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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Emotion Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1386676
This article is part of the Research Topic How Do Affective Stimuli Impact Actions? Unveiling the Relationship Between Emotional Stimuli and Motor Behavior View all 3 articles

Perception and discrimination of real-life emotional vocalizations in early blind individuals

Provisionally accepted
Chiara Ferrari Chiara Ferrari 1Maria Arioli Maria Arioli 2*Doron Atias Doron Atias 3Lotfi B. Merabet Lotfi B. Merabet 4Zaira Cattaneo Zaira Cattaneo 2
  • 1 University of Pavia, Pavia, Lombardy, Italy
  • 2 University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy
  • 3 Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
  • 4 Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The capacity to understand others' emotions and react accordingly is a key social ability.However, it may be compromised in case of a profound sensory loss that limits the contribution of available contextual cues (e.g. facial expression, gestures, body posture) to interpret emotions expressed by others. In this study, we specifically investigated whether early blindness affects the capacity to interpret emotional vocalizations, whose valence may be difficult to recognize without a meaningful context. Specifically, we asked a group of early blind (N=22) and sighted controls (N=22) to evaluate the valence and the intensity of spontaneous fearful and joyful nonverbal vocalizations. Our data showed that emotional vocalizations presented alone (i.e., with no contextual information) are similarly ambiguous for blind and sighted individuals but are perceived as more intense by the former possibly reflecting their higher saliency when visual experience is unavailable. Our study contributes to a better understanding of how sensory experience shapes emotion recognition.

    Keywords: Intense emotions, real-life vocalizations, Blindness, compensatory mechanisms, Arousal

    Received: 15 Feb 2024; Accepted: 16 Apr 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Ferrari, Arioli, Atias, Merabet and Cattaneo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Maria Arioli, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy

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