Biomedical subjects

Klaus R Scherer

Publications and source records attributed to Klaus R Scherer.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

First evidence for differential and sequential efferent effects of stimulus relevance and goal conduciveness appraisal.

In the context of a memory task, participants were presented with pictures displaying biological and cultural threat stimuli or neutral stimuli (stimulus relevance manipulation) with superimposed symbols signaling monetary gains or losses (goal conduciveness manipulation). Results for heart rate and facial electromyogram show differential efferent effects of the respective appraisal outcomes and provide first evidence for sequential processing, as postulated by Scherer's component process model of emotion. Specifically, as predicted, muscle activity over the brow and cheek regions marking the process of relevance appraisal occurred significantly earlier than facial muscle activity markers of goal conduciveness appraisal. Heart rate, in contrast, was influenced by the stimulus relevance manipulation only.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2006

Intonation as an interface between language and affect.

The vocal expression of human emotions is embedded within language and the study of intonation has to take into account two interacting levels of information--emotional and semantic meaning. In addition to the discussion of this dual coding system, an extension of Brunswik's lens model is proposed. This model includes the influences of conventions, norms, and display rules (pull effects) and psychobiological mechanisms (push effects) on emotional vocalizations produced by the speaker (encoding) and the reciprocal influences of these two aspects on attributions made by the listener (decoding), allowing the dissociation and systematic study of the production and perception of intonation. Three empirical studies are described as examples of possibilities of dissociating these different phenomena at the behavioral and neurological levels in the study of intonation.

Brain↗

PubMed2005

Emotion and attention interactions in social cognition: brain regions involved in processing anger prosody.

Multiple levels of processing are thought to be involved in the appraisal of emotionally relevant events, with some processes being engaged relatively independently of attention, whereas other processes may depend on attention and current task goals or context. We conducted an event-related fMRI experiment to examine how processing angry voice prosody, an affectively and socially salient signal, is modulated by voluntary attention. To manipulate attention orthogonally to emotional prosody, we used a dichotic listening paradigm in which meaningless utterances, pronounced with either angry or neutral prosody, were presented simultaneously to both ears on each trial. In two successive blocks, participants selectively attended to either the left or right ear and performed a gender-decision on the voice heard on the target side. Our results revealed a functional dissociation between different brain areas. Whereas the right amygdala and bilateral superior temporal sulcus responded to anger prosody irrespective of whether it was heard from a to-be-attended or to-be-ignored voice, the orbitofrontal cortex and the cuneus in medial occipital cortex showed greater activation to the same emotional stimuli when the angry voice was to-be-attended rather than to-be-ignored. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed a strong correlation between orbitofrontal regions and sensitivity on a behavioral inhibition scale measuring proneness to anxiety reactions. Our results underscore the importance of emotion and attention interactions in social cognition by demonstrating that multiple levels of processing are involved in the appraisal of emotionally relevant cues in voices, and by showing a modulation of some emotional responses by both the current task-demands and individual differences.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech.

We report two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments showing enhanced responses in human middle superior temporal sulcus for angry relative to neutral prosody. This emotional enhancement was voice specific, unrelated to isolated acoustic amplitude or frequency cues in angry prosody, and distinct from any concomitant task-related attentional modulation. Attention and emotion seem to have separate effects on stimulus processing, reflecting a fundamental principle of human brain organization shared by voice and face perception.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

A systems approach to appraisal mechanisms in emotion.

While artificial neural networks are regularly employed in modeling the perception of facial and vocal emotion expression as well as in automatic expression decoding by artificial agents, this approach is yet to be extended to the modeling of emotion elicitation and differentiation. In part, this may be due to the dominance of discrete and dimensional emotion models, which have not encouraged computational modeling. This situation has changed with the advent of appraisal theories of emotion and a number of attempts to develop rule-based models can be found in the literature. However, most of these models operate at a high level of conceptual abstraction and rarely include the underlying neural architecture. In this contribution, an appraisal-based emotion theory, the Component Process Model (CPM), is described that seems particularly suited to modeling with the help of artificial neural network approaches. This is due to its high degree of specificity in postulating underlying mechanisms including efferent physiological and behavioral manifestations as well as to the possibility of linking the theoretical assumptions to underlying neural architectures and dynamic processes. This paper provides a brief overview of the model, suggests constraints imposed by neural circuits, and provides examples on how the temporal unfolding of emotion can be conceptualized and experimentally tested. In addition, it is shown that the specific characteristics of emotion episodes can be profitably explored with the help of non-linear dynamic systems theory.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Affective speech elicited with a computer game.

To determine the degree to which emotional changes in speech reflect factors other than arousal, such as valence, the authors used a computer game to induce natural emotional speech. Voice samples were elicited following game events that were either conducive or obstructive to the goal of winning and were accompanied by either pleasant or unpleasant sounds. Acoustic analysis of the speech recordings of 30 adolescents revealed that mean energy, fundamental-frequency level, utterance duration, and the proportion of an utterance that was voiced varied with goal conduciveness; spectral energy distribution depended on manipulations of pleasantness; and pitch dynamics depended on the interaction of pleasantness and goal conduciveness. The results suggest that a single arousal dimension does not adequately characterize a number of emotion-related vocal changes, lending weight to multidimensional theories of emotional response patterning.

Acoustics↗

PubMed2004

Beyond surprise: the puzzle of infants' expressive reactions to expectancy violation.

The reactions of 58 infants to expectancy violation by digitally filtering the experimenter's voice were studied in a cross-sectional design for ages 5, 7, 9, 11-12, and 14 months. The results show that behavioral freezing and changes in gaze direction, but not facial or vocal expression, are reliable responses to expectancy violation. The pattern suggests that a transition in the infant's capacity for cognitive evaluation of novel and discrepant events may occur around age 9 months. These findings confirm the consistent failure to find prototypical facial surprise reactions in research on novel or impossible situations. Componential theories of emotion, which predict adaptive behavior patterns from appraisal processes, may provide clues for underlying mechanisms and generate hypotheses on age-related changes in emotional expression.

Cognition↗