Page 65 - Demo

Physiological Resonance and Interpretation of Emotional Expressions633mixed (against: Blairy et al., 1999; Hess & Blairy, 2001; for: Sato et al., 2013; metaanalysis: Holland et al., 2020). Importantly, physiological responses to another person%u2019s emotional expression can go beyond facial mimicry (Prochazkova & Kret, 2017) and access to a variety of signals and their integration might be crucial to facilitate emotion recognition. The current study investigates how perceiving emotional expressions, varying in display modality and content, affects the observer%u2019s interpretation and physiology: we (1) measured multiple bodily signals while participants were presented with prototypical facial and bodily expressions of emotion as well as with subtle facial emotion cues and (2) asked participants to report how they interpreted the emotion and how intensely they perceived it. Without having a priori hypotheses about the interplay between the different variables, this approach allowed us to explore the possibility of distinct bodily responses to different emotional expressions and to evaluate their subjective interpretations, thus gaining insight in emotion processing on multiple levels.MethodParticipantsIn total, 71 students from Leiden University, the Netherlands, participated in the experiment (42 female, Mage = 23.36, SD = 3.22, Range: 19 %u2013 34 years-old). Inclusion criteria were normal or corrected-to-normal vision, no regular use of medication or other substances and no prior psychiatric or neuropsychological disorders. Informed consent was provided prior to participation and participants were reimbursed with either 3 course credits or 10.5%u20ac. The experimental procedures were in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and the study was reviewed and approved by the Psychology Ethics Committee of Leiden University (CEP18-1029/406; November 2018). Out of the 71 subjects we tested, there were technical problems for three subjects with regard to facial electromyography, skin conductance and skin temperature recordings and, for three different subjects, pupil size was not measured during the experiment (both N = 68).