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Related Experiment Video

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Brain Imaging Investigation of the Impairing Effect of Emotion on Cognition
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Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant.

Marta Calbi1,2,3, Martina Montalti1,2,4, Carlotta Pederzani1

  • 1Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.

Frontiers in Psychology
|November 21, 2022
PubMed
Summary

Emotional body postures do not automatically influence motor reactions. Their impact on behavior, like facial expressions, depends on task relevance, not inherent emotional content.

Keywords:
Go/No-go taskemotional body languageemotional body posturesinhibitory controltask-relevance

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Classical theory suggests emotional stimuli, especially threat-related ones, are processed preferentially, automatically capturing attention.
  • Recent research challenges this, highlighting the crucial role of task relevance in emotional stimuli's behavioral effects.
  • Emotional facial expressions influence motor responses only when pertinent to a subject's goals, not automatically.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether emotional body postures, similar to facial expressions, automatically influence motor responses.
  • To determine if task relevance is a critical factor for emotional body postures affecting motor control.
  • To extend findings on facial emotion processing to the domain of body posture perception.

Main Methods:

  • A Go/No-go task was employed with 36 participants performing two versions: Emotional Discrimination and a control task.
  • In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants responded to neutral body postures and withheld responses to emotional (happy, fearful) ones.
  • In the control task, responses were based on t-shirt color, ignoring the emotional content of the body postures.

Main Results:

  • Participants made more commission errors for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task.
  • This difference in commission errors between happy and fearful postures vanished in the control task.
  • The findings suggest emotional body expressions do not automatically affect motor control.

Conclusions:

  • Emotional body expressions, like facial emotions, do not automatically influence motor control.
  • Task relevance is a key determinant for emotional body postures to modulate behavioral responses.
  • Motor reactions to social emotional stimuli are contingent on their relevance to the individual's current goals.