How do many species of animals communicate emotions?
through change in posture, facial expression and nonverbal sounds (e.g. sighs, laughs, moans, growls etc.)
What did Darwin say about emotions and why?
• Emotional expressions are innate and biologically determined (Charles Darwin, 1872).
- Observation of his own children
- Corresponding with people in isolated cultures around the world
What was Ekman and Friesen (1971) cross cultural study of emotion?
- Studies ability of members of isolated tribe in New Guinea to recognise facial expressions of emotion produced by Westerners
- They had no trouble doing so and themselves produced facial expressions that Westerners readily recognised
- Evidence to suggest that emotions are innate (in contrast to language which is learnt)
What does research with visually impaired people show about emotional expression?
- Facial expressions of children who are blind are very similar to those of ‘sighted’ children (Woodworth & Schlosberg)
- Few differences in emotional expressions of congenitally blind, noncongenitally blind and sighted athletes in 2004 Paralympic games
- This suggests that emotion expression is innate and does not require learning by imitation
What was Sauter et al. (2000) experiment about vocal emotion perception across cultures?
- Played members of isolated villages in north Namibia nonverbal emotional vocalisations from European-English speakers
- Played European English speakers nonverbal emotional vocalisations of emotion from Himba speakers (residents of northern Namibia)
- Both groups were able to recognise the emotions correctly for a number of trials to make it significant
What was Kraut & Johnston’s experiment about expression of emotion in group situations?
• Kraut & Johnston (1979) observed people in situations that would be likely to make them happy (e.g. achieving a strike when bowling)
- Produced only small signs of happiness when alone
- Much more likely to smile if they were interacting socially with others
- Smiling has been shown to increase in the presence of an audience in infants as young as 10 months
What was TRacy & Robins experiment about how automatic the recognition of emotion is?
- Ps could accurately recognise the emotion of facial expressions even when they were only presented for very brief periods of time
- If they were given more time to view the images, their classification of emotion showed little improvement
- This suggests that we recognise other people’s facial expressions automatically, rapidly and accurately
What was Meergen et al’s experiment about emotion and body language?
- Asked Ps to identify emotion in the face of images that were either congruent or incongruent with body language
- Ps were faster and more accurate when the face and body were congruent
- Suggests that our perception of emotion in others is based on multiple cues including body language as well as faces and voices
Which hemisphere of the brain plays a more important role in emotion comprehension?
The right
What was George et al’s experiment about laterality of emotion recognition?
- George et al. (1996) – Ps listened to sentences with emotional content
- Condition 1 – subjects listened to the meaning of the words and responded to whether the sentence described a happy, sad, angry or neutral situation
- Condition 2 – subjects listened to the tone of the voice and judged whether the words were said in a happy sad or neutral way
- Condition 1 – bilateral activation of prefrontal cortex (left involved in meaning)
- Condition 2 – right lateralised activation of prefrontal cortex (involved emotion)
What is the role of the amygdala in facial emotion recognition and how do we know this?
- Amygdala plays a role in both emotional responses and emotion recognition, in particular fear recognition
- Lesions of the amygdala, as a result of degenerative disease or surgery for disorders, result in problems recognising emotion in facial expressions, with recognition of fear being particularly impaired
- Activity in the amygdala increases when viewing photographs of emotional facial expressions
Large increases in activity when viewing pictures of fearful faces
Slight increases in activity when viewing happy faces
What is the role of the amygdala in vocal emotion recognition and how do we know this?
- Amygdala damage does not seem to effect the recognition of emotion in the voice
- SM has localised bilateral amygdala damage, could recognise emotion in the voice despite being unable to recognise emotion in the face
- RH had bilateral amygdala damage and damage to surrounding structures (extra-amygdalar structures), especially extensive in the right hemisphere. RH demonstrated normal prosody perception on most, but not all measures.
What is the role of imitation in emotion recognition?
