School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Emotion. 2012 Feb;12(1):120-31. doi: 10.1037/a0024785. Epub 2011 Aug 29.
Although both auditory and visual information can influence the perceived emotion of an individual, how these modalities contribute to the perceived emotion of a crowd of characters was hitherto unknown. Here, we manipulated the ambiguity of the emotion of either a visual or auditory crowd of characters by varying the proportions of characters expressing one of two emotional states. Using an intersensory bias paradigm, unambiguous emotional information from an unattended modality was presented while participants determined the emotion of a crowd in an attended, but different, modality. We found that emotional information in an unattended modality can disambiguate the perceived emotion of a crowd. Moreover, the size of the crowd had little effect on these crossmodal influences. The role of audiovisual information appears to be similar in perceiving emotion from individuals or crowds. Our findings provide novel insights into the role of multisensory influences on the perception of social information from crowds of individuals.
尽管听觉和视觉信息都可以影响个体感知到的情绪，但这些模态如何影响一群角色的感知情绪在以前是未知的。在这里，我们通过改变表达两种情绪状态之一的角色比例来操纵视觉或听觉角色群体的情绪的模糊性。使用感觉间偏向范式，在参与者确定处于注意但不同模态的群体的情绪的同时，呈现来自未注意模态的明确情感信息。我们发现，未注意模态中的情感信息可以消除对群体感知情绪的歧义。此外，群体的规模对这些跨模态影响的影响很小。在感知个体或群体的情绪时，视听信息的作用似乎相似。我们的发现为多感官影响对个体群体的社会信息感知的作用提供了新的见解。
