CANCELLED - Me, Us and Them: The influence of (social) context on emotional information processing

The ability to rapidly and accurately decode the emotional information carried by a conspecific’s expression is an essential aspect of daily life, and can even become crucial for survival. This process can take place automatically and under sub-optimal conditions, such as in the presence of noise or when arising outside the focus of attention. There is ample evidence that the basic neural mechanisms underlying emotional information processing have been largely conserved throughout evolution and, therefore, are strikingly similar across species, including humans. Yet, there are important individual differences in how people respond to stimuli with affective value. In fact, the evaluation of such stimuli can even vary in the same individual, depending on circumstantial factors, especially for stimuli whose emotional meaning is ambiguous. In this talk, I will present recent (mostly unpublished) studies from our group exploring how behavioral and neural responses to visual and auditory emotional expressions are modulated by personality (e.g., trait anxiety, anger and empathy) and contextual factors, such as the presence of complementary information, stimulus relevance, and the relation between the emitter and perceiver.