Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Humans are social beings. As they communicate, they must decipher each other's emotion, in order to produce appropriate behaviors. It is thus crucial to understand how the brain processes emotional information. Despite the fact that environmental inputs are typically complex and coming from various sensory modalities, the existing theoretical models on emotion processing are based on works using isolated (i.e, without context) faces (i.e, in visual modality). There is now evidence that contextual cues, including other elements in the visual scene and information from other modalities influence the processing of emotional facial expressions. Yet, little is known on the brain processes involved in these influences and their automaticity. The goal of this program is thus to establish a generalized model of emotion processing, that integrates the influence of multisensory contextual information, while investigating the automaticity of these processes. To do so, we will study the effect of contextual cues and multimodal presentations in two lines of research. In the first line of research, we will analyze behavioral, cerebral (EEG) and physiological responses to emotional stimuli embedded in matched or mismatched environment. The participants will have to identify emotional content of ecological stimuli (body pictures and scenes) while we manipulate their attentional focus and conscious perception. The results will provide critical information on the time course of brain processes involved in congruency effects (i.e., facilitation of emotional processing when context is congruent) and the automaticity of these effects. The second line of research will investigate the integration of emotional audiovisual information and whether this integration is automatic. It has been shown in the visual modality, that the processing of an emotional prime modulates the emotional processing of a target. These effects are interpreted as reflecting long-term activation of emotional amodal concepts initiated by the prime. If this is correct, these effects should occur in other sensory modalities and in cross-modal experimental designs (from audition to vision and vice-versa). To test this prediction, we will develop new paradigms in order to study behavioral and cerebral priming effects on emotional sounds and in cross-modal experimental paradigms. We predict that congruency effects will persist cross-modally and regardless of attentional focus, which will support the existence of amodal representations of emotional concepts in the brain. Altogether, this project will provide insights into the temporal course of the brain processes involved in the integration of emotional information and contextual cues, and the automaticity of these processes. It will help to understand the emotional processes at large with a promising multimodal and multidimensional approach, and push further out understanding of multisensory integration and influences of contextual information.