Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2023-10-10
Abstract： The majority of current research on facial expression perception uses static face images, and there is comparatively little study on dynamic expression. However, facial expressions are highly dynamic phenomena capable of conveying complex psychological states: the motion inherent in dynamic stimuli is crucial for social perception and improves coherence in identifying facial affect. Previous studies have found that perceptual processing of dynamic expressions may involve a variety of mechanisms, and some of these mechanisms have inconsistent effects. Therefore, it is important to study dynamic expressions to understand the nuances of human communication and support the naturalistic assessment of affective disorders.
Three experiments involved 96 participants, which provided 94 valid samples. The experimental material came from the Chinese Affective Picture System (CASP). Dynamic expression sequences were created from the happy and neutral expressions of the same individual. In Experiment 1, the impact of direction change and the average summary representation were examined. Experiments 2a and 2b combined static expressions to systematically explored the representational momentum effect of dynamic happy expressions. As such, the average summary representation of dynamic expressions differed across the two experiments. Participants were asked to evaluate the valence, arousal, and dominance of the final emotion of dynamic expressions or static expressions on a seven-point scale. ANOVA, independent sample t-test, and one sample t-test were used to analyze the results.
In this study, it was found that when the faces changed from strong to weak (versus weak to strong), they were rated with lower valence scores and higher dominance scores. In addition, faces that went from strong to weak had lower valence scores and higher dominance scores than static faces with the same intensity of expression in the previous frame. Indicative of the the representational momentum effect, faces that went from weak to strong had higher valence scores. Furthermore, the dynamic happy expressions that moved from strong to weak had a larger impact on perceived representational momentum than the dynamic happy expressions that moved from weak to strong. The arousal ratings were higher for the dynamic happy expression with a higher average summary representation. Valence, arousal, and dominance scores for the same expression image differed across experimental designs and material groups, according to this study's thorough analysis of repeated stimulus conditions (such as static 50% smiling).
According to the results, representation momentum impact extends to the assessment of dynamic happy expression on valence and dominance dimensions. Additionally, when assessing a facial expression, the perceiver will make a relative assessment based on the internal reference standard: a lower the standard is associated with a higher the score, and vice versa. This finding is consistent with reference dependence effect on expression perception. These processing characteristics are used as a reminder to academics to consider the difference between dynamic and static expressions and to think about the impact of various materials when using facial expression data in the future.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： People can quickly form the first impression of the strangers’ personality according to their face cues and/or voice cues. To explore the difference and the similarity of these two ways of personality perception, we compared these two sides of studies reported by the same teams. Firstly, both the first impression of face-personality perception and the first impression of voice-personality perception have similar two -dimensional structure models. Some studies had named them as "valence-dominance dimensional model" and others had named them as "approachability-capability dimensional model". The two dimensions reflect inference about the person’s intentions——harmful v.s. harmless, and the person’s ability to implement these intentions, respectively. Furthermore, considering from the perspectives of occurrence and development, cognitive formation mechanism, physiological mechanism and neural mechanism, the internal mechanism of the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception are similar to some extent. On the other hand, there are some differences between the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception, including being different in some specific personality traits contained in the same dimension, the rate of the total variation explained by the same dimension or the personality traits, and the perceived reliability of the same dimension, etc.. Such differences indicate that, during the formation of the first impression of personality perception, the face and the voice cues are different in sensitive personality traits and sensitive dimensions. Face cues may be more sensitive to the valence/approachability dimension and the related personality traits, while voice cues may be more sensitive to the dominance/capability dimension and the related personality traits. In addition, face cues and voice cues provide different physical properties for the overgeneralization of cognition to rely on, therefore, the cognitive process and the results of the overgeneralization vary between these two modality processing, that is, the overgeneralization for some specific content and cognitive mechanism have the modal specificity. Some studies have disclosed neural evidence that the differences between two modal processing were manifested in the early stage of cognitive processing. Therefore, it is valuable to know the whole picture and the essence of similarities and differences between the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception. Their similarities consist of the basis for the integration of face-voice cues in the first impression of personality perception. Their differences indicate that face and voice would have adaptive weight allocation in the integration of personality perception. In the future study, it is necessary to directly compare the first impression of face- and voice-personality perception based on the same group of participants who provided the face and the voice stimuli, so as to directly, systematically and comprehensively reveal their similarities and differences. Secondly, since previous studies mainly used the open -ended subjective evaluation as the experimental task, focusing on the results of the first impression of personality perception, future research can design experimental tasks compatible with neuro-imaging techniques and investigate the process characteristics of the first impression of face- and voice -personality perception. In addition, as the sensitive personality traits and sensitive dimensions of faces and voice cues might be different, it is important to explore how people integrate these two sources of information and form a holistic first impression of personality perception.