Atypical Minds: the Cognitive Science of Difference and Potentialities
Cognitio 2015
Young researchers conference in cognitive science
Montréal, June 8th, 9th and 10th 2015
The influence of context on ambiguous emotion perception
Priscille-Nice Sanon, Lena Xy Gu, Daina Crafa & Mathieu Brodeur.
Background: Interpreting others' emotions depends largely on the context in which these emotions appear - a laugh can be happy or sarcastic depending on the circumstances. Context can be particularly important when emotions are difficult to decode or ambiguous. In this project, we seek to understand how the information in a scene is used to interpret the emotions of others. Previous EEG studies have established paradigms for studying the effect of context on object identification. Using a similar experimental design, this study evaluates the event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain when social context influences the perception of emotions. We hypothesize that context modulates emotion recognition, and that ERPs measured by the EEG will exhibit significantly greater amplitudes when viewing ambiguous emotions and smaller amplitudes when viewing an unambiguous emotion.
Methods: We are presently recruiting 20 participants (10 Anglo, 10 French) to identify emotions of individuals depicted within scenes displaying either ambiguous or unambiguous emotions; this poster reports the results of our preliminary analyses (N=6). While the participants viewed these images, we recorded the brain activity of each participant (EEG) as they indicated via button press whether each emotion was positive or negative.
Results: Social context modulated neural processes when viewing ambiguous but not unambiguous emotions around 300-1000 ms. Amplitudes were more negative in the posterior region and more positive in the frontal region for ambiguous emotions compared with unambiguous emotions. In contrast, both ambiguous and unambiguous emotions elicited similar results when presented in context.
Discussion: Accordingly, our preliminary results suggest that brain processing of ambiguous emotions is modulated by contextual information, in contrast with unambiguous emotions which are not affected. The timing of this modulation echoes previous research on recognition of ambiguous objects; however, we found that social context effect is more frontally distributed compared to previous studies examining the context effect on ambiguous objects. Future studies will investigate differences in interpretation of ambiguous emotions in patients, such as those with schizophrenia, who have difficulty interpreting social information.