For us humans, voices and faces are important sources of social and emotional information. Their perception is also influenced by situational factors and the content associated with them. Psychologists Dr Annika Ziereis and Prof Dr Anne Schacht from the University of Göttingen have investigated how learned emotional context stimuli influence the perception of faces at different processing levels. Their research findings were honoured with the ‘Best Article Award’ of the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New York City on 23 November 2024.

Göttingen, November, 29th, 2024 ‘Various findings indicate that we can automatically integrate and process such emotional aspects. Our results also show relatively early emotion effects in neuronal face processing for negative stimuli – regardless of which task the participants were working on in the experiment,’ explains Schacht, Head of the Department of Cognition, Emotion and Behaviour at the Georg Elias Müller Institute of Psychology at the University of Göttingen.

The participants first studied various faces and voices with negative, positive and neutral expressions on the computer at home and learnt to correctly assign the pairs to each other. The researchers then tested the associations learnt by the participants in the laboratory with two tasks. The use of neurophysiological EEG measurement methods enabled a detailed investigation of the temporal dynamics of these processes.

‘We can show that attention plays a special role in a later processing phase,’ says first author Ziereis. ‘When participants were asked to categorise the associated faces as positive, negative or neutral, the associated emotional effects lasted longer and could also be recognised for positive stimuli.’ The findings make an important contribution to understanding the neural basis of emotional face processing and the role of motivational attention in this process.

More than 2700 researchers from over 40 countries took part in the Psychonomic Society’s 65th Annual Meeting 2024. The annual meeting is one of the most important international meetings in cognitive science and psychology. The research took place as part of Ziereis‘ doctorate in the Research Training Group “Understanding Social Relationships”. Further information can be found on the Internet at www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/de/anap/forschung and www.uni-goettingen.de/de/509586.html.

Translated together with Deepl_com

Originalpublication:

Ziereis, A. & Schacht, A. (2023). Motivated attention and task relevance in the processing of cross-modally associated faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci, 23, 1244–1266. (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-023-01112-5)

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