The nature and emotional valence of a prime influences the processing of emotional faces in adults and children

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 554-562
Author(s):  
Stefania Conte ◽  
Viola Brenna ◽  
Paola Ricciardelli ◽  
Chiara Turati
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Prior Exposure ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Facial Stimuli ◽  
Priming Task ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Emotional Face

A large body of research has investigated both the emotional elaboration of facial stimuli in adults and the development of children’s recognition of emotional expressions. Yet, it is still not clear whether children’s ability to recognize an emotional face may be modulated by prior exposure to a different face, and whether an emotional expression may exert an effect on the processing of subsequently encountered facial emotional expressions. We tested in three experiments the recognition of happy and angry target faces preceded by neutral faces or objects (Experiment 1) and happy or angry faces (Experiment 2A and Experiment 2B) using an affective priming task in adults and 7- and 5-year-old children. Results showed a standard prime effect for neutral faces (Experiment 1) for all participants, and for happy faces in children (Experiment 2A) and adults (Experiment 2B). Otherwise, angry faces elicited negative priming effects in all participants (Experiment 2A). Overall, our findings showed that both prior exposure to a face per se and the emotional valence of the prime face have an impact on subsequent processing of facial emotional information. Implications for emotional processing are discussed.

ERP Evidence of a Stroop-Like Effect in Emotional Speech Related to Social Anhedonia

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-21
Author(s):  
Paul Roux ◽  
Damien Vistoli ◽  
Anne Christophe ◽  
Christine Passerieux ◽  
Eric Brunet-Gouet
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
P300 Amplitude ◽  
Emotional Prosody ◽  
Social Anhedonia ◽  
Brain Response ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Response Level ◽  
The Social

The present study investigated the ERP correlates of the integration of emotional prosody to the emotional meaning of a spoken word. Thirty-four nonclinical participants listened to negative and positive words that were spoken with an angry or happy prosody and classified the emotional valence of the word meaning while ignoring emotional prosody. Social anhedonia was also self-rated by the subjects. Compared to congruent trials, incongruent ones elicited slower and less accurate behavioral responses, and a smaller P300 component at the brain response level. The present data suggest that vocal emotional information is salient enough to be integrated early in verbal processing. The P300 amplitude modulation by the prosody-meaning congruency positively correlated with the social anhedonia score, suggesting that the sensitivity of the electrical brain response to emotional prosody increased with social anhedonia. Interpretations of this result in terms of emotional processing in social anhedonia are discussed.

scholarly journals Negative Emotional Valence Intensity Affects Visual Target Detection in the Information Encoding Process

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Yasuhiro Takeshima
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Visual Processing ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Information Encoding ◽  
Low Intensity ◽  
Facial Stimuli ◽  
The Relationship

Previous studies have not yet investigated sufficiently the relationship between visual processing and negative emotional valence intensity, which is the degree of a dimensional component included in emotional information. In Experiment 1, participants performed a visual search task with three valence levels: neutral (control) and high- and low-intensity negative emotional valence stimuli (both angry faces). Results indicated that response times for high-intensity negative emotional valence stimuli were shorter than low-intensity ones. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to detect a target face among successively presented faces. Facial stimuli were the same as in Experiment 1. Results revealed that accuracy was higher for angry faces than for neutral faces. However, performance did not differ as a function of negative emotional valence intensity. Overall, the task performance differences between negative emotional valence intensities were observed in visual search, but not in attentional blink. Therefore, negative emotional valence intensity likely contributes to the process of efficient visual information encoding.

scholarly journals HAPPY FACIAL EXPRESSIONS IMPAIR INHIBITORY CONTROL WITH RESPECT TO FEARFUL FACIAL EXPRESSIONS BUT ONLY WHEN TASK-RELEVANT

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Mancini ◽  
Luca Falciati ◽  
Claudio Maioli ◽  
Giovanni Mirabella
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Inhibitory Control ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Emotional Facial Expressions ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Reaching Movement ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Healthy Participants

The ability to generate appropriate responses, especially in social contexts, requires integrating emotional information with ongoing cognitive processes. In particular, inhibitory control plays a crucial role in social interactions, preventing the execution of impulsive and inappropriate actions. In this study, we focused on the impact of facial emotional expressions on inhibition. Research in this field has provided highly mixed results. In our view, a crucial factor explaining such inconsistencies is the task-relevance of the emotional content of the stimuli. To clarify this issue, we gave two versions of a Go/No-go task to healthy participants. In the emotional version, participants had to withhold a reaching movement at the presentation of emotional facial expressions (fearful or happy) and move when neutral faces were shown. The same pictures were displayed in the other version, but participants had to act according to the actor's gender, ignoring the emotional valence of the faces. We found that happy expressions impaired inhibitory control with respect to fearful expressions, but only when they were relevant to the participants' goal. We interpret these results as suggesting that facial emotions do not influence behavioral responses automatically. They would instead do so only when they are intrinsically germane for ongoing goals.

