Individual Differences in Laughter Perception Reveal Roles for Mentalizing and Sensorimotor Systems in the Evaluation of Emotional Authenticity

McGettigan, Carolyn; Walsh, Eamonn; Jessop, Rosemary; Agnew, Zarinah K.; Sauter, Disa; Warren, Jane E.; Scott, Sophie K.

doi:10.1093/cercor/bht227

Cited by 116 publications

(288 citation statements)

References 51 publications

(77 reference statements)

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“…This suggests that a perceptionto-action pathway contributes to understanding vocalizations. McGettigan et al (2013) provided support for this hypothesis by showing a behavioral benefit (enhanced accuracy in authenticity detection) associated with functional responses within sensorimotor sites, possibly reflecting simulation of actions involved in the production of emotional sounds. Considering Bestelmeyer et al's (2014) task, one can speculate that sensorimotor responses reflect participants' effort to categorize ambiguous stimuli.…”

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…Like Bestelmeyer et al (2014), McGettigan et al (2013) report medial prefrontal responses in a study on authenticity perception in laughter. During passive listening, these sites responded more strongly to voluntary social-type laughter than to genuine amusement laughter.…”

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Warren et al (2006) reported activations in the same systems during passive listening of nonverbal vocalizations and also during the execution of facial movement, i.e., they are part of an auditory-motor mirror network. This suggests that a perceptionto-action pathway contributes to understanding vocalizations.…”

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Previously, medial prefrontal cortex was linked to person perception and attribution of mental states (mentalizing; Amodio and Frith, 2006). Because participants did not perform any task, McGettigan et al's (2013) findings cannot be attributed to task difficulty or motor responses. Thus, the new results of Bestelmeyer et al (2014), combined with previous findings, suggest that mentalizing systems are part of the network involved in perceiving vocalizations, highlighting the social nature of these signals (Brück et al, 2011).…”

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the new results of Bestelmeyer et al (2014), combined with previous findings, suggest that mentalizing systems are part of the network involved in perceiving vocalizations, highlighting the social nature of these signals (Brück et al, 2011). Mentalizing may provide a mechanism for (1) resolving ambiguity-stimulusdriven ambiguity in the case of morphed vocalizations, and socially driven ambiguity in the case of different types of laughter; and (2) making socio-emotional inferences of varying complexity: basic emotion categories (Bestelmeyer et al, 2014) and nuanced within-category distinctions (McGettigan et al, 2013).…”

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neurocognitive Mechanisms for Vocal Emotions: Sounds, Meaning, Action

Lavan

Lima

2014

J. Neurosci.

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Review of Bestelmeyer et al.Humans express emotions in many different ways. Facial expressions, body postures, or vocal cues, for instance, communicate a wealth of information about others' emotional states. While the adaptive significance of these multiple cues has long been acknowledged (Darwin, 1872(Darwin, /2009), facial expressions have historically received more research attention than expressions via other channels. The interest in vocal emotions is increasing, but mostly focused on speech prosody, i.e., voice modulations in speech. Vocal communication does, however, additionally encompass diverse nonverbal vocalizations, such as laughter, sobs, or screams. Accounting for these signals is crucial for a complete understanding of vocal emotions.In a recent study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, Bestelmeyer et al. (2014) provide new knowledge on this issue by demonstrating that nonspeech vocalizations are processed in multiple steps involving distinct brain networks: bilateral auditory cortices responded to vocalizations' low-level acoustic features, and a wider network including the anterior insulae and prefrontal systems processed higher-order evaluative aspects. While current models of vocal affect perception predict such a multistep processing of vocal emotions (Schirmer and Kotz, 2006; Brück et al., 2011), empirical evidence for this has been relatively sparse and limited to speech prosody. These new findings thus form an important contribution to the field. Multiple steps in the processing of vocal emotionsThe findings of Bestelmeyer et al. (2014) are based on a forced-choice emotion categorization task of vocalizations that were morphed on continua between anger and fear. The task was performed by 19 participants in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, using a continuous carry-over design (Aguirre, 2007) to examine how neural responses to a given vocalization were modulated by the features of the previously presented one: attenuated responses were expected when the preceding vocalization shared a dimension of interest (acoustic features, perceptual/evaluative aspects) versus when it differed (adaptation or "carry-over" effects). The experiment included six different sequences of 65 stimuli, each including eight items consisting of seven morph steps of a continuum between anger and fear, and a silent null event (the first item was repeated nine times per sequence, and the remaining ones were repeated eight times; a given item was preceded and followed by every other items an equal number of times). The authors build upon previous behavioral evidence of auditory aftereffects for vocal expressions, which are suggestive of neural adaptation phenomena for vocal emotion categories (Bestelmeyer et al., 2010).To separate low-level acoustic from higher-order evaluative processes, an index of "physical difference" was computed based on the absolute difference in morph steps between each vocalization and the preceding one. An index of "perceptual difference" was also computed, corresponding to t...

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Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Multiple Steps In the Processing Of Vocal Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Neurocognitive Mechanisms for Vocal Emotions: Sounds, Meaning, Action

Lavan

Lima

2014

J. Neurosci.

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Laughter as a scientific problem: An adventure in sidewalk neuroscience

Provine

2015

J of Comparative Neurology

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Laughter is a stereotyped, innate, human play vocalization that provides an ideal simple system for neurobehavioral analyses of the sort usually associated with such animal models as walking, wing-flapping, and bird song. Laughter research is in its early stages, where the frontiers are near and accessible to simple observational procedures termed "sidewalk neuroscience." The basic, nontechnical approach of describing the act of laughter and when humans do it has revealed a variety of phenomena of social and neurological significance. Findings include the acoustic structure of laughter, the minimal voluntary control of laughter, contagiousness, the "punctuation effect" that describes the placement of laughter in conversation, the dominance of speech over laughter, the role of breath control in the evolution of speech, the evolutionary trajectory of laughter in primates, and the role of laughter in human matching and mating. If one knows where to look and how to see, advances in neuroscience are accessible to anyone and require minimal resources.

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Insular cortex activity and the evocation of laughter

Wattendorf

Westermann

Lotze

et al. 2015

J of Comparative Neurology

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The insular cortex is fundamentally involved in the processing of interoceptive information. It has been postulated that the integrative monitoring of the bodily responses to environmental stimuli is crucial for the recognition and experience of emotions. Because emotional arousal is known to be closely coupled to functions of the anterior insula, we suspected laughter to be associated primarily with neuronal activity in this region. An anatomically constrained re-analysis of our imaging data pertaining to ticklish laughter, to inhibited ticklish laughter, and to voluntary laughter revealed regional differences in the levels of neuronal activity in the posterior and mid-/anterior portions of the insula. Ticklish laughter was associated specifically with right ventral anterior insular activity, which was not detected under the other two conditions. Hence, apparently, only laughter that is evoked as an emotional response bears the signature of autonomic arousal in the insular cortex.

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Individual Differences in Laughter Perception Reveal Roles for Mentalizing and Sensorimotor Systems in the Evaluation of Emotional Authenticity

Cited by 116 publications

References 51 publications

Neurocognitive Mechanisms for Vocal Emotions: Sounds, Meaning, Action

Neurocognitive Mechanisms for Vocal Emotions: Sounds, Meaning, Action

Laughter as a scientific problem: An adventure in sidewalk neuroscience

Insular cortex activity and the evocation of laughter

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