Séminaire LPNC - Renata CSERJESI

Renáta Cserjési ( Eötvös Loránd University,Budapest )

Emotional flexibility: Does the context matter? 

Emotional flexibility reflects the ability to adjust the emotional response to the changing environmental context. Facial expressions are fundamental and universal sources of basic human emotions, therefore most researches focuses on recognition and expression of emotions by face.  However, we think that context can automatically direct emotional processing and can override facial expressions. For illustration, crying at a funeral represents sadness, in contrast with crying when achieving great success represents happiness or pride. Meaning of a stimulus may depend on the context, and can change when the context changes. Therefore, one of the key elements of emotional flexibility is shifting between meanings taking into account the key stimulus (face) and the context (situation) together. Contextual information is processed and integrated with facial affective information in the early phase of perception, thus, we presume that the perception of a basic facial emotion can be categorically changed automatically by the context. In order to measure this automatic shifting process, with my phd student we have developed the Emotional Shifting Task (EST). Using EST we have carried out a series of studies on healthy adults using various methodologies including behavioural RT measurements, fMRI and EEG to investigate how, when, and where in the brain emotional shifting happens. In my presentation, I am going to talk about the EST and the results of our studies.