The ability to express and perceive emotion serves an important role for human functioning in everyday environments. It can, for example, allow us to detect danger or respond to a person in need. A full understanding of how emotion influences behaviour has yet to be realized. Recent literature has demonstrated that exposure to emotionally arousing stimuli can alter the perceptual mechanisms of participants. The present experiments attempted to expand this research to examine cross-modal vision and audition.
Emotion Processing in the Visual Modality The mechanisms responsible for emotion processing have been selected over the course of generations as they confer survival advantages. Susskind, Lee, Cusi, Feiman, Grabski, and Anderson (2008) …show more content…
As previous studies found that the amygdala was important for emotion processing, Anderson and Phelps (2001) sought to establish whether the amygdala could be used to modulate perception in a patient who possessed bilateral amygdala damage, patient S.P., as well as in ten patients with unilateral amygdala damage. They used the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm in order to measure the attentional blink in response to emotional stimuli, using both neutral words and negative arousing words as target stimuli. The attentional-blink effect refers to the fact that after a first target stimulus is presented, it will be more difficult to identify a second target stimulus when it is presented in close temporal proximity to the first. Members of the control group identified negative words with better accuracy than neutral words. S.P. showed a normal attentional-blink compared to the controls, however, she had a reduced attentional-blink for negative stimuli, most likely due to bilateral amygdala damage. This provides further evidence of the critical role of the amygdala in visual perception of emotion stimuli, as visual perception of the negative arousing stimuli presented to participants was impacted depending on the degree of damage to the
Emotion Processing in the Visual Modality The mechanisms responsible for emotion processing have been selected over the course of generations as they confer survival advantages. Susskind, Lee, Cusi, Feiman, Grabski, and Anderson (2008) …show more content…
As previous studies found that the amygdala was important for emotion processing, Anderson and Phelps (2001) sought to establish whether the amygdala could be used to modulate perception in a patient who possessed bilateral amygdala damage, patient S.P., as well as in ten patients with unilateral amygdala damage. They used the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm in order to measure the attentional blink in response to emotional stimuli, using both neutral words and negative arousing words as target stimuli. The attentional-blink effect refers to the fact that after a first target stimulus is presented, it will be more difficult to identify a second target stimulus when it is presented in close temporal proximity to the first. Members of the control group identified negative words with better accuracy than neutral words. S.P. showed a normal attentional-blink compared to the controls, however, she had a reduced attentional-blink for negative stimuli, most likely due to bilateral amygdala damage. This provides further evidence of the critical role of the amygdala in visual perception of emotion stimuli, as visual perception of the negative arousing stimuli presented to participants was impacted depending on the degree of damage to the