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Touch is an important sensory channel for individuals to explore the external world in everyday life. The sense of touch helps us to discriminate the location of a stimulus on the skin surface, to identify the shape, size and texture of objects. However, touch can also be affective. The motivational-affective dimension of touch is involved in coding its valence and motivational relevance. This aspect of tactile sensation plays an important role in maintaining social bonding and promoting interpersonal communication. The affective function of interpersonal touch can be achieved through unimodal presentations or multimodal information integration processing. That is, tactile action itself, either a strong handshake or a tender hug, can directly convey emotions. Although the accuracy of decoding six basic emotions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise) from interpersonal touch are slightly less than from the facial expression and vocal information, interpersonal touch has advantages in conveying social emotions such as "love", "gratitude" and "sympathy". Such advantages reflect the important significance of affective touch in establishing social bonding and promoting cooperative relationships. Further more, the affective meaning and social attributes carried by interpersonal touch can provide social background for emotion of other modal （e.g., visual or auditory） information processing, so as to enhance participants’ attention and to sharpen their social evaluation of emotional cues. Compared with sensory-discriminative subsystem, the motivational-affective subsystem has a special neurophysiological mechanism. For example, C-tactile (CT) afferents are strongly implicated as the neurobiological substrate underlying the affective property of touch. CTs, a class of slowly conducting mechanoreceptors, are specially tuned to the properties of human physical contact. They fire maximally to skin-temperature, light-pressure stroking at a rate of 1-10 cm per s. C-tactile-mediated affective tactile stimulation project in spinothalamic tract (STT) pathway (the spinal signaling of orofacial C-fiber mediated affective touch is still unclear), bypass the primary somatosensory cortex, directly project to the insular cortex, and then process in the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and other core areas of the “social brain” neural network. In addition, evidence from EEG research shows that, beta oscillation at parietal scalp sites, may be related to the affective representation of tactile stimuli, and theta oscillation at frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital scalp sites, may reflect an attentional-emotional regulatory mechanism of affective touch. Another complex facet of touch is that, affective touch would be complicated by its inextricable links to context, gender and sexuality, culture, and other individual, interpersonal, and societal factors. Moreover, learned from the previous research on facial emotion perception, a considerable body of work about affective touch are also around the topic of coding-decoding of basic emotions, so that the results fail to fully reveal the specificity of tactile channel in transmitting social emotions. Therefore, we should pay more attention to top-down contextual factors in the future researches, such as personal relationship, cultural difference, and social context, that may influence how to define and interpret the emotion and motivation of interpersonal touch. Meanwhile, although the time course of emotional touch perception was explored with electrophysiological measures, however no clear index has been identified till now. In addition, in order to reveal the relevance and independence between the sensory-discriminative and motivational-affective subsystems, such as activation likelihood estimate (ALE) meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling (MACM) analysis can be used to reveal the cortical functional neuroanatomy supporting a distinction between affective and discriminative touch.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2021-10-18
Abstract： Touch is an important sensory channel for individuals to explore the external world, and its affective function plays an important role in maintaining social bonding and promoting interpersonal communication. Tactile action itself can directly convey distinct emotions, and it also promotes the cross-modality emotional processing by enhancing attention and sharpening social evaluation of emotional cues. At neurophysiological level, C-tactile-mediated affective tactile stimulation project in spinothalamic tract (STT) pathway (the spinal signaling of orofacial C-fiber mediated affective touch is still unclear), bypass the primary somatosensory cortex, directly project to the insular cortex, and then process in the amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and other core areas of the “social brain” neural network. Future research should pay more attention to the interpersonal dependence, cultural uniqueness, and stimulus standardization of affective touch, and try to reveal the relevance and independence between the two tactile sub-systems at neural level."
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