A crowd of emotional voices influences the perception of emotional faces: Using adaptation, stimulus salience, and atten
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A crowd of emotional voices influences the perception of emotional faces: Using adaptation, stimulus salience, and attention to probe audio-visual interactions for emotional stimuli Sarah C. Izen 1 & Vivian M. Ciaramitaro 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Correctly assessing the emotional state of others is a crucial part of social interaction. While facial expressions provide much information, faces are often not viewed in isolation, but occur with concurrent sounds, usually voices, which also provide information about the emotion being portrayed. Many studies have examined the crossmodal processing of faces and sounds, but results have been mixed, with different paradigms yielding different results. Using a psychophysical adaptation paradigm, we carried out a series of four experiments to determine whether there is a perceptual advantage when faces and voices match in emotion (congruent), versus when they do not match (incongruent). We presented a single face and a crowd of voices, a crowd of faces and a crowd of voices, a single face of reduced salience and a crowd of voices, and tested this last condition with and without attention directed to the emotion in the face. While we observed aftereffects in the hypothesized direction (adaptation to faces conveying positive emotion yielded negative, contrastive, perceptual aftereffects), we only found a congruent advantage (stronger adaptation effects) when faces were attended and of reduced salience, in line with the theory of inverse effectiveness. Keywords Multisensory emotional processing . Principle of inverse effectiveness . Visual salience . Crossmodal
The expression of emotions is inherently multimodal (Robins, Hunyadi, & Schultz, 2009), with emotional information conveyed via faces, voices, odors, touch, and body posture or movement (Bestelmeyer, Maurage, Rouger, Latinus, & Belin, 2014; Herz, McCall, & Cahill, 1999; Niedenthal,
Public significance statement This study highlights how the processing of emotional information in a face is influenced by concurrent emotional information in a different sense. We found that faces and sounds of matched emotional valence yield a perceptual benefit compared with faces and sounds that do not match, but only when faces are reduced in salience, and when the emotion of the face is attended. This extends basic principles of multisensory interactions, the principles of inverse effectiveness, to static emotional stimuli and highlights the importance of considering stimulus salience and attention in the study of emotional processing across the senses. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02104-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Vivian M. Ciaramitaro [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Developmental and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, McCormack, M-04-212, Boston, MA 02125, USA
2007; Zald & Pardo, 1997). Our ability to extract a person’s
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