Perception Of Emotional Signals Research Articles

Multisensory Perception of Affect

Multisensory integration must stand out among the fields of research that have witnessed a most impressive explosion of interest this last decade. One of these new areas of multisensory research concerns emotion. Since our first exploration of this phenomenon (de Gelder et al., 1999) a number of studies have appeared and they have used a wide variety of behavioral, neuropsychological and neuroscientifc methods. The goal of this presentation is threefold. First, we review the research on audiovisual perception of emotional signals from the face and the voice followed by a report or more recent studies on integrating emotional information provided by the voice and whole body expressions. We will also include some recent work on multisensory music perception. In the next section we discuss some methodological and theoretical issues. Finally, we will discuss findings about abnormal affective audiovisual integration in schizophrenia and in autism.

Similarities and differences in perceiving threat from dynamic faces and bodies. An fMRI study

Neuroscientific research on the perception of emotional signals has mainly focused on how the brain processes threat signals from photographs of facial expressions. Much less is known about body postures or about the processing of dynamic images. We undertook a systematic comparison of the neurofunctional network dedicated to processing facial and bodily expressions. Two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments investigated whether areas involved in processing social signals are activated differently by threatening signals (fear and anger) from facial or bodily expressions. The amygdala (AMG) was more active for facial than for bodily expressions. Body stimuli triggered higher activation than face stimuli in a number of areas. These were the cuneus, fusiform gyrus (FG), extrastriate body area (EBA), temporoparietal junction (TPJ), superior parietal lobule (SPL), primary somatosensory cortex (SI), as well as the thalamus. Emotion-specific effects were found in TPJ and FG for bodies and faces alike. EBA and superior temporal sulcus (STS) were more activated by threatening bodies.