Perceived dynamics of static images enables emotional attribution

The shape of you: do individuals associate particular geometric shapes with identity?

For more than a century, psychologists have been interested in how visual information can arouse emotions. Several studies have shown that rounded shapes evoke positive feelings due to their link with happy/baby-like expressions, compared with sharp angular shapes, usually associated with anger and threatening objects having negative valence. However, to date, no-one has investigated the preference to associate simple geometric shapes to personal identities, including one’s own, that of a close acquainted, or that of a stranger. Through 2 online surveys we asked participants to associate a geometric shape, chosen among a circle, a square and a triangle, to each of three identities, namely “you” (the self), “your best friend” or “a stranger”. We hypothesized that the circle would be more associated with the self, the square with the friend and the triangle with the stranger. Moreover, we investigated whether these associations are modulated by 3 personality traits: aggressivity, social fear and empathy. As predicted, we found that participants associate more often the circle with the self, both the circle and the square with the best friend, whereas they matched angular shapes (both the triangle and the square) to the stranger. On the other hand, the possibility that personality traits can modulate such associations was not confirmed. The study of how people associate geometric figures with the self or with other identities giving them an implicit socio-affective connotation, is interesting for all the disciplines interested in the automatic affective processes activated by visual stimuli.

Soundtrack design: The impact of music on visual attention and affective responses

Through music, film composers attempt to affect the audience's emotions and visual attention; however, little empirical evidence exists characterizing the mechanisms whereby music affects viewers. We conducted a mixed-design experiment with 60 participants to explore the effect of music on viewers' visual attention and affective responses to a film. Music led to quicker first fixations on film objects and supplied emotional content, increasing positive sentiment for the film's story. However, music did not influence viewers' attitudes to filmed events. Within this context, music has limited impact on attitudes toward filmed events but can accentuate the saliency of film objects and supply emotional information altering viewers' sentiment towards the film. Understanding the mechanisms of music's physiological and behavioral effects can inform content delivery strategies. This study offers insights for composition and production of musical soundtracks for feature-length films, advertising videos, educational videos, and video games.

The Inference of Friendly Communicative Atmosphere Created by Geometric Shapes

Many previous studies on inference of social behaviors using geometric shapes have explored causality, animacy, intention, and desire inferred from the movements of such shapes; however, inference of communicative atmosphere in terms of friendliness/antagonism using geometric shapes has not yet been studied well. This study investigated how a friendly/antagonistic communicative atmosphere was inferred from the movement of two egg shapes. We developed animations for these shapes involving forward/backward/parallel tilts with coincidence/incoincidence of synchronous movement. Results showed significant differences in the inference of friendly/antagonistic atmosphere between coincident and incoincident synchronous movement. In addition, the inference of a friendly atmosphere was affected by the combination of forward tilt with incoincident movement, which may be interpreted as interaction between the shapes, such as responding or providing feedback. This suggests that individuals may infer a friendly/antagonistic communicative atmosphere from both coincident movement and incoincident movement interpreted as an interaction.

Visual Search for Wines with a Triangle on the Label in a Virtual Store

Two experiments were conducted in a virtual reality (VR) environment in order to investigate participants’ in-store visual search for bottles of wines displaying a prominent triangular shape on their label. The experimental task involved virtually moving along a wine aisle in a virtual supermarket while searching for the wine bottle on the shelf that had a different triangle on its label from the other bottles. The results of Experiment 1 revealed that the participants identified the bottle with a downward-pointing triangle on its label more rapidly than when looking for an upward-pointing triangle on the label instead. This finding replicates the downward-pointing triangle superiority (DPTS) effect, though the magnitude of this effect was more pronounced in the first as compared to the second half of the experiment, suggesting a modulating role of practice. The results of Experiment 2 revealed that the DPTS effect was also modulated by the location of the target on the shelf. Interestingly, however, the results of a follow-up survey demonstrate that the orientation of the triangle did not influence the participants’ evaluation of the wine bottles. Taken together, these findings reveal how in-store the attention of consumers might be influenced by the design elements in product packaging. These results therefore suggest that shopping in a virtual supermarket might offer a practical means of assessing the shelf standout of product packaging, which has important implications for food marketing.

