Izen Sarah C, Lapp Hannah E, Harris Daniel A, Hunter Richard G, Ciaramitaro Vivian M
Department of Psychology, Developmental and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA 02125, USA.
Division of Epidemiology, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5T 3M7, Canada.
Brain Sci. 2019 Jul 25;9(8):176. doi: 10.3390/brainsci9080176.
One source of information we glean from everyday experience, which guides social interaction, is assessing the emotional state of others. Emotional state can be expressed through several modalities: body posture or movements, body odor, touch, facial expression, or the intonation in a voice. Much research has examined emotional processing within one sensory modality or the transfer of emotional processing from one modality to another. Yet, less is known regarding interactions across different modalities when perceiving emotions, despite our common experience of seeing emotion in a face while hearing the corresponding emotion in a voice. Our study examined if visual and auditory emotions of matched valence (congruent) conferred stronger perceptual and physiological effects compared to visual and auditory emotions of unmatched valence (incongruent). We quantified how exposure to emotional faces and/or voices altered perception using psychophysics and how it altered a physiological proxy for stress or arousal using salivary cortisol. While we found no significant advantage of congruent over incongruent emotions, we found that changes in cortisol were associated with perceptual changes. Following exposure to negative emotional content, larger decreases in cortisol, indicative of less stress, correlated with more positive perceptual after-effects, indicative of stronger biases to see neutral faces as happier.
我们从日常经验中收集的用于指导社交互动的一个信息来源是评估他人的情绪状态。情绪状态可以通过多种方式表达：身体姿势或动作、体味、触摸、面部表情或语音语调。许多研究考察了单一感官模态内的情绪处理或情绪处理从一种模态到另一种模态的转移。然而，尽管我们常有在看到面部表情的同时听到相应语音语调中的情绪这样的共同体验，但对于感知情绪时不同模态之间的相互作用却知之甚少。我们的研究考察了与效价不匹配（不一致）的视觉和听觉情绪相比，效价匹配（一致）的视觉和听觉情绪是否会产生更强的感知和生理效应。我们使用心理物理学方法量化了接触情绪面孔和/或语音如何改变感知，以及使用唾液皮质醇量化了其如何改变压力或唤醒的生理指标。虽然我们发现一致情绪相对于不一致情绪没有显著优势，但我们发现皮质醇的变化与感知变化有关。在接触负面情绪内容后，皮质醇的更大幅度下降（表明压力较小）与更积极的感知后效应相关（表明将中性面孔视为更快乐的更强偏差）。
