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Project

The modulation of emotional responses to unidentifiable social stimuly by velocity, direction of movement and eccentricity: a brain imaging study in healthy volunteers and brain damaged patients.

We daily interact with people and are experts in reading the intentions and emotions of the people we encounter. Previous research has primarily focused on how we process static facial and bodily expressions of people we can identify, but little is known about what happens when we can not perceive the full identity of the person and we can only process different aspects of the movements and the location of the person. This project aims to investigate how the direction of movement (directly or not directly approaching), the velocity (slowly or fast moving) and the location in the visual field (central or peripheral) contribute to how threatening a person looks when we can not establish his identity. We will present subjects with videos of actors that can be identified or not and that display threatening or nonthreatening expressions. We will measure how the brain processes the movements and location of these stimuli. Thereafter, we will present the same stimuli to two groups of patients with damage in brain areas that are either involved in identification or in threat perception. This will reveal which brain areas are involved in or necessary for processing social threat, independent of the identity information.
Date:1 Oct 2011 →  30 Sep 2017
Keywords:Emotion, Movement, Amygdala, Social, Identity, Eccentricity, Threat, Blindsight
Disciplines:Psychiatry and psychotherapy, Nursing, Other paramedical sciences, Clinical and counselling psychology, Other psychology and cognitive sciences