Geometrical Factors in the Perception of Sacredness

Geometrical and environmental factors in the perception of sacredness, dominance, and attractiveness were assessed by 137 participants in five tests. In the first test, a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm was used to test the perception of sacredness, dominance, and attractiveness in geometrical figures differing in shape, verticality, size, and symmetry. Verticality, symmetry, and convexity were found to be important factors in the perception of sacredness. In the second test, participants had to mark the point inside geometrical surfaces that was perceived as most sacred, dominant, and attractive. The top and the center areas were associated with sacredness, dominance, and attractiveness. In the third test, peaks and elevated regions in landscapes were evaluated as more sacred, dominant, and attractive than valley regions. In the fourth test, three figures sharing the same area but differing in horizontal and vertical orientation were evaluated on eight scales. The vertical figure was evaluated as more sacred, dominant, and attractive than the horizontal figure. The fifth test demonstrated the significant role of space seclusion and inaccessibility in the perception of sacredness. Geometrical factors in the perception of sacredness, dominance, and attractiveness were largely overlapping.

Affective Priming by Simple Geometric Shapes: Evidence from Event-related Brain Potentials

Previous work has demonstrated that simple geometric shapes may convey emotional meaning using various experimental paradigms. However, whether affective meaning of simple geometric shapes can be automatically activated and influence the evaluations of subsequent stimulus is still unclear. Thus the present study employed an affective priming paradigm to investigate whether and how two geometric shapes (circle vs. downward triangle) impact on the affective processing of subsequently presented faces (Experiment 1) and words (Experiment 2). At behavioral level, no significant effect of affective congruency was found. However, ERP results in Experiment 1 and 2 showed a typical effect of affective congruency. The LPP elicited by affectively incongruent trials was larger compared to congruent trials. Our results provide support for the notion that downward triangle is perceived as negative and circle as positive and their emotional meaning can be activated automatically and then exert an influence on the electrophysiological processing of subsequent stimuli. The lack of significant congruent effect in behavioral measures and the inversed N400 congruent effect might reveal that the affective meaning of geometric shapes is weak because they are just abstract threatening cues rather than real threat. In addition, because no male participants are included in the present study, our findings are limited to females.

Combinative aspects of leadership style and emotional intelligence

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the leader’s emotional intelligence influences the leader’s preferences for different ways of combining leadership behaviors (i.e. combinative aspects of leadership style).

Design/methodology/approach

– The authors used a hybrid design to collect the data to avoid common-method biases. The authors described a high-stress workplace in a vignette and asked participants to rank four styles of combining a task-oriented leadership (i.e. Pressure) statement and a socio-emotional leadership (i.e. Support) statement. The authors then asked participants to complete a Likert-scale based questionnaire on emotional intelligence.

Findings

– The authors found that leaders who prefer to provide Support immediately before Pressure have higher levels of emotional intelligence than do leaders who prefer the three other combinative styles. Leaders who prefer to provide Pressure and Support separately (i.e. provide Pressure 30 minutes after Support) have the lowest levels of emotional intelligence.

Research limitations/implications

– A key implicit assumption in the work is that leaders do not want to evoke negative emotions in followers. The authors did not take into account factors that influence leadership style which participating managers would be likely to encounter on a daily basis such as the relationship with the follower, the follower’s level of performance and work experience, the gender of the leader and the gender of the follower, the hierarchical levels of the leader and follower, and the followers’ preferred combinative style. The nature of the sample and the use of a hypothetical scenario are other limitations of the study.

Practical implications

– Providing leadership behaviors that are regarded as effective is necessary but not enough because the emotional impact of leadership behaviors appears to also depend on how the behaviors are configured.

Originality/value

– This is the first study to show that the emotional intelligence of leaders is related to their preferences for the manner in which they combine task and social leadership statements. Furthermore, two-factor theories of leadership propose that the effects of task and social leadership are additive. However, the findings show that the effects are interactive.

Sensitivity to Spatiotemporal Percepts Predicts the Perception of Emotion

The present studies examined how sensitivity to spatiotemporal percepts such as rhythm, angularity, configuration, and force predicts accuracy in perceiving emotion. In Study 1, participants (N = 99) completed a nonverbal test battery consisting of three nonverbal emotion perception tests and two perceptual sensitivity tasks assessing rhythm sensitivity and angularity sensitivity. Study 2 (N = 101) extended the findings of Study 1 with the addition of a fourth nonverbal test, a third configural sensitivity task, and a fourth force sensitivity task. Regression analyses across both studies revealed partial support for the association between perceptual sensitivity to spatiotemporal percepts and greater emotion perception accuracy. Results indicate that accuracy in perceiving emotions may be predicted by sensitivity to specific percepts embedded within channel- and emotion-specific displays. The significance of such research lies in the understanding of how individuals acquire emotion perception skill and the processes by which distinct features of percepts are related to the perception of emotion.