The effects of emotional context and exposure frequency on L2 contextual word learning

2021 ◽  
pp. 136700692110165
Author(s):  
Sijia Hao ◽  
Lijuan Liang ◽  
Jue Wang ◽  
Huanhuan Liu ◽  
Baoguo Chen
Keyword(s):  
Recognition Test ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Recall Test ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Neutral Context ◽  
Emotional Context ◽  
Exposure Frequency ◽  
Form Recognition

Objectives: An experiment was conducted to explore how emotional valence of contexts and exposure frequency of novel words affect second language (L2) contextual word learning. Methodology: Chinese native speakers who learned English in a formal classroom setting were asked to read English paragraphs with different emotional valence (positive, negative or neutral) across five different days. These paragraphs were embedded with pseudowords. During this learning process, form recognition test and meaning recall test were carried out for these pseudowords. Data and analysis: Data were analyzed using mixed-model ANOVA. Accuracy for each task was compared among the three kinds of emotional contexts. Findings/Conclusions: In the form recognition test, the accuracy in the negative context was higher than in the positive and neutral contexts, and the pseudowords were acquired much earlier. In the meaning recall test, the accuracy in the positive and negative contexts was higher than that in the neutral context. Accuracy increased gradually with the increase of exposure frequency of the pseudowords. More importantly, we found that less exposure times were needed for emotional context relative to neutral context in contextual word learning. Originality: This may be the first study to explore the influence of emotional valence and exposure frequency on L2 contextual word learning. Significance/Implications: This study underlined the importance of emotional information in L2 contextual word learning and contributed to the understanding of how emotional information and exposure frequency functions in this learning process.

scholarly journals Dogs can infer implicit information from human emotional expressions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Albuquerque ◽  
Daniel S. Mills ◽  
Kun Guo ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Briseida Resende
Keyword(s):  
Emotional State ◽  
Food Resource ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Implicit Information ◽  
Emotional Display ◽  
Affective Information ◽  
Social Decision Making ◽  
Current Behaviour

AbstractThe ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.

scholarly journals Emotion Processing for Arousal and Neutral Content in Alzheimer's Disease

2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Satler ◽  
Carlos Uribe ◽  
Carlos Conde ◽  
Sergio Leme Da-Silva ◽  
Carlos Tomaz
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Alzheimer's Disease ◽  
Linear Regression ◽  
Neuropsychological Tests ◽  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Declarative Memory ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Educational Levels ◽  
Emotional Rating

Objective. To assess the ability of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients to perceive emotional information and to assign subjective emotional rating scores to audiovisual presentations.Materials and Methods. 24 subjects (14 with AD, matched to controls for age and educational levels) were studied. After neuropsychological assessment, they watched a Neutral story and then a story with Emotional content.Results. Recall scores for both stories were significantly lower in AD (Neutral and Emotional:P=.001). CG assigned different emotional scores for each version of the test,P=.001, while ratings of AD did not differ,P=.32. Linear regression analyses determined the best predictors of emotional rating and recognition memory for each group among neuropsychological tests battery.Conclusions. AD patients show changes in emotional processing on declarative memory and a preserved ability to express emotions in face of arousal content. The present findings suggest that these impairments are due to general cognitive decline.

Facial Expressions of Emotions and Ethological Behavioral Categories

1986 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilles Kirouac ◽  
Martin Bouchard ◽  
Andrée St-Pierre
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Facial Stimuli ◽  
Motivational States ◽  
Behavioral Tendencies

The purpose of this study was to measure the capacity of human subjects to match facial expressions of emotions and behavioral categories that represented the motivational states they are supposed to illustrate. 100 university students were shown facial stimuli they had to classify using ethological behavioral categories. The results showed that accuracy of judgment was over-all lower than what was usually found when fundamental emotional categories were used. The data also indicated that the relation between emotional expressions and behavioral tendencies was more complex than expected.

scholarly journals Dogs recognize dog and human emotions

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 20150883 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Albuquerque ◽  
Kun Guo ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Carine Savalli ◽  
Emma Otta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Domestic Dogs ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Auditory Cues ◽  
Cognitive Representations ◽  
Negative Valence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face ◽  
High Level

The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorize others' emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs.

scholarly journals Neurophysiological Correlates of Comprehending Emotional Meaning in Context

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 2245-2262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daphne J. Holt ◽  
Spencer K. Lynn ◽  
Gina R. Kuperberg
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
N400 Effect ◽  
Late Positivity ◽  
Electrophysiological Responses ◽  
Emotional Meaning ◽  
Reading Experiment ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Modulated Process

Although the neurocognitive mechanisms of nonaffective language comprehension have been studied extensively, relatively less is known about how the emotional meaning of language is processed. In this study, electrophysiological responses to affectively positive, negative, and neutral words, presented within nonconstraining, neutral contexts, were evaluated under conditions of explicit evaluation of emotional content (Experiment 1) and passive reading (Experiment 2). In both experiments, a widely distributed Late Positivity was found to be larger to negative than to positive words (a “negativity bias”). In addition, in Experiment 2, a small, posterior N400 effect to negative and positive (relative to neutral) words was detected, with no differences found between N400 magnitudes to negative and positive words. Taken together, these results suggest that comprehending the emotional meaning of words following a neutral context requires an initial semantic analysis that is relatively more engaged for emotional than for nonemotional words, whereas a later, more extended, attention-modulated process distinguishes the specific emotional valence (positive vs. negative) of words. Thus, emotional processing networks within the brain appear to exert a continuous influence, evident at several stages, on the construction of the emotional meaning of language.

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