Angry and happy expressions affect forward gait initiation only when task relevant.

Mirabella, Giovanni; Grassi, Michele; Mezzarobba, Susanna; Bernardis, P. de

doi:10.1037/emo0001112

Cited by 35 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Direct evidence about the effect of task relevance on motor responses elicited by body postures is very scarce and provides contrasting results. Differently, recent research on facial expressions (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al, 2020Mancini et al, , 2022Mirabella et al, 2022) showed that all aspects of motor control, i.e., planning, execution, and inhibition, are affected by emotions only when participants have to pay attention to such stimuli features. However, as both faces and bodies are potent conveyors of emotional signals, it is crucial to assess whether this phenomenon can be generalized to emotional body postures or, conversely, it is restricted to emotional facial expressions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

et al. 2022

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A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures (fearful or happy) and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors (instances in which they moved even though the No-go signal was presented) for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

et al. 2022

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“…Moreover, Williams et al (2020) found better action control only in older adults and when emotions were task-relevant, as in the findings of Nayak et al (2019). In line with these results, in a series of go-nogo studies, Mirabella and colleagues showed that emotional facial expressions affect motor control only when task relevant, i.e., when participants needed to pay attention to the emotional content of the stimuli valence to give a correct response (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al, 2020Mancini et al, , 2022Mirabella et al, 2022). Therefore, it seems that several variables determine the results, such as whether the emotional stimuli have a beneficial or a detrimental effect and whether positive and negative emotions have a similar effect on action control.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 54%

Stopping in (e)motion: Reactive action inhibition when facing valence-independent emotional stimuli

Battaglia

Cardellicchio

Fazio

et al. 2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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Emotions are able to impact our ability to control our behaviors. However, it is not clear whether emotions play a detrimental or an advantageous effect on action control and whether the valence of the emotional stimuli differently affects such motor abilities. One way to measure reactive inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which estimates the ability to cancel outright a response to the presentation of a stop signal by means of the stop signal reaction times (SSRT). Impaired as well as facilitated action control has been found when faced with emotional stimuli such as stop signals in SSTs and mixed results were observed for positive versus negative stimuli. Here, we aimed to investigate these unresolved issues more deeply. Action control capabilities were tested in 60 participants by means of a SST, in which the stop signals were represented by a fearful and a happy body posture together with their neutral counterpart. Results showed that both positive and negative body postures enhanced the ability to suppress an ongoing action compared to neutral body postures. These results demonstrate that emotional valence-independent emotional stimuli facilitate action control and suggest that emotional stimuli may trigger increased sensory representation and/or attentional processing that may have promote stop-signal processing and hence improved inhibitory performance.

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“…Negative facial expressions can draw attentional resources more efficiently than happy facial expressions, allowing people to quickly detect potential threats ( Vuilleumier and Huang, 2009 ). However, as hypervigilance toward negative faces makes it difficult to divert attention, motor responses are slower ( Mirabella, 2018 ; Mancini et al, 2020 , 2022 ; Mirabella et al, 2022 ). In our study, the facial stimuli to recognize were always task-relevant, and the BAP group also showed that happy emotions elicited faster responses than fear and sad emotions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Diminished ability to integrate target stimuli with context during emotional recognition in individuals with broad autism phenotype

Cha

Lee

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP) have a tendency not to integrate emotional stimuli with the surrounding context. They have also shown different patterns and abilities in processing positive and negative emotions. This study aimed to examine whether the effect of context on target stimuli could vary depending on the type of target emotion in individuals with BAP. Based on the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) and Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), 36 individuals with BAP and 33 healthy controls were selected. All the participants performed an overlap-emotional task consisting of six conditions: 2 (congruence: congruent and incongruent) × 3 (emotion: fearful, sad, and happy). Reaction time and accuracy were measured as dependent variables. The results revealed that the individuals with BAP showed no difference in reaction time between the condition of congruence and incongruence, but that the control group was faster to categorize facial expression on the condition of congruence than that of incongruence regardless of the type of target emotion. There were no differences between the two groups in any of the conditions with regard to accuracy. These findings indicate that individuals with BAP tend not to integrate target emotions with contextual information, a feature that could worsen the speed of emotional recognition in individuals with BAP. This study confirmed that the individuals with BAP have different cognition patterns in emotional recognition than the control group.

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Angry and happy expressions affect forward gait initiation only when task relevant.

Cited by 35 publications

References 44 publications

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

Stopping in (e)motion: Reactive action inhibition when facing valence-independent emotional stimuli

Diminished ability to integrate target stimuli with context during emotional recognition in individuals with broad autism phenotype

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