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Emotional Actions Are Coded via Two Mechanisms: With and without Identity Representation

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Joanna Wincenciak

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).


Abstract

Accurate perception of an individual's identity and emotion derived from their actions and behavior is essential for successful social functioning. Here we determined the role of identity in the representation of emotional whole-body actions using visual adaptation paradigms. Participants adapted to actors performing different whole-body actions in a happy and sad fashion. Following adaptation subsequent neutral actions appeared to convey the opposite emotion. We demonstrate two different emotional action aftereffects showing distinctive adaptation characteristics. For one short-lived aftereffect, adaptation to the emotion expressed by an individual resulted in biases in the perception of the expression of emotion by other individuals, indicating an identity-independent representation of emotional actions. A second, longer lasting, aftereffect was observed where adaptation to the emotion expressed by an individual resulted in longer-term biases in the perception of the expressions of emotion only by the same individual; this indicated an additional identity-dependent representation of emotional actions. Together, the presence of these two aftereffects indicates the existence of two mechanisms for coding emotional actions, only one of which takes into account the actor's identity. The results that we observe might parallel processing of emotion from face and voice.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Wincenciak J, Ingham J, Jellema T, Barraclough NE

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Frontiers in Psychology

Year: 2016

Volume: 7

Online publication date: 11/05/2016

Acceptance date: 25/04/2016

Date deposited: 16/05/2016

ISSN (electronic): 1664-1078

Publisher: Frontiers Research Foundation

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00693

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00693


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Funding

Funder referenceFunder name
University of Hull
RES-062-23-2797Economic and Social Research Council

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