Experiential Influences on Multimodal Perception of Emotion

Abstract

The impact of 2 types of learning experiences on children's perception of multimodal emotion cues was examined. Children (aged 7 -12 years) were presented with conflicting facial and vocal emotions. The effects of familiarity were tested by varying whether emotions were presented by familiar or unfamiliar adults. The salience of particular emotional expressions was tested by contrasting the performance of physically abused and nonabused children. Children exhibited a preference for auditory expressions produced by their mothers but not by strangers. Additionally, abused children were biased to rely on auditory cues when their own abusive mother was expressing anger. These results are discussed in terms of the impact of both typical and atypical early experiences on the development of emotion perception.

Recognition and Understanding of Emotions in Persons with Mild to Moderate Mental Retardation

“…or the emotion was more difficult to identify (anger, fear), subjects with mental retardation performed less well than normal children [9]. Listeners were accurately able to identify sadness, anger and fear based upon prosody which included both rhythmic and intonational aspects of human speech when listening to semantically neutral sentences [18]; [4].…”

“…Integration involves the combination of the degree to which each source supports a given alternative (e.g., happy, sad, angry). A decision is made based on the amount of support for each alternative [4]. According to [20] most individuals show perceptual and attention biases toward visual stimuli which may explain why subjects with mental retardation have difficulties on tasks using two modalities, but perform better in the video and audio-visual tasks, than they did on other tasks; pictures, comics and audio task.…”

“…Familiar and meaningful stimuli may take precedence for perceptual processing over those stimuli that are less meaningful. Thus research that employs standardized expressions of emotions may not capture some of the processes linking emotional experience to perception and behaviour [4]. Processes involved in perceiving and understanding specific aspects of the particular stimuli, may determine performance and these capacities may have more to do with aspects of intelligence than emotion recognition capacities.…”

“…Even body movement and positioning can convey a certain amount of emotion information. Emotional information is thus conveyed in the form of linguistic (semantic content of spoken language) and paralinguistic (facial expressions, vocal prosody, physical gestures and body postures) cues [4]. Recognition of emotion allows individuals to make quick inferences about the probable intentions and behavior of others.…”

The effects of exposure to dynamic expressions of affect on 5-month-olds’ memory

“…Thus, like adults, children show reliable and robust memory for positive and negative emotional events (Hudson & Fivush, 1991;Ornstein, 1995). More broadly, research also reveals that emotional abuse and neglect have profound effects on children's recognition of affect, their development of memory, and their broader cognitive development (e.g., Pollak, Cicchetti, Hornung, & Reed, 2000;Pollak, Messner, Kistler, & Cohn, 2009;Shackman & Pollak, 2005). Finally, research also demonstrates that infants raised by a mother with depression show impaired memory, impaired associative learning, and delayed cognitive development (e.g., Kaplan, Burgess, Sliter, & Moreno, 2009;Kaplan, Danko, Diaz, & Kalinka, 2011).…”