Neuroscience
We're highly tuned to emotional signals. So whereas most of the information bombarding our brain is filtered, emotion-related signals seem to strike home regardless. Take fearful faces - research has shown these trigger the same activity in a fear-sensitive brain region, the amygdala, regardless of whether we're paying attention to them. This is in contrast to how the brain normally works. For example, a face will trigger a different amount of activity in the brain's fusiform gyri – a kind of face-processing module - depending on whether that face is being attended to. Didier Grandjean and colleagues at the University of Geneva wanted to find out whether the brain treats emotional sounds with the same priority as emotional sights.
Fifteen participants had their brains scanned while they were played two meaningless but word-like utterances to both their ears at once. These utterances were either neutral in their stress, tone and timing or they could convey anger. The participants' attention was always directed to one ear at a time by a task which required them to identify the gender of the voice at either their left or right ear.
An angry utterance at one ear triggered the same enhanced activity in the right middle superior temporal sulcus, regardless of whether a person was paying attention to that ear. "This suggests the right superior temporal sulcus...(is) finely tuned to extract socially and affectively salient signals from conspecficis (others of the same species)", the authors said. Together with past research, this points to a system that prioritises "orienting towards significant stimuli even when these are not the focus of attention".
___________________________________
Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M.L., Scherer, K.R. & Vuilleumier, P. (2005). The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 145-146.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- An Afternoon Nap Tunes Out Negative Emotions, Tunes In Positive Ones
The perfect excuse for a siesta! People who stay awake throughout the day become progressively more sensitive to negative emotions. In contrast, those who take an afternoon nap are desensitised to negative emotions yet more responsive to positive ones....
- Botox Patients Help Emotion Researchers
The idea that the mere act of smiling can cheer us up is traceable to Darwin's "facial feedback hypothesis" and also to the work of famous American psychologist William James, who believed that muscular as well as more visceral bodily feedback influences...
- Judging What Came First
You can’t possibly process everything that’s going on around you. Instead you’re armed with an attentional spotlight that selects areas and objects of interest for preferential processing. An anomalous consequence of this, is that we judge objects...
- Abnormal Social Cognition
To investigate the neuroscience behind socialising, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues have scanned the brains of people with the genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome and compared them with scans of healthy controls. People with Williams syndrome...
- Talk To The Hand And Just Say No
A new fMRI paper (Grosbras et al., 2007) examined the hemodynamic response [an indirect reflection of neural activity] in 10 yr old children who were watching videos of angry faces and gestures (versus neutral faces and gestures and control stimuli,...
Neuroscience
The brain can't ignore angry voices
We're highly tuned to emotional signals. So whereas most of the information bombarding our brain is filtered, emotion-related signals seem to strike home regardless. Take fearful faces - research has shown these trigger the same activity in a fear-sensitive brain region, the amygdala, regardless of whether we're paying attention to them. This is in contrast to how the brain normally works. For example, a face will trigger a different amount of activity in the brain's fusiform gyri – a kind of face-processing module - depending on whether that face is being attended to. Didier Grandjean and colleagues at the University of Geneva wanted to find out whether the brain treats emotional sounds with the same priority as emotional sights.
Fifteen participants had their brains scanned while they were played two meaningless but word-like utterances to both their ears at once. These utterances were either neutral in their stress, tone and timing or they could convey anger. The participants' attention was always directed to one ear at a time by a task which required them to identify the gender of the voice at either their left or right ear.
An angry utterance at one ear triggered the same enhanced activity in the right middle superior temporal sulcus, regardless of whether a person was paying attention to that ear. "This suggests the right superior temporal sulcus...(is) finely tuned to extract socially and affectively salient signals from conspecficis (others of the same species)", the authors said. Together with past research, this points to a system that prioritises "orienting towards significant stimuli even when these are not the focus of attention".
___________________________________
Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M.L., Scherer, K.R. & Vuilleumier, P. (2005). The voices of wrath: brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 145-146.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- An Afternoon Nap Tunes Out Negative Emotions, Tunes In Positive Ones
The perfect excuse for a siesta! People who stay awake throughout the day become progressively more sensitive to negative emotions. In contrast, those who take an afternoon nap are desensitised to negative emotions yet more responsive to positive ones....
- Botox Patients Help Emotion Researchers
The idea that the mere act of smiling can cheer us up is traceable to Darwin's "facial feedback hypothesis" and also to the work of famous American psychologist William James, who believed that muscular as well as more visceral bodily feedback influences...
- Judging What Came First
You can’t possibly process everything that’s going on around you. Instead you’re armed with an attentional spotlight that selects areas and objects of interest for preferential processing. An anomalous consequence of this, is that we judge objects...
- Abnormal Social Cognition
To investigate the neuroscience behind socialising, Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and colleagues have scanned the brains of people with the genetic disorder Williams-Beuren syndrome and compared them with scans of healthy controls. People with Williams syndrome...
- Talk To The Hand And Just Say No
A new fMRI paper (Grosbras et al., 2007) examined the hemodynamic response [an indirect reflection of neural activity] in 10 yr old children who were watching videos of angry faces and gestures (versus neutral faces and gestures and control stimuli,...