Abstract
The purpose of this study is to clarify the neural correlates of human emotional judgment. This study aimed to induce a controlled perturbation in the emotional system of the brain by multimodal stimuli, and to investigate whether such emotional stimuli could induce reproducible and consistent changes in electroencephalography (EEG) signals. We exposed 12 subjects to auditory, visual, or combined audio–visual stimuli. Audio stimuli consisted of voice recordings of the Japanese word “arigato” (thank you) pronounced with three different intonations (angry—A, happy—H or neutral—N). Visual stimuli consisted of faces of women expressing the same emotional valences (A, H or N). Audio–visual stimuli were composed using either congruent combinations of faces and voices (e.g., H × H) or noncongruent combinations (e.g., A × H). The data were collected using an EEG system, and analysis was performed by computing the topographic distributions of EEG signals in the theta, alpha, and beta frequency ranges. We compared the conditions stimuli (A, H or N), and congruent versus noncongruent. Topographic maps of EEG power differed between those conditions. The obtained results demonstrate that EEG could be used as a tool to investigate emotional valence and discriminate various emotions.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aftanas LI, Lotova NV, Koshkarov VI, Makhnev VP, Mordvintsev YN, Popov SA. Non-linear dynamic complexity of the human EEG during evoked emotions. Int J Psychophysiol. 1998;28(1):63–76.
Biehl M, Matsumoto D, Ekman P, Hearn V, Heider K, Kudoh T, Veronica T. Matsumoto and Ekman’s Japanese and Caucasian facial expressions of emotion (JACFEE): reliability data and cross-national differences. J Nonverbal Behav. 1997;21(1):3–21.
Barrett LF, Mesquita B, Ochsner KN, Gross JJ. The experience of emotion. Annu Rev Psychol. 2007;58:373–403.
Chakrabarti B, Bullmore E, Baron-Cohen S. Empathizing with basic emotions: common and discrete neural substrates. Soc Neurosci. 2006;1(3–4):364–84.
Conrad NJ, Schmidt LA, Niccols A, Polak CP, Riniolo TC, Burack JA. Frontal electroencephalogram asymmetry during affective processing in children with Down syndrome: a pilot study. J Intellect Disabil Res. 2007;51(Pt 12):988–95.
de Gelder B, Morris JS, Dolan RJ. Unconscious fear influences emotional awareness of faces and voices. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2005;102(51):18682–7.
Dolan RJ, Morris JS, de Gelder B. Crossmodal binding of fear in voice and face. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2001;98(17):10006–10.
Doronbekov TK, Tokunaga H, Ikejiri Y, Kazui H, Hatta N, Masaki Y, Ogino A, Miyoshi N, Oku N, Nishikawa T, Takeda M. Neural basis of fear conditioning induced by video clip: positron emission tomography study. Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2005;59(2):155–62.
Duncan S, Barrett LF. Affect is a form of cognition: a neurobiological analysis. Cogn Emot. 2007;21:1184–211.
Ekman P, Friesen WV. Manual for facial action coding system. Palo Alto: Consulting Psychologists; 1978.
Evans JS. Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social cognition. Annu Rev Psychol. 2008;59:255–78.
Gepperth AR, Rebhan S, Hasler S, Fritsch J. Biased competition in visual processing hierarchies: a learning approach using multiple cues. Cogn Comput. 2011;3(1):146–66.
Giuliani NR, McRae K, Gross JJ. The up- and down-regulation of amusement: experiential, behavioral, and autonomic consequences. Emotion. 2008;8(5):714–9.
Grandjean D, Scherer KR. Unpacking the cognitive architecture of emotion processes. Emotion. 2008;8(3):341–51.
Grimm S, Beck J, Schuepbach D, Hell D, Boesiger P, Bermpohl F, Niehaus L, Boeker H, Northoff G. Imbalance between left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in major depression is linked to negative emotional judgment: an fMRI study in severe major depressive disorder. Biol Psychiatry. 2008;63(4):369–76.
Grimm S, Schmidt CF, Bermpohl F, Heinzel A, Dahlem Y, Wyss M. Segregated neural representation of distinct emotion dimensions in the prefrontal cortex—an fMRI study. NeuroImage. 2006;30:325–40.
Hoshi Y, Chen SJ. Regional cerebral blood flow changes associated with emotions in children. Pediatr Neurol. 2002;27(4):275–81.
Jack RE, Garrod OG, Yu H, Caldara R, Schyns PG. Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2012;109(19):7241–4.
