Visual Emotion Perception Research Articles

A Web-Based Auditory and Visual Emotion Perception Task Experiment With Children and a Comparison of Lab Data and Web Data

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the significance of online research has been rising in the field of psychology. However, online experiments with child participants are rare compared to those with adults. In this study, we investigated the validity of web-based experiments with child participants 4–12 years old and adult participants. They performed simple emotional perception tasks in an experiment designed and conducted on the Gorilla Experiment Builder platform. After short communication with each participant via Zoom videoconferencing software, participants performed the auditory task (judging emotion from vocal expression) and the visual task (judging emotion from facial expression). The data collected were compared with data collected in our previous similar laboratory experiment, and similar tendencies were found. For the auditory task in particular, we replicated differences in accuracy perceiving vocal expressions between age groups and also found the same native language advantage. Furthermore, we discuss the possibility of using online cognitive studies for future developmental studies.

Modulating Emotion Perception: Opposing Effects of Inhibitory and Excitatory Prefrontal Cortex Stimulation

BackgroundExcitatory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of adult patients with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD). This stimulation is supposed to restore excitability of prefrontal cortex regions that exhibit diminished regulation of emotion-generative systems in MDD. Based on the valence lateralization hypothesis, inhibitory rTMS of the right dlPFC has also been applied in MDD. This approach has proved to be effective, although meta-analyses of emotional perception and affective regulation in healthy control subjects and patients with depression do not support functional asymmetries within dlPFC regions. MethodsTo shed more light on this discrepancy, the effects of excitatory and inhibitory rTMS of the right dlPFC on visual emotional perception were compared in two groups of 41 healthy participants overall. Before and after rTMS stimulation, participants viewed fearful and neutral faces while whole-head magnetoencephalography was recorded and supplemented by behavioral tests. ResultsVisual sensory processing of fearful facial expressions, relative to neutral facial expressions, was reduced after excitatory stimulation and was increased after inhibitory stimulation within right occipital and right temporal regions. Correspondingly, after excitatory rTMS compared with inhibitory rTMS, participants displayed relatively reduced reaction times in an emotion discrimination task and showed reduced emotional arousal. ConclusionsThese results support the hypothesis that excitatory rTMS compared with inhibitory rTMS of the right dlPFC strengthens top-down control of aversive stimuli in healthy control subjects, which should encourage more research on mechanisms of excitatory/inhibitory dlPFC-rTMS protocols in general and on neuromodulatory treatment of MDD.

Recognition memory for low- and high-frequency-filtered emotional faces: Low spatial frequencies drive emotional memory enhancement, whereas high spatial frequencies drive the emotion-induced recognition bias.

This article deals with two well-documented phenomena regarding emotional stimuli: emotional memory enhancement-that is, better long-term memory for emotional than for neutral stimuli-and the emotion-induced recognition bias-that is, a more liberal response criterion for emotional than for neutral stimuli. Studies on visual emotion perception and attention suggest that emotion-related processes can be modulated by means of spatial-frequency filtering of the presented emotional stimuli. Specifically, low spatial frequencies are assumed to play a primary role for the influence of emotion on attention and judgment. Given this theoretical background, we investigated whether spatial-frequency filtering also impacts (1) the memory advantage for emotional faces and (2) the emotion-induced recognition bias, in a series of old/new recognition experiments. Participants completed incidental-learning tasks with high- (HSF) and low- (LSF) spatial-frequency-filtered emotional and neutral faces. The results of the surprise recognition tests showed a clear memory advantage for emotional stimuli. Most importantly, the emotional memory enhancement was significantly larger for face images containing only low-frequency information (LSF faces) than for HSF faces across all experiments, suggesting that LSF information plays a critical role in this effect, whereas the emotion-induced recognition bias was found only for HSF stimuli. We discuss our findings in terms of both the traditional account of different processing pathways for HSF and LSF information and a stimulus features account. The double dissociation in the results favors the latter account-that is, an explanation in terms of differences in the characteristics of HSF and LSF stimuli.

