How the brain resolves ambiguity in emotion perception

Interpreting emotional information from the faces of others guides social behavior. This information is often ambiguous, requiring reliance on internal brain states. Thus, the intrinsic brain processes involved in resolving emotional ambiguity have important implications for everyday interactions, especially in the context of conditions like depression and autism. Prior work has examined neural correlates of face valence judgments at threshold. However, it remains unknown how task-evoked responses differ across different perceptual outcomes on identical trials of emotionally ambiguous face stimuli. The present study investigated what brain systems are important for resolving emotional ambiguity of a repeatedly presented emotionally ambiguous stimulus. Thirty participants (Female=21, Mage=21.71) completed an emotional face judgment task on repeated exposure to an emotionally ambiguous face that could be judged as sad or neutral. The image was individually chosen for each subject prior to the experiment using a threshold detection procedure on eleven different levels of sad-to-neutral morphing. General linear models were constructed to assess how task-evoked responses differed between the two percepts. Group-level results did not reveal any significant differences between the two conditions. The absence of task-evoked differences at the group-level could reflect different decision-making strategies that e.g., give weight to different types of stimuli features across individuals. Alternatively, repeating these analyses in a larger sample will clarify whether a larger effect size is needed given subtle differences between perceptual outcomes. Future work will investigate how pre-stimulus brain states and transdiagnostic factors may be related to the tendency to perceive an identical face stimulus as sad compared to neutral.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Olshan, Sarah M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Sadaghiani, Sepideh
• Beck, Diane

• Emotion Perception
• Ambiguity
• Fmri

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Sarah Olshan

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124462

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124462