Page 84 - Demo

Chapter 382The clear distinction between emotions in self-reports was not reflected in participants%u2019 physiology. Nevertheless, a few consistent relationships between discrete emotion categories and physiological markers were observed. Specifically, in the SCL signal, a cubic trend with an early peak appeared when participants observed angry facial expressions. This result is in line with previous studies, showing that observing negative facial expressions (Banks et al., 2012), and anger in particular (Kreibig, 2010), tend to increase SCL (but see Vrana & Gross, 2004 for different results). As signals of direct threat, angry faces take a special role in emotion perception. Compared to other emotional expressions, their detection and processing occurs in a privileged, speedy and automatic manner (Feldmann-W%u00fcstefeld et al., 2011), a phenomenon called the %u201canger-superiority effect%u201d (Hansen & Hansen, 1988). Perceiving threat immediately sets the body in a fight-or-flight mode (Cannon, 1914), which is typically characterized by autonomic arousal and, among others, with an increased SCL (Darrow, 1936). This may explain the observed increase in SCL in our study, with the early peak highlighting the fast processing of facial displays of anger as a potential threat. The current study also yielded some novel findings related to the processing of sad expressions. Sadness is characterized by a low-arousal physiological state (Huron, 2018) and a conservation-withdrawal tendency which, however, is not consistently reflected across physiological channels (Kreibig et al., 2007). When observing sad body expressions, the participants in the current study showed an initial drop in their cheek temperature (see Salazar-L%u00f3pez et al., 2015 for similar findings on negative images with low arousal). As previous research has shown that watching sad body movements can induce sadness in observers (Shafir et al., 2013), the cheek temperature drop in our study might be the result of induced sadness. Compared to other facial regions, cheek temperature variations have however not been extensively studied in the context of emotional responses yet (Clay-Warner & Robinson, 2015; Ioannou et al., 2014). Further research should therefore substantiate this suggestion. Apart from these two observations, we did not find evidence for a robust linkage between the perception of basic emotion displays and distinct ANS responses. Our findings, thus, challenge the idea that their own signals from the ANS could serve observers as a reliable indication of the observed individual%u2019s state.