Perceived emotional valence in clear and conversational speech for older adults with hearing loss

When asked to speak as though talking to an individual with hearing loss, talkers modify their speech from their everyday conversational style to a “clear” speaking style. Audiologists have observed in practice that individuals with hearing loss sometimes complain that their frequent communication partners are shouting at them, while the communication partners insist they are just trying to speak more clearly. A previous study investigated how individuals with normal hearing perceived emotional valence in clear and conversational speech and found that clear speech sounded angry more often than conversational speech. The present study will explore whether a similar effect is found in older individuals with hearing loss. Perceived anger has been partially attributed to increased energy in the high frequencies, where age-related hearing loss is most severe. Furthermore, aging effects have been found for visual emotion perception. Older adult listeners with hearing loss will be presented with conversational and clear sentences from the Ferguson Clear Speech Database (Ferguson, 2004) and asked to assign an emotion category to each sentence (anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, or neutral). The results will indicate whether elderly listeners with hearing loss judge clear speech as sounding angry more often than typical conversational speech.

Social Cognition and Clinical Insight in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

The association between clinical insight and social cognition assessed with an emotion perception task was investigated in schizophrenia (n = 29) and bipolar I disorder (n = 19). Persons with schizophrenia had reduced auditory emotion perception compared with individuals with bipolar I disorder, but levels of visual emotion perception and clinical insight were comparable. In the schizophrenia group, clinical insight was moderately associated with auditory and visual emotion perception (r = 0.36-0.44) and negative symptoms (r = -0.33). Better insight was associated with better social cognition and fewer negative symptoms. In the bipolar I disorder group, clinical insight showed small associations with social cognition (largest r = -0.28) and moderate to large associations with positive, negative, manic, and depressive symptoms. Poorer insight was associated with higher symptom load. Social cognition seems to be of importance for clinical insight in schizophrenia, whereas symptoms are important in bipolar I disorder.

The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings (CRs), with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale (PAS), through which participants categorize "raw" visual experience, and post-decision wagering (PDW), which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives.

Cortico-subcortical visual, somatosensory, and motor activations for perceiving dynamic whole-body emotional expressions with and without striate cortex (V1)

Patients with striate cortex damage and clinical blindness retain the ability to process certain visual properties of stimuli that they are not aware of seeing. Here we investigated the neural correlates of residual visual perception for dynamic whole-body emotional actions. Angry and neutral emotional whole-body actions were presented in the intact and blind visual hemifield of a cortically blind patient with unilateral destruction of striate cortex. Comparisons of angry vs. neutral actions performed separately in the blind and intact visual hemifield showed in both cases increased activation in primary somatosensory, motor, and premotor cortices. Activations selective for intact hemifield presentation of angry compared with neutral actions were located subcortically in the right lateral geniculate nucleus and cortically in the superior temporal sulcus, prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and intraparietal sulcus. Activations specific for blind hemifield presentation of angry compared with neutral actions were found in the bilateral superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, amygdala, and right fusiform gyrus. Direct comparison of emotional modulation in the blind vs. intact visual hemifield revealed selective activity in the right superior colliculus and bilateral pulvinar for angry expressions, thereby showing a selective involvement of these subcortical structures in nonconscious visual emotion perception.

The Timing of Emotional Discrimination in Human Amygdala and Ventral Visual Cortex

Models of visual emotional perception suggest a reentrant organization of the ventral visual system with the amygdala. Using focused functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans with a sampling rate of 100 ms, here we determine the relative timing of emotional discrimination in amygdala and ventral visual cortical structures during emotional perception. Results show that amygdala and inferotemporal visual cortex differentiate emotional from nonemotional scenes approximately 1 s before extrastriate occipital cortex, whereas primary occipital cortex shows consistent activity across all scenes. This pattern of discrimination is consistent with a reentrant organization of emotional perception in visual processing, in which transaction between rostral ventral visual cortex and amygdala originates the identification of emotional relevance.

Fear-Related Chemosignals Modulate Recognition of Fear in Ambiguous Facial Expressions

Integrating emotional cues from different senses is critical for adaptive behavior. Much of the evidence on cross-modal perception of emotions has come from studies of vision and audition. This research has shown that an emotion signaled by one sense modulates how the same emotion is perceived in another sense, especially when the input to the latter sense is ambiguous. We tested whether olfaction causes similar sensory modulation of emotion perception. In two experiments, the chemosignal of fearful sweat biased women toward interpreting ambiguous expressions as more fearful, but had no effect when the facial emotion was more discernible. Our findings provide direct behavioral evidence that social chemosignals can communicate emotions and demonstrate that fear-related chemosignals modulate humans' visual emotion perception in an emotion-specific way--an effect that has been hitherto unsuspected.