We conclude that task-irrelevant posed facial expressions of emotion cannot bias attention even when presented infrequently.

Are Socially Relevant Scenes Abnormally Processed in Complex Trauma-Exposed Children?

Abnormal attentional processes to socially relevant information may underlie behavioral dysfunctional symptoms in children exposed to a complex trauma. Attentional biases to social scenes close to real-world situations and their association with behavioral symptomatology were examined in complex trauma-exposed children. A visual dot-probe task involving neutral versus emotional (i.e., threatening, sad, or happy) scenes was applied to twenty-one maltreated children (mean age 10.43; 42.8% female; 61.1% White). These children were exposed to a complex trauma (i.e., severe, repeated, multiple, prolonged, and interpersonal) and were safeguarded in a juvenile welfare home after all parental responsibility was removed. Twenty-four comparable non-maltreated children (mean age 10.13; 29.2% female; 76% White), served as control group. All participants were at risk of social exclusion and every legal representative completed the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Complex trauma-exposed children showed an attentional bias toward threatening scenes, while the control group showed an attentional bias toward sad scenes. There were no differences for happy scenes between groups. Attentional bias toward threatening scenes was associated with withdrawn symptoms in complex trauma-exposed children. Children exposed to a complex trauma show an abnormal attention to threatening social situations, which can trigger maladaptive behaviors such as withdrawn. The understanding of how complex trauma-exposed children process affective environmental information may provide new targets in the social skills interventions such as diminishing maladaptive behaviors and improving coping strategies to face threatening situations.

A study on users’ attention distribution to product features under different emotions

ABSTRACT With the development of intelligent products, products are increasingly able to provide personalised feedback to users. Product designs must meet users’ emotional needs to deliver a positive experience. The current study examined emotional design, focusing on emotional arousal and methods for converting users from negative to positive emotional states. However, products are typically used in an emotional context with a specific usage scenario. Integrating emotional elements into a design can reveal users’ concerns and needs, enabling user-centered emotional design. The current study examined the distribution of users’ attention to product features under different emotional conditions. On the basis of the theory of visual attention, this study used emotional induction methodology and eye-tracking technology to observe users’ attention to different product features after the induction of three different emotional states. We established a labeled product feature database and explored the influence of emotional scenes on user preferences. These research findings can provide theoretical support for emotional design of products under specific emotional scenarios and effectively guide designers to arrange design elements.