Pupil dilation reflects the authenticity of received nonverbal vocalizations

Blindness influences emotional authenticity perception in voices: Behavioral and ERP evidence

The ability to distinguish spontaneous from volitional emotional expressions is an important social skill. How do blind individuals perceive emotional authenticity? Unlike sighted individuals, they cannot rely on facial and body language cues, relying instead on vocal cues alone. Here, we combined behavioral and ERP measures to investigate authenticity perception in laughter and crying in individuals with early- or late-blindness onset. Early-blind, late-blind, and sighted control participants (n = 17 per group, N = 51) completed authenticity and emotion discrimination tasks while EEG data were recorded. The stimuli consisted of laughs and cries that were either spontaneous or volitional. The ERP analysis focused on the N1, P2, and late positive potential (LPP). Behaviorally, early-blind participants showed intact authenticity perception, but late-blind participants performed worse than controls. There were no group differences in the emotion discrimination task. In brain responses, all groups were sensitive to laughter authenticity at the P2 stage, and to crying authenticity at the early LPP stage. Nevertheless, only early-blind participants were sensitive to crying authenticity at the N1 and middle LPP stages, and to laughter authenticity at the early LPP stage. Furthermore, early-blind and sighted participants were more sensitive than late-blind ones to crying authenticity at the P2 and late LPP stages. Altogether, these findings suggest that early blindness relates to facilitated brain processing of authenticity in voices, both at early sensory and late cognitive-evaluative stages. Late-onset blindness, in contrast, relates to decreased sensitivity to authenticity at behavioral and brain levels.

How much is a chef's touch worth? Affective, emotional and behavioural responses to food images: A multimodal study

BACKGROUND

Food aesthetics influences affective dimensions (valence and arousal) and subsequent emotional and behavioural responses in images presented in more traditional form, almost rustic in some cases, to the signature dishes of haute cuisine. However, the visual impact of images of haute cuisine dishes on consumers' affective and emotional responses compared to traditional dishes is still understudied.

METHODS

We recorded electrodermal activity, ocular movements and self-report affect of 35 volunteers while they performed a picture viewing paradigm using images of haute cuisine food, traditional food, and non-food. Additionally, the moderating role of age was examined.

RESULTS

Our results showed that subjects had higher feelings of pleasure and arousal toward images of food (haute cuisine and traditional dishes) compared to non-food images. However, no difference in self-report affect, physiological and behavioural responses was found between haute cuisine and traditional dishes. Interestingly, a moderating effect of age was revealed, reporting that younger participants had greater feelings of pleasure and shorter eye-to-screen distance towards traditional food than haute cuisine.

CONCLUSIONS

As a whole, our findings suggest that food aesthetics could at least partially affect consumers' affective and emotional responses. Interestingly, physiological responses to food pictures seemed to be relatively independent of approach/avoidance motivational states, supporting the assumption that traditional visual restaurant menus with attractive images might be insufficient for eliciting intense positive emotions. This study also contributes to advancing the understanding of the role that age plays in emotional impact when images of haute cuisine dishes are presented to consumers.

Is Negative Affect that Bad? The Effect of Affective States on Conventional and Unconventional Creative Thinking in University Students

Introduction

The role of affective states on the creative process has been receiving the attention of researchers and has led to contradictory results. Most research in creativity has emphasized the role of affective states, mainly positive ones, on creativity levels, namely those resulting from divergent thinking tasks that reveal the unconventional way of thinking in the creative process. However, there are no studies to date that focus on the impact of affective states on conventional and unconventional thinking, during the same creative process, which consider a single creative assessment task. The aim of this experimental study was to analyze the effect of induced affective states on both conventional and unconventional thinking of creativity in adults by using the TCT-DP (Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production).

Method

Seventy-five university students, mostly female, with a mean age of 26.95 years, were randomly assigned into three affect elicitation conditions (pleasant vs. unpleasant vs. neutral).

Results

Results indicated that the negative affective state led to higher levels of conventional thinking when compared to positive and neutral affective states. However, no significant differences were found on unconventional thinking across the three conditions.

Conclusions

Our results do not support the assumption that the negative affect has a hindering effect on creativity nor the positive affect increases creativity. Negative affect seems to promote conventional thinking, perhaps due to its cognitive correlates, which can be manifested in focusing attention and analytic thinking. Practical and theoretical implications for future research on the role of affective states on creativity are discussed.

Pupil dilation reflects the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech

Emotional speech perception is a multisensory process. When speaking with an individual we concurrently integrate the information from their voice and face to decode e.g., their feelings, moods, and emotions. However, the physiological reactions-such as the reflexive dilation of the pupil-associated to these processes remain mostly unknown. That is the aim of the current article, to investigate whether pupillary reactions can index the processes underlying the audiovisual integration of emotional signals. To investigate this question, we used an algorithm able to increase or decrease the smiles seen in a person's face or heard in their voice, while preserving the temporal synchrony between visual and auditory channels. Using this algorithm, we created congruent and incongruent audiovisual smiles, and investigated participants' gaze and pupillary reactions to manipulated stimuli. We found that pupil reactions can reflect emotional information mismatch in audiovisual speech. In our data, when participants were explicitly asked to extract emotional information from stimuli, the first fixation within emotionally mismatching areas (i.e., the mouth) triggered pupil dilation. These results reveal that pupil dilation can reflect the dynamic integration of audiovisual emotional speech and provide insights on how these reactions are triggered during stimulus perception.

