Automatic Processing Mechanism Of Emotional And Non-emotional Body Postures

The body and face are important carriers of emotional information in people's social communication.However,the emotional information expressed and transmitted by the body has distinct "action" characteristics and attributes,which are essentially different from the emotional information conveyed and expressed by facial expressions.Previous research on body expressions focuses on similarities and differences of facial and body expression,as well as the physical expression processing of specific brain regions.However,the differences and similarities between the movement information conveyed by the body and the emotional information in the early processing stage and how the changes of the body movement affect the emotional processing have not been systematically explored.The passive oddball paradigm was adopted for experiment 1 and 2.In experiment 1,vMMN activities were evoked by fear and neutral body deviants,and we compared the amplitude difference between them in different time periods.In experiment 2,we controlled for the difference of movement range between emotion and neutral deviant stimulus,two conditions were set: difference and no difference,then we compared the difference between emotional vMMN and neutral vMMN under different conditions.In experiment 3,we adopted a new "reverse block" oddball paradigm,and further explored the difference of automatic processing mechanism between the unexpected emotion and neutral body without the interference of movement range information of the stimulus itself,which was also achieved by comparing the features of vMMNs.Experiment 1 shows that both body emotional and neutral changes can be processed automatically and reflected in vMMN activities,and emotional vMMN has a longer duration,which may reflect the specific processing of emotional change information.The results of experiment 2 suggest that the automatic processing differences between the emotional and neutral body change information reflected on vMMN may be partly dependent on the larger motion range of the emotional body than the neutral body.Experiment 3 proves that unexpected emotions and neutral bodies can be processed automatically,and also induce highly similar vMMN activities as in experiment 1 and2,which further indicates that automatic processing of body change information may reflect "predictive error response" in essence.