- Adolphs et al. (2000) correlated the location of lesions in 108 people with the ability to perceive emotion in the face
People who were poorest at facial emotion recognition had damage to the right somatosensory cortex
They suggest that when we see a facial expression of an emotion, we unconsciously imagine ourselves making that expression
Often we do more than imagine making the expressions – we actually imitate what we see
What is the simulationist hypothesis?
- Simulationist hypothesis – emotion recognition involves simulation of emotion that we are viewing
Neuroimaging studies have shown that brain regions that are activated in response to observing emotion are similar to the regions activated when making emotions expressions
What did a study using TMS to interfere with visual perceptions of faces and somatosensory feedback from one’s own face find?
Found that interference of either region impaired people’s ability to recognise facial expression of emotion.
What is the role of mirror neurons and where are they located?
- Mirror neurons are activated when an animal performs a particular behaviour or when it sees another animal performing that behaviour
Carr et al. (2003) activation of mirror neurons when observing facial movements of others helps us to understand how other people feel
Mirror neuron system might be involved in our ability to empathise - Located in the ventral premotor cortex of the frontal lobe
Receive input from the superior temporal sulcus and the posterior parietal cortex
What do studies with people with Moebius syndrome show?
- Moebius syndrome – a rare congenital neurological disorder characterised by facial paralysis
- Caused by defective development of nerves involved in the movement of facial muscles
- People with this syndrome cannot express emotion in the face
- Also have difficulty in recognising emotion in others (Cole, 2001)
- Possible that the inability to produce facial emotions makes it hard to imitate expressions of others and the lack of internal feedback from the motor system to the somatosensory cortex makes recognition hard
What does it mean that facial expressions of emotions are automatic and involuntary?
- It is not easy to produce a realistic facial expression of emotion when we do not really feel that way
- Fake smiles involve contraction of muscles around the mouth. Muscles near the eyes is involved in genuinely happy smiles – Duchenne’s muscle
What is volitional facial paresis and what does it show?
• Volitional facial paresis difficulty in moving the facial muscles voluntarily; caused by damage to the face region of the primary motor cortex of its subcortical connections
- Shows that innate emotional responses require muscles opposed to the voluntary ones
What is emotional facial paresis?
Emotional facial paresis lack of movement of facial muscles in response to emotions in people who have no difficulty moving these muscles voluntarily; caused by damage to insular prefrontal cortex, subcortical white matter of the frontal lobes or parts of the thalamus
What is the laterality of emotion expression?
- Emotion most profoundly expressed in left side of the face because the right side of the brain controls the left side
- The same hemispheric specialisation appears to be true of emotion expressions
- Left hemisphere lesions do not usually impair expression of vocal emotion
- E.g. Wernicke’s aphasia – even though their speech is meaningless, the prosodic features of the voice remain intact
- Right hemisphere lesions do impair both facial and vocal expression of emotions
Is the amygdala involved in the recognition or expression of facial emotions?
Recognition
What is the case study that shows that amygdala damage affects recognition but not expression of emotions?
- Patient SP, 54 year old female
- First noticed neurological impairments ages 3-4 and was later diagnosed with epilepsy
- During middle age, the seizures which originated in the right temporal lobe began to occur more frequently and aged 48 she had her right amygdala removed. She also had a lesion in her left amygdala so now had bilateral amygdala damage
- Normal neuropsychological profile: normal IQ and largely unimpaired visual perceptual function
- Intact ability to discriminate gender, age and identity in faces
- Compared SPs performance to 20 control patients on 3 tasks: facial affect recognition, lexical affect recognition and facial affect generation
- Task 1 – identify emotion expressed in an image of a face
- Task 2 – identify emotion expressed in a sentence
- Task 3 – generate a facial expression to match a given emotion
- Results:
- Task 1: SP showed great impairment in fear recognition in faces
- Task 2: SP performed within the normal range on all emotion
- Task 3: Sp’s production of facial expressions was equal to or better than controls for all expression types
- Shows that amygdala damage affects recognition but not expression of emotions
