Attentional Bias in Humans Toward Human and Bonobo Expressions of Emotion

Correctly recognizing and efficiently attending to emotional situations are highly valuable skills for social species such as humans and bonobos, humans' closest living relatives. In the current study, we investigated whether humans perceive a range of emotional situations differently when these involved other humans compared to bonobos. A large group of children and adults participated in an emotion perception task and rated scenes showing either bonobos or humans in situations depicting distressed or aggressive behavior, yawning, scratching, grooming, playing, sex scenes or neutral situations. A new group of people performed a dot-probe task to assess attentional biases toward these materials. The main finding is that humans perceive emotional scenes showing people similarly as emotional scenes of bonobos, a result reflecting a shared evolutionary origin of emotional expressions. Other results show that children interpreted bonobos’ bared teeth displays as a positive signal. This signal is related to the human smile, but is frequently seen in distressed situations, as was the case in the current experiment. Children may still need to learn to use contextual cues when judging an ambiguous expression as positive or negative. Further, the sex scenes were rated very positively, especially by male participants. Even though they rated these more positively than women, their attention was captured similarly, surpassing all other emotion categories. Finally, humans’ attention was captured more by human yawns than by bonobo yawns, which may be related to the highly contagious nature of yawns, especially when shown by close others. The current research adds to earlier work showing morphological, behavioral and genetic parallels between humans and bonobos by showing that their emotional expressions have a common origin too.

Attentional bias during emotional processing: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence from an Emotional Flanker Task

Threatening stimuli seem to capture attention more swiftly than neutral stimuli. This attention bias has been observed under different experimental conditions and with different types of stimuli. It remains unclear whether this adaptive behaviour reflects the function of automatic or controlled attention mechanisms. Additionally, the spatiotemporal dynamics of its neural correlates are largely unknown. The present study investigates these issues using an Emotional Flanker Task synchronized with EEG recordings. A group of 32 healthy participants saw response-relevant images (emotional scenes from IAPS or line drawings of objects) flanked by response-irrelevant distracters (i.e., emotional scenes flanked by line drawings or vice versa). We assessed behavioural and ERP responses drawn from four task conditions (Threat-Central, Neutral-Central, Threat-Peripheral, and Neutral-Peripheral) and subjected these responses to repeated-measures ANOVA models. When presented as response-relevant targets, threatening images attracted faster and more accurate responses. They did not affect response accuracy to targets when presented as response-irrelevant flankers. However, response times were significantly slower when threatening images flanked objects than when neutral images were shown as flankers. This result replicated the well-known Emotional Flanker Effect. Behavioural responses to response-relevant threatening targets were accompanied by significant modulations of ERP activity across all time-windows and regions of interest and displayed some meaningful correlations. The Emotional Flanker Effect was accompanied by a modulation over parietal and central-parietal regions within a time-window between 550-690ms. Such a modulation suggests that the attentional disruption to targets caused by response-irrelevant threatening flankers appears to reflect less neural resources available, which are seemingly drawn away by distracting threatening flankers. The observed spatiotemporal dynamics seem to concur with understanding of the important adaptive role attributed to threat-related attention bias.

Friend vs. Foe: Cognitive and Affective Empathy in Women With Different Hormonal States

Empathy is crucial for social functioning as well as social coherence. It can be influenced by modulatory factors such as familiarity and liking (i.e., emotional closeness). Furthermore, there are first hints that hormonal status may modulate affective but not cognitive empathy in women. The aim of this study was to investigate potential separate as well as combined modulatory effects of emotional closeness and hormonal status on female cognitive and affective empathy. Three hormonal status groups of women (n = 62) were studied: (1) naturally-cycling (NC) women in the early follicular phase (fNC), (2) NC women during periovulatory phase (oNC), and (3) oral contraceptive (OC) users. All women underwent a newly developed empathy task (i.e., Tübinger Empathy Test, TET) presenting textual descriptions of positive and negative emotional scenes relating to three different perspectives (i.e., self vs. friend vs. enemy/disliked person). Regardless of hormonal status, empathic responses were higher for the friend compared to the enemy perspective for both empathy components. However, cognitive empathy was less affected by varying emotional closeness toward the target person than affective empathy. Hormonal status modulated only affective empathy. OC users showed significantly less affective empathy toward the enemy compared to the fNC women. Overall, affective empathy seems more sensitive to modulatory effects of emotional closeness and hormonal status than cognitive empathy. Possible implications of this current investigation for future research on empathy and OC use, contraceptive education as well as for other clinical applications are discussed.