Emotion lecture 2 Flashcards
Why may the results be more confused and overlap in the previously mentioned smiles study?
While the big 6 categories captured the mental models well for western observers, the big 6 was inadequate for east asian observers. Probably because other emotions that are fundamental to east asian observers (e.g shame, pride, guilt) were lacking.
Describe two pieces of evidence which further display the difference between eye and mouth reliance in western Caucasians and eastern Asian observers
Fixation patterns during emotion recognition across all big six reveal that western caucasian observers sped much more time looking at the mouth than their asian counterparts.
Also they each are more likely to use different emoticons either focusing on eyes or mouth to convey emotion ( :) :( vs ^_^, T_T )
When do these differences in looking at eyes or mouth to recognise emotion arise during development/ adulthood?
Very early even around 9 months
What is the other race effect caused by?
Contact frequency; how often you see them
How does the other-race effect play into the eye-mouth comparison in emotion recognition?
It shows that cultural differences in face identification are similar to emotion recognition. East Asian observers rely more on the eyes, less on the mouth than Western Caucasian observers in a face recognition task also.
As with emotion recognition, these differences are observer-specific and invariant across East Asian and Western Caucasian faces
These studies have so far focused on Asian vs western cultures. Describe a study which examined more remote cultures
Study examined difference in sorting photos of facial expressions into distinct piles by people from the US vs. the Himbaethnic group (remote culture in Namibia with little contact to outsiders and no written language but spoken words for neutral and the Big 5 basic emotions). There was no other instruction apart from sorting them in piles.
The US participants spontaneously label their piles with the big 5 words, those in the other culture often used behavioural words or some other random words.
In a second part of the study, the researchers provided them with the emotion concepts and asked them to sort them according to the emotion concepts. This caused the American piles to be more consistent and the other culture to be more consistent with the American to a lesser extent
What two important findings can be drawn as conclusions from this study regarding the sorting of photos?
There is a strong effect of culture if you use the free sorting, ekmen was almost forcing these participants to use emotion categories.
For american participants it really makes a difference whether you provide these labels or not. To see the structure in someone’s mind, it is probably better to use these free sorting systems.
How are these studies on emotion limited in the inferences they can make on the universality of emotion?
They solely focus on the facial expression of emotion. However these are not the emotion itself so this does not necessarily mean that there are no universal emotion categories.
What other visual stimulus conveying emotion has also been studied quite a lot?
The body, sometimes even more important than the face
Describe two studies which investigate how body posture can influence emotional judgment
They had congruent and incongruent facial and body posture expression. Participants had to judge the emotion from the facial expression. They are much better at doing this when the body posture matches the emotion conveyed by the facial expression.
In another study the face from tennis players either winning or losing a point were extracted without the body and either the face, the body or the complete image was shown to participants. Participants had to gauge the emotional valence of these images. Participants were very poor at this task when only shown the face however scored just as well in the body condition as in the whole body condition.
What did EEG reveal in the first body posture study
this judgement happens very fast- around 150ms
What conclusion can be drawn from the second (tennis) study?
Body postures can trump facial expressions
How was it shown further that perceived facial emotion can depend on body posture? (2)
In the tennis study, losing and winning faces and the bodies were also paired either congruently or incongruently and results showed that the perceived facial emotion could depend on body posture.
In a seperate study faces conveying different emotions (pain from getting a piercing, pleasure from orgasm, victory and defeat from tennis and grief from a funeral) were cutout from the images and placed into the images of other scenarios to determine the extent to which facial expressions were diagnostic for valence. It was found that facial expressions across intense emotional situations are nondiagnostic for valence. Perceived facial valence shifted categorically as a function of the body
Describe a study which investigated whether there is universal emotion recognition from body movements
Study ran in Cambodian highlands on the isolated Kreung tribe. A dance performer in the tribe was supposed to dance to the each of the five basic emotions according to ekmen. US students then had an 85% success rate of identifying it with fixed labels.
They then had an American actress, displaying each of the big five emotions using dynamic body postures and converted it into point-light displays (bio motion). There was a 53% success rate by kreung tribe from point-light displays observers with fixed labels. With free responses there was still good agreements, except for love and pride.
Name two face-selective areas in ventral occipito-temporal cortex and their relevant function
Occipital face area (OFA/IOG): Detection of facial components
Fusiform face area (FFA//FUS): Holistic face processing/ identifying faces
(however not as clear a picture as posited here)
Name two body-selective areas in ventral occipito-temporal cortex and their relevant function
Extrastriate body area (EBA): Sensitive to body parts
Fusiform body area (FBA): Sensitive to full bodies
(however not as clear a picture as posited here)
Recently there has been a lot of work in the circuits of these face sensitive areas both in macaque monkeys and human recordings. What conclusions have been drawn from this research
There is a proposed hierarchy of processing in face selective brain regions.
(V1-V2) ||| ||(IOG)---| || | |(pFus) | | | (mFus)--| | AT
Just look at images lol
What is the STS involved in?
‘social processing’- Processing dynamic and changeable aspects of faces (emotion, eye gaze, mouth movement, lip reading) biological motion, and a number of other things
Describe Haxby’s distributed neural system for face perception
it was a dual stream model that also proposed two systems: a core system for visual analysis and an extended system for further processing with other neural systems.
In the core system it is proposed that the inferior occipital gyri (after early perception of facial features) projects to both the STS for processing changeable aspects of faces- perception of eye gaze, expression and lip movement etc and the lateral fusiform gyrus for invariant aspects of faces- i.e perception of a unique identity. These three areas interact with each other.
The STS then interacts with the intraparietal sulcus for spatially directed attention, the auditory sulcus for prelexical speech perception and the amygdala, insula and limbic system to process emotion. The other stream from the lateral fusiform gyrus interacts with the anterior temporal where personal identity, name and biolographical information is processed. These make up the extended system.
This is supported by research but of course still debated.
How is this pathway model associated with the where/ how and what pathway model?
The original author of that model proposed an integrated model in which this forms a third stream, processing the dynamics of social perception: facial and body movement (expressions, eye gaze, bodies etc)
This activity in the temporo-parietal junction feed into a module for what function?
Understanding other’s thoughts; the theory of mind
Describe a task which measures theory of mind
False beliefs task:
False belief: Someone else holds a mental state (belief) that differs from one’s own belief and from the current state of reality
•In developmental psychology: Object transfer task, e.g. Sally-Anne task (shows sally placing marble in the basket before leaving, Anne transfers it into a box before leaving, sally returns- where will sally look for the marble?)
•Correct answer: “In the basket”
>proof of Theory of Mind
Describe a study which utilised this false belief task to measure the neural correlates of theory of mind
A false belief story and a false photograph story were presented as two different conditions and a question was posed asking about what someone believed vs what the developed photograph would show (both require ‘false’ representation). This task was carried out in an fMRI scanner. In line with expectations, the false belief task showed higher activation of the left TPL than those in the false photograph task.
Describe a study which utilised patients doing a false belief task as a measurement of theory of mind
Had three patients with lesions to left TPJ do a video based false belief task. Although impaired in language (story based false belief tasks), in video-based false-belief had selective impairment- were not impaired in areas which may confound this: memory control, inhibition control.