Concept of Fuzzy Atmosfield for Representing Communication Atmosphere and its Application to Humans-Robots Interaction

The concept of Fuzzy Atmosfield (FA) is proposed to represent a communication atmosphere in society consisting of multiple individuals such as humans and/or robots, where the FA is characterized by 3D fuzzy cubic space with “Friendly-Hostile” (FH), “Lively-Calm” (LC), and “Casual-Formal” (CF) axes, and each state of the FA is visualized using shape-colorlength graphics. It is targeted to be a tool for identifying an atmosphere using quantitative analysis and graphical representation. By a humans-robots interaction experiment in which the FA is used to represent the real-time atmosphere created by four humans and five eye robots in a home party scenario, it shows that Pearson’s correlation coefficient values of 0.92, 0.86, and 0.72 for the FH, LC, and CF axes, respectively, indicate the correspondence between the proposed FA and results of questionnaires, and that subjective estimation of graphical representation of the FA achieves 84% accuracy for shape, 76% for color, and 58% for length. The FA is being extended to the representation of complex atmosphere generated by humans, robots, and background music, and part of results is also shown.

Emotional complexity and the neural representation of emotion in motion

According to theories of emotional complexity, individuals low in emotional complexity encode and represent emotions in visceral or action-oriented terms, whereas individuals high in emotional complexity encode and represent emotions in a differentiated way, using multiple emotion concepts. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants viewed valenced animated scenarios of simple ball-like figures attending either to social or spatial aspects of the interactions. Participant’s emotional complexity was assessed using the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale. We found a distributed set of brain regions previously implicated in processing emotion from facial, vocal and bodily cues, in processing social intentions, and in emotional response, were sensitive to emotion conveyed by motion alone. Attention to social meaning amplified the influence of emotion in a subset of these regions. Critically, increased emotional complexity correlated with enhanced processing in a left temporal polar region implicated in detailed semantic knowledge; with a diminished effect of social attention; and with increased differentiation of brain activity between films of differing valence. Decreased emotional complexity was associated with increased activity in regions of pre-motor cortex. Thus, neural coding of emotion in semantic vs action systems varies as a function of emotional complexity, helping reconcile puzzling inconsistencies in neuropsychological investigations of emotion recognition.

Perception of intentions and actions: gender stereotype susceptibility

Gender differences are evident in the comprehension of social signals, but the underlying basis for these differences is unclear. There is some indication that gender effects have neurobiological sources. Here we manipulated stereotype messages about gender differences in a social cognition task, on which no gender gap has previously been documented. The outcome indicates that manipulation of stereotype messages elicits gender effects. A positive message enhances performance, whereas a negative message diminishes it. Furthermore, this effect is more pronounced in females, with a greater force of a negative stereotype message. The study provides novel insights into the possible sources of gender related fluctuations in social cognition. The findings are discussed in terms of behavioral components and brain mechanisms underpinning gender effects in social cognition.

Can persons with schizophrenia appreciate visual art?

The way schizophrenia patients perceive the world is largely mysterious. Understanding and appreciating the visual world begins with the perception of basic visual features, which is altered in this mental disorder. Yet, the roles basic visual features play in functional activities such as appreciation of art are unclear. This study examined the effects of visual feature manipulation on beauty perception of art in schizophrenia patients (n=29) and in normal controls (n=30). Three pieces of art--The Starry Night (Van Gogh), Mona Lisa (Da Vinci) and a natural landscape photograph (anonymous)--were manipulated in terms of their coloration (removal of color), spatial frequency content (low or high-frequency pass) and visual noise level (with added noise). Subjects judged the beauty of the original and visual-feature-manipulated artworks by rating each piece individually (1 to 7) and by ranking all pieces from most to least beautiful. For the three original art pieces, averaged ratings and rankings were similar in patients and controls. However, when the visual features of the original pieces were manipulated, changes in the beauty ratings were significantly smaller in patients. The reduced sensitivity to visual feature manipulations suggests that the modulation of basic visual signals, often used for vivid and dynamic expressions in art, may be under-appreciated in schizophrenia.