The Effects of Meaning and Emotional Content of a Sentence on the Kinematics of a Successive Motor Sequence Mimiking the Feeding of a Conspecific

Abstract

Aim: Do the emotional content and meaning of sentences affect the kinematics of successive motor sequences?Material and Methods: Participants observed video-clips of an actor pronouncing sentences expressing positive or negative emotions and meanings (related to happiness or anger in Experiment 1 and food admiration or food disgust in Experiment 2). Then, they reached-to-grasp and placed a sugar lump on the actor’s mouth. Participants acted in response to sentences whose content could convey (1) emotion (i.e., face expression and prosody) and meaning, (2) meaning alone, or (3) emotion alone. Within each condition, the kinematic effects of sentences expressing positive and negative emotions were compared. Stimuli (positive for food admiration and negative for food disgust), conveyed either by emotion or meaning affected similarly the kinematics of both grasp and reach.Results: In Experiment 1, the kinematics did not vary between positive and negative sentences either when the content was expressed by both emotion and meaning, or meaning alone. In contrast, in the case of sole emotion, sentences with positive valence made faster the approach of the conspecific. In Experiment 2, the valence of emotions (positive for food admiration and negative for food disgust) affected the kinematics of both grasp and reach, independently of the modality.Discussion: The lack of an effect of meaning in Experiment 1 could be due to the weak relevance of sentence meaning with respect to the motor sequence goal (feeding). Experiment 2 demonstrated that, indeed, this was the case, because when the meaning and the consequent emotion were related to the sequence goal, they affected the kinematics. In contrast, the sole emotion activated approach or avoidance toward the actor according to positive and negative valence. The data suggest a behavioral dissociation between effects of emotion and meaning.

Observer-Agent Kinematic Similarity Facilitates Action Intention Decoding

“…The presence of a social target led to a significant decrease in reach velocity and reach deceleration compared to actions targeting a container. In line with the previous results 17,19,32 , arm movements were slower when the action intent was socially oriented, evidencing a more careful and accurate approach when the aim was to pass the object to another person in comparison to place it in an inanimate target container. The result concerning the arm acceleration can be interpreted according to the same principle; indeed, arm acceleration was lower in the social conditions compared to the non-social ones, but only when the target had a big size.…”

“…For each axis, we requested that 3 consecutive time frames showed a displacement lower than 0.3 mm with respect to the previous frame. As slight differences were found among results for X, Y and Z directions, the global endpoint was selected as the one closer to the grasping end 32 .…”

“…Similarly, when the action develops in a social context, the interaction with another individual results in longer reaching duration with respect to the individual (i.e. non-social) execution [16][17][18][19][20]32 .…”

Congenital facial palsy and emotion processing: The case of Moebius syndrome

“…Moreover, although facial mimicry plays an important role in facial expressions recognition, people may also use other expressive channels to communicate emotions such as gestures, posture, proximity or the voice (eg, prosody, language) and these channels may further support the process of emotion understanding and social interactions …”

“…Moreover, although facial mimicry plays an important role in facial expressions recognition, people may also use other expressive channels to communicate emotions such as gestures, posture, proximity 162,163 or the voice (eg, prosody, language) 164 and these channels may further support the process of emotion understanding and social interactions. [165][166][167] Over the years, these individuals may likely have compensated for their facial paralysis by learning, for example, which contextual bodily cues are used in association with specific face configurations.…”