Temporal profile of intranasal oxytocin in the human autonomic nervous system at rest: An electrocardiography and pupillometry study

BACKGROUND

Human social behavior is modulated by oxytocin (OT). Intranasal administration of OT (IN-OT) is a noninvasive route shown to elicit changes in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity; however, IN-OT's effect on the temporal profile of ANS activity at rest is yet to be described.

AIMS

We aimed to describe the temporal profile of IN-OT at six 10-min time windows from 15- to 100-min post-administration in 20 male participants at rest while continuously recording their pupillary in an eyes-open condition and cardiac activity in eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions.

METHODS

We used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects design study where we extracted two proxies of parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity: high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) and pupillary unrest index (PUI); and a proxy of sympathetic nervous system activity: sample entropy of the pupillary unrest.

RESULTS

In the eyes-open condition, we found an effect of IN-OT on the proxies of PNS activity: decreased PUI in the three-time windows post-administration spanning 65-100 min, and as an exploratory finding, an increased HF-HRV in the 80-85 min time window.

CONCLUSIONS

We suggest there is a role of OT in PNS regulation that may be consistent with OT's currently theorized role in the facilitation of alertness and approach behavior.

EyeT4Empathy: Dataset of foraging for visual information, gaze typing and empathy assessment

We present a dataset of eye-movement recordings collected from 60 participants, along with their empathy levels, towards people with movement impairments. During each round of gaze recording, participants were divided into two groups, each one completing one task. One group performed a task of free exploration of structureless images, and a second group performed a task consisting of gaze typing, i.e. writing sentences using eye-gaze movements on a card board. The eye-tracking data recorded from both tasks is stored in two datasets, which, besides gaze position, also include pupil diameter measurements. The empathy levels of participants towards non-verbal movement-impaired people were assessed twice through a questionnaire, before and after each task. The questionnaire is composed of forty questions, extending a established questionnaire of cognitive and affective empathy. Finally, our dataset presents an opportunity for analysing and evaluating, among other, the statistical features of eye-gaze trajectories in free-viewing as well as how empathy is reflected in eye features.

Is Pupil Activity Associated With the Strength of Memory Signal for Words in a Continuous Recognition Memory Paradigm?

Research on pupillometry provides an increasing evidence for associations between pupil activity and memory processing. The most consistent finding is related to an increase in pupil size for old items compared with novel items, suggesting that pupil activity is associated with the strength of memory signal. However, the time course of these changes is not completely known, specifically, when items are presented in a running recognition task maximizing interference by requiring the recognition of the most recent items from a sequence of old/new items. The sample comprised 42 healthy participants who performed a visual word recognition task under varying conditions of retention interval. Recognition responses were evaluated using behavioral variables for discrimination accuracy, reaction time, and confidence in recognition decisions. Pupil activity was recorded continuously during the entire experiment. The results suggest a decrease in recognition performance with increasing study-test retention interval. Pupil size decreased across retention intervals, while pupil old/new effects were found only for words recognized at the shortest retention interval. Pupillary responses consisted of a pronounced early pupil constriction at retrieval under longer study-test lags corresponding to weaker memory signals. However, the pupil size was also sensitive to the subjective feeling of familiarity as shown by pupil dilation to false alarms (new items judged as old). These results suggest that the pupil size is related not only to the strength of memory signal but also to subjective familiarity decisions in a continuous recognition memory paradigm.

The neural basis of authenticity recognition in laughter and crying

Deciding whether others' emotions are genuine is essential for successful communication and social relationships. While previous fMRI studies suggested that differentiation between authentic and acted emotional expressions involves higher-order brain areas, the time course of authenticity discrimination is still unknown. To address this gap, we tested the impact of authenticity discrimination on event-related potentials (ERPs) related to emotion, motivational salience, and higher-order cognitive processing (N100, P200 and late positive complex, the LPC), using vocalised non-verbal expressions of sadness (crying) and happiness (laughter) in a 32-participant, within-subject study. Using a repeated measures 2-factor (authenticity, emotion) ANOVA, we show that N100's amplitude was larger in response to authentic than acted vocalisations, particularly in cries, while P200's was larger in response to acted vocalisations, particularly in laughs. We suggest these results point to two different mechanisms: (1) a larger N100 in response to authentic vocalisations is consistent with its link to emotional content and arousal (putatively larger amplitude for genuine emotional expressions); (2) a larger P200 in response to acted ones is in line with evidence relating it to motivational salience (putatively larger for ambiguous emotional expressions). Complementarily, a significant main effect of emotion was found on P200 and LPC amplitudes, in that the two were larger for laughs than cries, regardless of authenticity. Overall, we provide the first electroencephalographic examination of authenticity discrimination and propose that authenticity processing of others' vocalisations is initiated early, along that of their emotional content or category, attesting for its evolutionary relevance for trust and bond formation.