Emotional Prosody Recognition Enhances and Progressively Complexifies From Childhood to Adolescence

Background: Emotional prosody is the result of the dynamic variation of acoustical non-verbal aspects of language that allow people to convey and recognize emotions. Understanding how this recognition develops during childhood to adolescence is the goal of the present paper. We also aim to test the maturation of the ability to perceive mixed emotions in voice. Methods: We tested 133 children and adolescents, aged between 6 and 17 years old, exposed to 4 kinds of emotional (anger, fear, happiness, and sadness) and neutral linguistic meaningless stimuli. Participants were asked to judge the type and degree of perceived emotion on continuous scales. Results: By means of a general linear mixed model analysis, as predicted, a significant interaction between age and emotion was found. The ability to recognize emotions significantly increased with age for all emotional and neutral vocalizations. Girls recognized anger better than boys, who instead confused fear with neutral prosody more than girls did. Across all ages, only marginally significant differences were found between anger, happiness, and neutral versus sadness, which was more difficult to recognize. Finally, as age increased, participants were significantly more likely to attribute mixed emotions to emotional prosody, showing the progressive complexification of the emotional content representation that young adults perceived in emotional prosody. Conclusions: The ability to identify basic emotions from linguistically meaningless stimuli develops from childhood to adolescence. Interestingly, this maturation was not only evidenced in the accuracy of emotion detection, but also in a complexification of emotion attribution in prosody.

Cognitive and affective Theory of Mind double dissociation after parietal and temporal lobe tumors

Extensive neuroimaging literature suggests that understanding others' thoughts and emotions engages a wide network encompassing parietal, temporal and medial frontal brain areas. However, the causal role played by these regions in social inferential abilities is still unclear. Moreover very little is known about ToM deficits in brain tumours and whether potential anatomical substrates are comparable to those identified in fMRI literature. This study evaluated the performance of 105 tumour patients, before and immediately after brain surgery, on a cartoon-based non-verbal task evaluating Cognitive (Intention Attribution) and Affective (Emotion Attribution) ToM, as well as a non-social control condition (Causal Inference). Across multiple analyses, we found converging evidence of a double dissociation between patients with right superior parietal damage, selectively impaired in Intention Attribution, and those with right antero-medial temporal lesion, exhibiting deficits only in Emotion attribution. Instead, patients with damage to the frontal cortex were impaired in all kinds of inferential processes, including those from the non-social control conditions. Overall, our data provides novel reliable causal evidence of segregation between different aspects of the ToM network from both the cognitive and also the anatomical point of view.

No convincing evidence that outgroup members are dehumanised: Revisiting trait and emotion attribution in intergroup bias

We challenge the prevalent claim that outgroup members are dehumanised. In study 1, we conducted a systematic content analysis of historical documents from Nazi Germany and showed that, even in these supposedly prototypical cases of extreme dehumanisation, victims are described in ways that only make sense when applied to humans. In studies 2a-c, we test Haslam’s influential dual model of dehumanisation. We show that outgroup members are thought to possess positive human attributes to a lesser extent but negative human attributes to a greater extent. In study 3, we test Leyens’ prominent infrahumanisation model and demonstrate that, contrary to a body of previous work, outgroup members are not thought to experience all secondary emotions less intensely. Rather, they are thought to experience prosocial emotions less intensely but antisocial emotions more intensely. In a final study, we question the hypothesised relationship between dehumanisation and modulation of prosocial behaviour. We demonstrate that describing someone in uniquely human terms can actually reduce prosociality towards them when those terms are antisocial. Taken together, these studies cast doubt on the claim that representing others as ‘less human’ holds explanatory power in the study of intergroup bias.

Chinese Companion Animal Caretakers’ Attachment Influences their Attribution of Emotions to their Animals

It is well-documented that in developed countries, companion animal caretakers often show strong attachments to their animals. However, very little research has incorporated caretakers’ attachment to companion animals in developing countries such as China. This research analyzed the correlation between the attachment level of Chinese dog and cat caretakers and their attribution of emotions to their animals. The results indicated a trend that respondents frequently attributed primary emotions to companion animals rather than secondary emotions. Respondents who had frequent and multiple interactions with their companion animals scored higher on the Pet Bonding Scale (PBS). The degree of attachment significantly influenced caretakers’ (particularly female caretakers’) attribution of responsive emotions to companion animals. This study is one of the first to investigate the role of attachment in emotion attribution in an under-researched population and can therefore act as a baseline for follow-up research.