Incidental retrieval of prior emotion mimicry

Simulated proximity enhances perceptual and physiological responses to emotional facial expressions

Physical proximity is important in social interactions. Here, we assessed whether simulated physical proximity modulates the perceived intensity of facial emotional expressions and their associated physiological signatures during observation or imitation of these expressions. Forty-four healthy volunteers rated intensities of dynamic angry or happy facial expressions, presented at two simulated locations, proximal (0.5 m) and distant (3 m) from the participants. We tested whether simulated physical proximity affected the spontaneous (in the observation task) and voluntary (in the imitation task) physiological responses (activity of the corrugator supercilii face muscle and pupil diameter) as well as subsequent ratings of emotional intensity. Angry expressions provoked relative activation of the corrugator supercilii muscle and pupil dilation, whereas happy expressions induced a decrease in corrugator supercilii muscle activity. In proximal condition, these responses were enhanced during both observation and imitation of the facial expressions, and were accompanied by an increase in subsequent affective ratings. In addition, individual variations in condition related EMG activation during imitation of angry expressions predicted increase in subsequent emotional ratings. In sum, our results reveal novel insights about the impact of physical proximity in the perception of emotional expressions, with early proximity-induced enhancements of physiological responses followed by an increased intensity rating of facial emotional expressions.

Emotional processing of sadness and disgust evoked by disaster scenes

OBJECTIVE

Disaster scenes produce long-term negative feelings in those who experience them. Previous studies have focused on mitigating disaster impacts through directed forgetting or conscious suppression. However, the initial emotional processing of disaster scenes is not fully understood, hindering the comprehension of long-term disaster impacts. This study aims to investigate how pictures of disaster scenes evoking disgust and sadness are processed via cortical electrical activity.

METHODS

Pictures of grief and mutilation from disasters were used to evoke sadness and disgust, respectively. Event-related desynchronization (ERD) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to quantify the intensity and time-course of emotional processing.

RESULTS

The information processing of emotional pictures was stronger than neutral pictures, represented by greater declines of alpha ERD. In the posterior ERP components of N1 and EPN, amplitudes for emotional pictures were larger than those for neutral pictures, which reflected the effects of arousal on visual perception. In the anterior ERP components of P2, P3, and LPP, disgust pictures showed higher attention attraction and enhanced encoding memory processing.

CONCLUSIONS

Disgust disaster scenarios induced long-term prominent LPP, which may correspond with the long-term negative impacts of the disaster.

Effects of posed smiling on memory for happy and sad facial expressions

The perception and storage of facial emotional expressions constitutes an important human skill that is essential for our daily social interactions. While previous research revealed that facial feedback can influence the perception of facial emotional expressions, it is unclear whether facial feedback also plays a role in memory processes of facial emotional expressions. In the present study we investigated the impact of facial feedback on the performance in emotional visual working memory (WM). For this purpose, 37 participants underwent a classical facial feedback manipulation (FFM) (holding a pen with the teeth—inducing a smiling expression vs. holding a pen with the non-dominant hand—as a control condition) while they performed a WM task on varying intensities of happy or sad facial expressions. Results show that the smiling manipulation improved memory performance selectively for happy faces, especially for highly ambiguous facial expressions. Furthermore, we found that in addition to an overall negative bias specifically for happy faces (i.e. happy faces are remembered as more negative than they initially were), FFM induced a positivity bias when memorizing emotional facial information (i.e. faces were remembered as being more positive than they actually were). Finally, our data demonstrate that men were affected more by FFM: during induced smiling men showed a larger positive bias than women did. These data demonstrate that facial feedback not only influences our perception but also systematically alters our memory of facial emotional expressions.