Week 8 - Emotion and Accent Perception

How did Plato define emotion?

• Emotions are to be distrusted as they arise from the lower part of the mind.

• Emotions prevent rational thought

How did Darwin define emotion?

• Emotions can be recognised in other species.

• Have evolved to serve important function = survival and social bonding.

What are the basic components that define emotion?

1. Cognitive appraisal of arousing event

2. Physiological changes (e.g. HR, breathing)

3. Increased readiness to act

4. Subjective “sense of feeling”

What is the Circumplex Model (Russel, 1980)?

The Circumplex Model of Emotion (or Affect) proposes that all emotional states arise from just two core dimensions: valence (pleasantness vs. unpleasantness) and arousal (intensity/energy).

Emotions are mapped onto a circular (circumplex) space, where valence is the horizontal axis and arousal is the vertical axis, allowing any emotion to be described as a combination of these fundamental sensations, rather than discrete, separate emotions.

What are the main brain structures involved in emotion?

• Amygdala (yellow)

• Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (red)

• Somatosensory Cortex (green)

• Ventricles for orientation (blue)

• V1 and FFA / OFA

What is the course of emotion processing?

Emotional stimuli (like faces) follow a rapid, parallel pathway involving subcortical (amygdala, superior colliculus) and early cortical (striate cortex, fusiform face area) areas for quick threat detection, alongside slower pathways to prefrontal cortex (PFC) and somatosensory cortex for deeper, conscious evaluation and regulation, highlighting the amygdala's crucial role in fast emotional salience detection and the PFC's role in context and control, with distinct timing for different emotions like fear versus happiness.

What are two things that contribute to the ‘sound of emotion’?

1. Speech prosody

2. Vocal expression

   • Vocal modulations due to emotional arousal are easily and quickly picked up by listeners.

   • Hard to fake.

   • Important in understanding meaning in speech

   • Vocal emotional cues reflect communicative intentions.

   • Also a powerful “tool” in modifying meaning

     • Imagine this sentence said in a fearful, happy, sad tone:

     • “I will leave the room now but I’ll be back later”