Affective scenes influence fear perception of individual body expressions

Abstract

In natural viewing conditions, different stimulus categories such as people, objects, and natural scenes carry relevant affective information that is usually processed simultaneously. But these different signals may not always have the same affective meaning. Using body-scene compound stimuli, we investigated how the brain processes fearful signals conveyed by either a body in the foreground or scenes in the background and the interaction between foreground body and background scene. The results showed that left and right extrastriate body areas (EBA) responded more to fearful than to neutral bodies. More interestingly, a threatening background scene compared to a neutral one showed increased activity in bilateral EBA and right-posterior parahippocampal place area (PPA) and decreased activity in right retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and left-anterior PPA. The emotional scene effect in EBA was only present when the foreground body was neutral and not when the body posture expressed fear (significant emotion-by-category interaction effect), consistent with behavioral ratings. The results provide evidence for emotional influence of the background scene on the processing of body expressions.

The role of the basolateral amygdala in the perception of faces in natural contexts

“…For example, two previous studies by Van den Stock et al [2,6] increased activation in the EBA for threatening compared with neutral scenes, but found no activation of dorsal stream regions. The increased activation in the EBA has been interpreted as enhanced ambiguity reduction due to a crosscategorical bias between emotional expression and scenes [2]. Interestingly, we did not observe that activity in the EBA or in the PPA was changed in the BLA damage group compared with the control group for threatening versus neutral scenes.…”

“…B 371: 20150376 Second, at the group level, a random-effects GLM was performed. We first assessed general categorical task effects to validate and compare the current dataset with the two previous studies by Van den Stock et al [2,6] that used the same task design in healthy students. We used the two main categorical contrasts to map functional activation for the two groups combined by contrasting faces versus control shapes, and scenes versus scrambled scenes.…”

“…Recent evidence indicates that the natural context plays an important role in determining how facial and also bodily expressions of emotion are processed and reacted to [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. A facial expression is recognized faster when presented in a congruent emotional background (for example, a fearful face in a threatening context) [9].…”

“…The N170, an event-related potential that is linked to the first stages of face processing, shows an increase or decrease in amplitude depending on the context [3,8]. The few studies that have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the effect of affective context information on one or another stimulus category (faces, bodies, scenes) reported that the presence of affective information influences activity in the relevant category representation in the ventral stream, that is in the fusiform face area (FFA), the extrastriate body area (EBA), and the parahippocampal place area (PPA) [2,6,7]. The standard view is that the amygdala (AMG) is the central structure in orchestrating such up or down modulation [10,13,14].…”

Visual imagery influences brain responses to visual stimulation in bilateral cortical blindness

“…There is accumulating evidence that cortically blind patients are able to process stimulus features like affective or social valence in the absence of conscious awareness of the stimuli (Buetti et al, 2013;Burra et al, 2013;de Gelder et al, 2008;Pegna, Khateb, Lazeyras, & Seghier, 2005, Pegna, Landis, & Khateb, 2008Tamietto & de Gelder, 2010;Van den Stock, Tamietto, Hervais-Adelman, Pegna, & de Gelder, in press;Van den Stock et al, 2011;Van den Stock, Tamietto, Zhan, et al, 2014). We presented patient TN, the only available case in the literature with bilateral cortical blindness and "blindsight" (i.e., the ability to process stimulus features in the absence of conscious awareness), with intact and scrambled affective faces and scenes that where shown simultaneously with specific visual imagery instructions.…”