Vocal threat enhances visual perception as a function of attention and sex

Schirmer, Annett; Wijaya, Maria; Wu, Esther; Penney, Trevor B.

doi:10.1093/scan/nsz044

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 54 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…Thus, subtle differences in how the pandemic was handled nationally as well as other interindividual variables could be relevant in modulating psychophysical responses to touch. Although, the present and previous research, in various cultures, has shown that the inverted u-shaped pleasantness is relatively stable on a group level (Croy et al, 2021; Cruciani et al, 2021; Schirmer et al, 2019), variables such as touch frequency, touch manners, or current ideology have been linked to the feelings elicited by touch (Sailer & Ackerley, 2019; Schirmer, Cham, et al, 2022; Sorokowska et al, 2021). Future research is required to understand whether and how these variables moderate the effect of velocity and other motion properties on the subjective evaluation of stroking touch.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 70%

Stroking trajectory shapes velocity effects on pleasantness and other touch percepts.

Schirmer¹,

Cham²,

Lai³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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Research has identified an inverted u-shaped relationship between the pleasantness of arm stroking and stroking velocity. However, the generalizability of this relationship is questionable as much of the work relied on the rotary tactile stimulator (RTS), which strokes skin with force varying along an arc and confounds stimulus velocity with duration. We explored how these parameters shape the subjective evaluation of touch. In Study 1, one group of participants was stroked by the RTS, while two other groups were stroked by a new robot capable of different stroking trajectories. Participants were stroked at five velocities and rated pleasantness, humanness, intensity, and roughness. In Study 2, participants were stroked by the new robot imitating the trajectory of the RTS exactly, imitating it while controlling stimulus duration, or moving linearly or ovally with both constant force and duration. Participants rated pleasantness and humanness. Although stroke velocity was related to both pleasantness and humanness in an inverted u-shaped manner, stimulus trajectory modulated this relationship and the association between velocity and the other ratings. Together, our results clearly link stroking velocity to the perception of touch but highlight that this relationship is shaped by other physical parameters including touch duration and spatial pattern. Public Significance StatementPsychophysical research has identified an inverted u-shaped relationship between a touch's velocity and subjective pleasantness, which has guided current thinking about the processing and benefits of a gentle caress. Here, we show that this relationship depends on aspects of the tactile stimulus that, so far, have been overlooked, including the duration of skin contact and the trajectory of the touch. We find that stroking duration and trajectory shape how stroke velocity modulates subjective pleasantness, humanness, intensity, and roughness. Thus, we identify a need for research to go beyond velocity and to consider other motion features of touch, especially those that approximate human social touch outside the laboratory.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 70%

Stroking trajectory shapes velocity effects on pleasantness and other touch percepts.

Schirmer¹,

Cham²,

Lai³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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“…Our sample contained mostly female participants, and generalizing our findings to males should be taken with care since previous work has suggested sex differences with respect to the processing of emotional information (for a review, see Kret and De Gelder, 2012 ). Regarding ERPs, women exhibit larger mid-latency modulations for emotional vocalizations ( Schirmer et al., 2019 ) and larger LPP responses to images conveying interpersonal touch in implicit tasks ( Schirmer and McGlone, 2019 ) and show task-modulated N170 emotion effects ( Valdés-Conroy et al., 2014 ). Furthermore, each emotional expression was repeated 6 times and each identity even 12 times in total.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

Schindler

Bruchmann

Steinweg

et al. 2020

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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The processing of fearful facial expressions is prioritized by the human brain. This priority is maintained across various information processing stages as evident in early, intermediate and late components of event-related brain potentials (ERP). However, emotional modulations are inconsistently reported for these different processing stages. In this preregistered study, we investigated how feature-based attention differentially affects ERPs to fearful and neutral faces in 40 participants. The tasks required participants to discriminate either the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the sex of the face, or the face’s emotional expression, increasing attention to emotion-related features. We found main effects of emotion for the N170, EPN and LPP. While N170 emotional modulations were task-independent, interactions of emotion and task were observed for the EPN and LPP. While EPN emotion effects were found in the sex and emotion tasks, the LPP emotion effect was mainly driven by the emotion task. This study shows that early responses to fearful faces are task-independent (N170) and likely based on low-level and configural information, while during later processing stages, attention to the face (EPN) or—more specifically—to the face’s emotional expression (LPP) is crucial for reliable amplified processing of emotional faces.

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“…Singapore has a dominantly Chinese population and uses English as its official language. The sample size for this study was based on prior research exploring individual differences in voice perception [6,47]. Participants of this study were Singaporean residents who PLOS ONE spoke English as their native language.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust

Schirmer

Chiu

et al. 2020

PLoS ONE

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This study examined how trustworthiness impressions depend on vocal expressive and person characteristics and how their dependence may be explained by acoustical profiles. Sentences spoken in a range of emotional and conversational expressions by 20 speakers differing in age and sex were presented to 80 age and sex matched listeners who rated speaker trustworthiness. Positive speaker valence but not arousal consistently predicted greater perceived trustworthiness. Additionally, voices from younger as compared with older and female as compared with male speakers were judged more trustworthy. Acoustic analysis highlighted several parameters as relevant for being perceived as trustworthy (i.e., accelerated tempo, low harmonic-to-noise ratio, more shimmer, low fundamental frequency, more jitter, large intensity range) and showed that effects partially overlapped with those for perceived speaker affect, age, but not sex. Specifically, a fast speech rate and a lower harmonic-to-noise ratio differentiated trustworthy from untrustworthy, positive from negative, and younger from older voices. Male and female voices differed in other ways. Together, these results show that a speaker's expressive as well as person characteristics shape trustworthiness impressions and that their effect likely results from a combination of lowlevel perceptual and higher-order conceptual processes.

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Vocal threat enhances visual perception as a function of attention and sex

Cited by 4 publications

References 54 publications

Stroking trajectory shapes velocity effects on pleasantness and other touch percepts.

Stroking trajectory shapes velocity effects on pleasantness and other touch percepts.

Attentional conditions differentially affect early, intermediate and late neural responses to fearful and neutral faces

Angry, old, male – and trustworthy? How expressive and person voice characteristics shape listener trust

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