Keightley ML, Winocur G, Graham SJ, Mayberg HS, Hevenor SJ, Grady CL. An fMRI study investigating cognitive modulation of brain regions associated with emotional processing of visual stimuli. Neuropsychologia. 2003;41:585–96.
Kootstra G, de Boer B, Schomaker LR. Predicting eye fixations on complex visual stimuli using local symmetry. Cogn Comput. 2011;3(1):223–40.
Lang PJ, Bradley MM, Cuthbert BN. Emotion and motivation: measuring affective perception. J Clin Neurophysiol. 1998;15(5):397–408.
Lange K, Williams LM, Young AW, Bullmore ET, Brammer MJ, Williams SCR. Task instructions modulate neural responses to fearful facial expressions. Biol Psychiatry. 2003;53:226–32.
Ledoux JE. Emotion circuits in the brain. Annu Rev Neurosci. 2000;23:155–84.
Li A, Dang J. A cross-cultural investigation on emotion expression under vocal and facial conflict—also an observation on emotional McGurk effect. In: International symposium on biomechanical and physiological modeling and speech science, Kanazawa, I. 2009; p. 37–50. Japan.
Martin LL, Stepper S, Strack F. Inhibiting and facilitating conditions of the human smile: a nonobtrusive test of the facial feedback hypothesis. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1988;54(5):768–77.
McGurk H, MacDonald J. Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature. 1976;264(5588):746–8.
Nakamura K, Kawashima R, Ito K, Sugiura M, Kato T, Nakamura A. Activation of the right inferior frontal cortex during assessment of facial emotion. J Neurophysiol. 1999;82:1610–4.
Northoff G, Heinzel A, Bermpohl F, Niese R, Pfennig A, Pascual-Leone A, Schlaug G. Reciprocal modulation and attenuation in the prefrontal cortex: an fMRI study on emotional—cognitive interaction. Hum Brain Mapp. 2004;21:202–12.
Ochsner KN, Bunge SA, Gross JJ, Gabrieli JD. Rethinking feelings: an FMRI study of the cognitive regulation of emotion. J Cogn Neurosci. 2002;14:1215–29.
Onton J, Makeig S. High-frequency broadband modulations of electroencephalographic spectra. Front Hum Neurosci. 2009;23(3):61.
Rigoulot S, Pell MD. Seeing emotion with your ears: emotional prosody implicitly guides visual attention to faces. PLoS ONE. 2012;7(1):e30740.
Schachter S, Singer JE. Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychol Rev. 1962;69(5):379–99.
Scherer KR. Appraisal theories. In: Dalgleish T, Power M, editors. Handbook of cognition and emotion. Chichester: Wiley; 1999. p. 637–63.
Scherer KR, Shorr A, Johnstone T. Appraisal processes in emotion: theory, methods, research. Canary, NC: Oxford University Press; 2001.
Tsoi DT, Lee KH, Gee KA, Holden KL, Parks RW, Woodruff PW. Humour experience in schizophrenia: relationship with executive dysfunction and psychosocial impairment. Psychol. 2008;38(6):801–10.
Tsuchiya N, Adolphs R. Emotion and consciousness. Trends Cogn Sci. 2007;11(4):158–67.
Van den Stock J, Grèzes J, de Geldera B. Human and animal sounds influence recognition of body language. Brain Res. 2008;1242(25):185–90.
van Brakel J. Emotions: a cross-cultural perspective on forms of life. Soc Perspect Emot. 1993;II:179–237.
van Damme S, Crombez G, Spence C. Is visual dominance modulated by the threat value of visual and auditory stimuli? Exp Brain Res. 2009;193(2):197–204.
van Hemmen JL, Sejnowski TJ. 23 problems in systems neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2006.
Welch PD. The use of fast Fourier transform for the estimation of power spectra: a method based on time averaging over short, modified periodograms. IEEE Trans Audio Electroacoust. 1967;AU-15:70–3.
Watson D, Clark LA, Tellegen A. Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1988;47:1063–70.
Yanulevskaya V, Marsman JB, Cornelissen F, Geusebroek JM. An image statistics-based model for fixation prediction. Cogn Comput. 2011;3(1):94–104.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
A. Cichocki and F.B. Vialatte made equal contributions and should be considered as co-last authors of the present manuscript.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hiyoshi-Taniguchi, K., Kawasaki, M., Yokota, T. et al. EEG Correlates of Voice and Face Emotional Judgments in the Human Brain. Cogn Comput 7, 11–19 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-013-9225-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-013-9225-0