Modulation of spontaneous emotional facial expressions during modality-specific emotion processing: A simultaneous EEG and EMG study
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1
University of Newcastle, School of Psychology, Australia
The ability to spontaneously mimic emotional facial expressions in social situations is critical for healthy social integration. Impairments in this ability are thought to contribute to the social dysfunction typically seen in several psychopathological disorders. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this ability are still not known. Recent findings have shown that patterns of mimicry are highly inconsistent across healthy individuals and situations, suggesting that the embodiment of emotion, such as through facial expressions, extends far beyond mimicry and social understanding. Therefore, our research is based on a more global approach to understanding these neural mechanisms. In studies already carried out, EEG activity was recorded simultaneously with facial muscle activity during various emotion-eliciting situations including interpersonal facial mimicry and intrapersonal emotional experiences. In addition, we compared these perceptual conditions across three emotion recognition tasks in a paradigm that permitted analyses of whether emotion embodiment is differently influenced by modality-specific emotion perception. Specifically, these tasks focused on emotion embodiment as a function of language-anchored emotion knowledge, and as a function of purely sensory emotion knowledge. Preliminary results from these studies suggest that the modality facilitating emotion processing can influence the degree of respective facial muscle activity, and that these effects are observable within the EEG data. These findings are discussed in terms of ‘perceptual effort’, and whether the recruitment of higher cognitive processing modalities may demand increased embodiment such as through facial expressions, including facial mimicry.
Keywords:
Electroencephalography,
Electromyography,
Facial mimicry,
Emotion Perception,
emotion recognition,
Faces and Scenes
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Emotion and Social
Citation:
Mavratzakis
AL and
Walla
P
(2012). Modulation of spontaneous emotional facial expressions during modality-specific emotion processing: A simultaneous EEG and EMG study.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00066
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Received:
25 Oct 2012;
Published Online:
07 Nov 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Ms. Aimee L Mavratzakis, University of Newcastle, School of Psychology, Newcastle, Australia, Aimee.Mavratzakis@uon.edu.au