Emotional sounds modulate early neural processing of emotional pictures

Abstract

In our natural environment, emotional information is conveyed by converging visual and auditory information; multimodal integration is of utmost importance. In the laboratory, however, emotion researchers have mostly focused on the examination of unimodal stimuli. Few existing studies on multimodal emotion processing have focused on human communication such as the integration of facial and vocal expressions. Extending the concept of multimodality, the current study examines how the neural processing of emotional pictures is influenced by simultaneously presented sounds. Twenty pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures of complex scenes were presented to 22 healthy participants. On the critical trials these pictures were paired with pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral sounds. Sound presentation started 500 ms before picture onset and each stimulus presentation lasted for 2 s. EEG was recorded from 64 channels and ERP analyses focused on the picture onset. In addition, valence and arousal ratings were obtained. Previous findings for the neural processing of emotional pictures were replicated. Specifically, unpleasant compared to neutral pictures were associated with an increased parietal P200 and a more pronounced centroparietal late positive potential (LPP), independent of the accompanying sound valence. For audiovisual stimulation, increased parietal P100 and P200 were found in response to all pictures which were accompanied by unpleasant or pleasant sounds compared to pictures with neutral sounds. Most importantly, incongruent audiovisual pairs of unpleasant pictures and pleasant sounds enhanced parietal P100 and P200 compared to pairings with congruent sounds. Taken together, the present findings indicate that emotional sounds modulate early stages of visual processing and, therefore, provide an avenue by which multimodal experience may enhance perception.

Affective responses to emotional words are boosted in communicative situations

“…Indeed, some evidence suggests that the processing of non-verbal emotional auditory stimuli can enhance early visual processing in the form of enhanced amplitudes in the P1 component (e.g. Brosch et al, 2009;Gerdes et al, 2013). Similar to affective prosody, affective semantics may increase the salience of the emotional stimuli and elicit an analogous longer lasting posterior ERP effect in the P1 range.…”

“…de Gelder and Vroomen, 2000) already during early perceptual processing stages (e.g. de Gelder et al, 1999;Gerdes et al, 2013;Pourtois et al, 2000Pourtois et al, , 2002Stekelenburg and Vroomen, 2007) probably involving specialized structures (e.g. de Gelder and Van den Stock, 2011), while incongruent audiovisual input can even lead to perceptual illusions (cf.…”

Event-related potential signatures of perceived and imagined emotional and food real-life photos

“…This area of research is only now emerging (e.g. [83,84]) and the NeCoPES model may offer some initial neurocognitive insights.…”

Neural processing of emotion in multimodal settings

“…Watson et al (2013) showed that audiovisual integration areas of the superior temporal cortex are sensitive to emotional congruency: Conflicting affective information enhanced activity in these sensory integration areas. Stronger cortical processing of incongruent emotional stimuli was also reported by Gerdes et al (2013). They found enlarged P100 and P200 components for conflicting emotional information.…”

“…In a similar way, auditory emotional cues can enhance early cortical processing of visual stimuli. Gerdes et al (2013) found an amplitude modulation of early visual P100 and P200 components when pictures were accompanied by emotional sounds. Emotional "crosstalk" between early auditory and visual areas thus seems to exist in both directions.…”