Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Psychology Dept., 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Eberhard Karls-Universität, 1933.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Eberhard Karls-Universität, 1933.

No description available.

Rapid and accurate identification of emotionally meaningful stimuli has important benefits related to survival. In the current thesis, speeded detection of emotionally meaningful signals, including emotional facial expressions and emotional body postures, was investigated using two main experimental techniques; forced choice discrimination and exogenous cueing. To provide a direct measure of attention, and to further elucidate the time-course of emotional bias, the response mode of interest (manual or saccadic) and presentation duration of the stimuli (Short: 20ms) or (Long: 100ms; 500ms) was varied systematically across the experiments. Overall a consistent pattern of results was found where saccadic responses showed emotional bias at short, but not long stimulus durations, whereas manual responses evidenced emotional bias only at long stimulus durations. Besides from being detected more rapidly, evidence also shows that emotional stimuli are more likely than neutral stimuli to enter awareness. To further investigate this theory, the final series of experiments in this thesis employed a binocular rivalry paradigm. It was found that emotional facial expressions were associated with longer periods of dominance (i.e. they were perceived for longer durations) than neutral facial expressions. Taken together, the experiments reported in this thesis showed that attention is biased towards emotion conveyed not only by the face, but also by the body. Notably, both emotional facial expressions and body postures were detected more quickly than their neutral counterparts using saccades and manual responses and further, emotional facial expressions were more likely to be perceived in a binocular rivalry situation.

This thesis reports eight experiments which investigate voluntary emotional expressions in head-injured and normal children and four experiments which investigate spontaneous expressiveness in head-injured and normal children. A novel technique using dynamic video film was used to elicit more truly spontaneous expressions and then surreptitiously video the child's expressive responses to the film clips. In the voluntary condition children posed expressions on verbal request and imitated expressions depicted in photographs. Independent adult raters then viewed still images of the children's' expressions and categorised them for emotion shown and rated intensity of expression. Results indicated that for the spontaneous expressions not all film clips elicited expressions equally as well. The best clips were those that elicited happiness, sadness and disgust and differences in expressiveness were shown to exist between the head-injured and normal children. The acquired head-injury children as a group were significantly less expressive than the controls while differential effects on positive and negative spontaneous expression were found in left and right congenital hemiplegics. In right hemiplegics (left brain damage) the spontaneous expressions of disgust, sadness and happiness were poorer than controls, while in left hemiplegics (right brain damage) only negative spontaneous expressions of disgust and sadness were poorer than controls. These findings add new information to the existing body of knowledge in that they suggest that the left hemisphere is more important than one thought for the expression of negative emotion. The results from the voluntary production conditions indicated that the head-injured children could accurately imitate expressions suggesting that their ability to manipulate facial muscles was intact. However, the acquired head-injury children were found to be poorer than controls at producing expressions on verbal request particularly so in the left brain damage group.

A series of studies was conducted to examine the feasiblity of a bottom-up approach to the study of judgment of affective feeling states from facial behavior. Previous work on the judgment of emotion from facial expressions has taken a more top-down approach; observers judged the emotional meaning of a wholistic facial expression. Individual facial movements have sometimes then been identified within that complex expression, but the meaning of those individual movements has not been studied. A bottom-up approach begins by exploring the meaning of individual facial movements instead of complex facial expressions. In this approach the relationship between the emotional meaning of individual facial movements and complex facial expressions can be explored. It is argued that such an approach has the potential to explain judgment of not only a limited set of basic emotional expressions, but the full range of emotionally tinged feelings that individuals both experience in themselves and judge in others. Individual action units, as scored by Ekman and Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and selected combinations of action units were presented to observers in three pairs of studies. Filmstrip sequences were used in the first pair of studies, and still photographs in the other two pairs. In the first study of each pair, observers judged the degree of pleasure and arousal expressed by the face. In the second study of each pair, observers rated how well each of a set of emotion terms described the feeling expressed by the face. Observers were found to reliably attribute meaning to individual action units on both scales. Additionally, pleasure and arousal judgments predicted emotion term ratings. The meaning attributed to combinations of action units was found to be related to the meanings of the individual action units occurring alone. Resultant ratings were shown to be meaningful within a dimensional model of emotion space.

No description available.

No description available.

The communication of facial affect is a poorly understood process. In a subthreshold priming task, subjects were asked to rate photographs of faces displayed in a tachistoscope. Faces exhibiting strong positive and negative expressions were shown at 10% below the subject's recognition level and masked. Following this, a photograph of the same individual exhibiting no expression, or neutrality, was exposed at a rate that was well above the subject's recognition level. The subject was asked to rate the second photograph, or target, as being either positive or negative. It was hypothesized that the evaluations of target photographs would be biased by the prior subthreshold presentation of a strong positive or negative prime. The results did not support the hypothesis. Subjects rated the neutral faces as being negative regardless of the prime. It is possible that the experimental procedure produced a negative bias that counteracted the potential biasing effect of the primes.