Susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions improves detection of smile authenticity

A smile is a context-dependent emotional expression. A smiling face can signal the experience of enjoyable emotions, but people can also smile to convince another person that enjoyment is occurring when it is not. For this reason, the ability to discriminate between felt and faked enjoyment expressions is a crucial social skill. Despite its importance, adults show remarkable individual variation in this ability. Revealing the factors responsible for these huge individual differences is a key challenge in this domain. Here we investigated, on a large sample of participants, whether individual differences in smile authenticity recognition are accounted for by differences in the predisposition to experience other people’s emotions, i.e., by susceptibility to emotional contagion. Results showed that susceptibility to emotional contagion for negative emotions increased smile authenticity detection, while susceptibility to emotional contagion for positive emotions worsened detection performance, because it leaded to categorize most of the faked smiles as sincere. These findings suggest that susceptibility to emotional contagion plays a key role in complex emotion recognition, and point out the importance of analyzing the susceptibility to experience other people’s positive and negative emo-tions as separate abilities

‘Kitchen and cooking’, a serious game for Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer’s Disease: a pilot study

Recently there has been a growing interest in employing serious games for the assessment and rehabilitation of elderly people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related disorders. In the present study we examined the acceptability of ‘Kitchen and cooking’ - a serious game developed in the context of the EU project VERVE (http://www.verveconsortium.eu/) - in these populations. In this game a cooking plot is employed to assess and stimulate executive functions (such as planning abilities) and praxis. The game is installed on a tablet, to be flexibly employed at home and in nursing homes. 21 elderly participants (9 MCI and 12 AD, including 14 outpatients and 7 patients living in nursing homes, as well as 11 apathetic and 10 non-apathetic) took part in a 1-month trail, including a clinical and neuropsychological assessment, and 4-week training where the participants were free to play as long as they wanted on a personal tablet. During the training, participants met once a week with a clinician in order to fill in self-report questionnaires assessing their overall game experience (including acceptability, motivation, and perceived emotions). The results of the self reports and of the data concerning game performance (e.g. time spent playing, number of errors, etc) confirm the overall acceptability of Kitchen and cooking for both patients with MCI and patients with AD and related disorders, and the utility to employ it for training purposes. Interestingly, the results confirm that the game is adapted also to apathetic patients

The Clock’N Test as a Possible Measure of Emotions: Normative Data Collected on a Non-clinical Population

International audienceObjective: At present emotional experience and implicit emotion regulation (IER) abilities are mainly assessed though self -reports, which are subjected to several biases. The aim of the present studies was to validate the Clock'N test, a recently developed time estimation task employing emotional priming to assess implicitly emotional reactivity and IER. Methods: In Study 1, the Clock' N test was administered to 150 healthy participants with different age, laterality and gender, in order to ascertain whether these factors affected the test results. In phase 1 participant were asked to judge the duration of seven sounds. In phase 2, before judging the duration of the same sounds, participants were presented with short arousing video -clip used as emotional priming stimuli. Time warp was calculated as the difference in time estimation between phase 2 and phase 1, and used to assess how emotions affected subjective time estimations. In study 2, a representative sample was selected to provide normative scores to be employed to assess emotional reactivity (Score 1) and IER (Score 2), and to calculate statistical cutoffs, based on the 10th and 90th score distribution percentiles. Results: Converging with previous findings, the results of study 1 suggested that the Clock'N test can be employed to assess both emotional reactivity, as indexed by an initial time underestimation, and IER, as indexed by a progressive shift to time overestimation. No effects of gender, age and laterality were found. Conclusions: These results suggest that the Clock'N test is adapted to assess emotional reactivity and IER. After collection of data on the test discriminant and convergent validity, this test may be employed to assess deficits in these abilities in different clinical populations

A time estimation task as a possible measure of emotions: difference depending on the nature of the stimulus used

Objective: Time perception is fundamental for human experience. A topic which has attracted the attention of researchers since long time is how the stimulus sensory modality (e.g., images vs. sounds) affects time judgments. However, so far, no study has directly compared the effect of two sensory modalities using emotional stimuli on time judgments.Methods: In the present two studies, healthy participants were asked to estimate the duration of a pure sound preceded by the presentation of odors vs. emotional videos as priming stimuli (implicit emotion-eliciting task). During the task, skin conductance (SC) was measured as an index of arousal. Results: Olfactory stimuli resulted in an increase in SC and in a constant time overestimation. Video stimuli resulted in an increase SC (emotional arousal), which decreased linearly overtime. Critically, video stimuli resulted in an initial time underestimation, which shifted progressively towards a time overestimation. These results suggest that video stimuli recruited both arousal-related and attention-related mechanisms, and that the role played by these mechanisms changed overtime. Conclusions: These pilot studies highlight the importance of comparing the effect of different kinds on temporal estimation tasks, and suggests that odors are well suited to investigate arousal-related temporal distortions, while videos are ideal to investigate both arousal-related and attention-related mechanisms

The multilingual CID-5: A new tool to study the perception of communicative interactions in different languages

The investigation of the ability to perceive, recognize and judge upon social intentions, such as communicative intentions, on the basis of body motion is a growing research area. Cross-cultural differences in ability to perceive and interpret biological motion, however, have been poorly investigated so far. Progress in this domain strongly depends on the availability of suitable stimulus material. In the present method paper, we describe the multilingual CID-5, an extension of the CID-5 database, allowing for the investigation of how non-conventional communicative gestures are classified and identified by speakers of different languages. The CID-5 database contains 14 communicative interactions and 7 non-communicative actions performed by couples of agents and presented as point-light displays. For each action, the database provides movie files with the point-light animation, text files with the 3-D spatial coordinates of the point-lights, and five different response alternatives. In the multilingual CID-5 the alternatives were translated into seven languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Polish). Preliminary data collected to assess the recognizability of the actions in the different languages suggest that, for most of the action stimuli, information presented in point-light displays is sufficient for the distinctive classification of the action as communicative vs. individual, as well as for identification of the specific communicative gesture performed by the actor in all the available languages