Processing of subliminal facial expressions of emotion: A behavioral and fMRI study

Prochnow, Denise; Kossack, Hannes; Brunheim, Sascha; Müller, Katharina; Wittsack, Hans‐Jörg; Markowitsch, Hans J.; Seitz, Rüdiger J.

doi:10.1080/17470919.2013.812536

Cited by 45 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Although mood decline is likely to occur in response to mild stressors during sleep debt [42], sleep deprivation was reported to increase sensitivity to pleasurable experiences by lowering the threshold value in a task judging valence of pleasure-evoking pictures [43]. A change in nonconscious emotion processing can influence one’s conscious state, such as mood, feeling or emotional evaluation [44, 45]. Previous studies using nonconscious emotional stimuli have indicated that subjects can be unaware of their own emotional responses [11, 46].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sleepiness induced by sleep-debt enhanced amygdala activity for subliminal signals of fear

et al. 2014

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BackgroundEmotional information is frequently processed below the level of consciousness, where subcortical regions of the brain are thought to play an important role. In the absence of conscious visual experience, patients with visual cortex damage discriminate the valence of emotional expression. Even in healthy individuals, a subliminal mechanism can be utilized to compensate for a functional decline in visual cognition of various causes such as strong sleepiness. In this study, sleep deprivation was simulated in healthy individuals to investigate functional alterations in the subliminal processing of emotional information caused by reduced conscious visual cognition and attention due to an increase in subjective sleepiness. Fourteen healthy adult men participated in a within-subject crossover study consisting of a 5-day session of sleep debt (SD, 4-h sleep) and a 5-day session of sleep control (SC, 8-h sleep). On the last day of each session, participants performed an emotional face-viewing task that included backward masking of nonconscious presentations during magnetic resonance scanning.ResultsFinally, data from eleven participants who were unaware of nonconscious face presentations were analyzed. In fear contrasts, subjective sleepiness was significantly positively correlated with activity in the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and insular cortex, and was significantly negatively correlated with the secondary and tertiary visual areas and the fusiform face area. In fear-neutral contrasts, subjective sleepiness was significantly positively correlated with activity of the bilateral amygdala. Further, changes in subjective sleepiness (the difference between the SC and SD sessions) were correlated with both changes in amygdala activity and functional connectivity between the amygdala and superior colliculus in response to subliminal fearful faces.ConclusionSleepiness induced functional decline in the brain areas involved in conscious visual cognition of facial expressions, but also enhanced subliminal emotional processing via superior colliculus as represented by activity in the amygdala. These findings suggest that an evolutionally old and auxiliary subliminal hazard perception system is activated as a compensatory mechanism when conscious visual cognition is impaired. In addition, enhancement of subliminal emotional processing might cause involuntary emotional instability during sleep debt through changes in emotional response to or emotional evaluation of external stimuli.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sleepiness induced by sleep-debt enhanced amygdala activity for subliminal signals of fear

et al. 2014

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“…We performed an fMRI study using short video clips to present dynamic stimuli to participants (Prochnow et al 2013). For this purpose, video clips are better than static pictures because dynamic images induce higher activation in brain regions responsible for dealing with and generating aff ective content.…”

Section: Genotypingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Association of TMEM132D, COMT, and GABRA6 genotypes with cingulate, frontal cortex and hippocampal emotional processing in panic and major depressive disorder

Inoue

Akiyoshi

Muronaga

et al. 2015

International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice

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“…Also in this context of priming effects is the work of Prochnow et al (Prochnow et al, 2013), that combined behavioral and fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) studies, aiming at examining whether or not consciously accessible (subliminal) emotional facial expressions influence empathic judgments and which brain activations are related to it. Their experiment showed that subliminal emotional facial expressions of 40 ms duration affect the judgments of the subsequent neutral facial expressions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating Macroexpressions and Microexpressions in Computer Graphics Animated Faces

Queiroz

Musse

Badler

2014

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments

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Due to varied personal, social, or even cultural situations, people sometimes conceal or mask their true emotions. These suppressed emotions can be expressed in a very subtle way by brief movements called microexpressions. We investigate human subjects' perception of hidden emotions in virtual faces, inspired by recent psychological experiments. We created animations with virtual faces showing some facial expressions and inserted brief secondary expressions in some sequences, in order to try to convey a subtle second emotion in the character. Our evaluation methodology consists of two sets of experiments, with three different sets of questions. The first experiment verifies that the accuracy and concordance of the participant's responses with synthetic faces matches the empirical results done with photos of real people in the paper by X.-b. Shen, Q. Wu, and X.-l. Fu, 2012, "Effects of the duration of expressions on the recognition of microexpressions," Journal of Zhejiang University Science B, 13(3), 221-230. The second experiment verifies whether participants could perceive and identify primary and secondary emotions in virtual faces. The third experiment tries to evaluate the participant's perception of realism, deceit, and valence of the emotions. Our results show that most of the participants recognized the foreground (macro) emotion and most of the time they perceived the presence of the second (micro) emotion in the animations, although they did not identify it correctly in some samples. This experiment exposes the benefits of conveying microexpressions in computer graphics characters, as they may visually enhance a character's emotional depth through subliminal microexpression cues, and consequently increase the perceived social complexity and believability (Shen, Wu, & Fu, 2012). The second experiment verifies if participants could perceive and identify primary and secondary emotions in virtual faces. The third tries to evaluate the participant's perception of realism, deceit and valence of the emotions. Our results show that most of the participants recognized the foreground (macro) emotion and most of the time they had perceived the presence of the second (micro) emotion in the animations, although they did not identify it correctly in some samples. This experiment exposes the benefits of conveying microexpressions in Computer Graphics characters, as they may visually enhance a character's emotional "depth" through subliminal microexpression cues and consequently increase its perceived social complexity and believability.

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Processing of subliminal facial expressions of emotion: A behavioral and fMRI study

Cited by 45 publications

References 58 publications

Sleepiness induced by sleep-debt enhanced amygdala activity for subliminal signals of fear

Sleepiness induced by sleep-debt enhanced amygdala activity for subliminal signals of fear

Association of TMEM132D, COMT, and GABRA6 genotypes with cingulate, frontal cortex and hippocampal emotional processing in panic and major depressive disorder

Investigating Macroexpressions and Microexpressions in Computer Graphics Animated Faces

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