Did you know that high intensity 💥 emotions do not always make vocal cues easier to recognize? In this post, DSEC Lab research assistant Jake Hartwig-MacDonald describes some surprising findings about the intensity at which various emotions 😄😡 are recognizable in the voice! 🗣️
#emotions #vocal #nonverbal #YGKyouth #science #affectivescience
Epilepsy is a brain disorder characterized by recurring seizures. 🧠 It most commonly starts during childhood 🧒 or older adulthood 👨🦳. The most common form of epilepsy in youth is “temporal lobe epilepsy”, which impacts parts of the brain that help us understand social and emotional information. 🎭 To better understand the impact of early-onset epilepsy on youth’s social perception, we investigated emotion recognition skills in youth with and without epilepsy. Compared to youth without epilepsy, we found that youth with epilepsy struggled to identify emotional expressions in faces. This was related to different brain activation patterns in the temporal lobe. DSEC Lab Research Assistant Sophie Ye breaks down these findings and their implications for youth with epilepsy, as well as where future research can go with these results. 📝
#epilepsy #scicomm #knowledgetranslation #research
Does loneliness impact the way youth interpret vocal emotions? Given that loneliness tends to increase 📈 during puberty, this is an especially important question to ask in youth. In this post, research assistant Sophie Ye breaks down a research study 📝 which looked to answer this question!
Before swiping through the slides, do you believe youth with greater loneliness were better at recognizing friendliness 🙂 or meanness 😡? Comment below to share your answer! 🙋
#infographic #psychology #emotions #scicomm #science
Welcome to another installment of our Psychology Terms Made Easy series! In this post, we will be breaking down the concept of prosody 🔊! Can you think of a time when your friend told you they were “fine”, but the features of their voice (such as the pitch, intensity level and rhythm) told you otherwise? Together, these features were helping you understand how your friend really felt!
Not only can researchers investigate how well people identify emotional states through prosody, but they can also study how we use prosody to express ourselves… such as in our EXPRESS-1 Study 😄!
Special thanks to our research assistant Jake Hartwig-Macdonald for helping us deconstruct the concept of prosody!!
#psychology #prosody #science #scicomm #emotion #PTME
New post in our Psychology Terms Made Easy series! If you’re a parent of a teenager, you may have noticed changes in your teen’s social behaviour as they enter adolescence. 👦 👧 Psychologists often call this phenomena “social re-orientation”. It describes the changes in social behaviour that prioritize peers outside of the family home during adolescence. 👯 More research is needed to understand WHY this happens, but many researchers think that social re-orientation is spurred on by changes in teenagers’ hormones, brain function, and social environments. 🧠
Our DETECT-A study focuses on exactly this—check out our link in bio to learn more about this study, and how 12- to 15-year-olds can participate! ✌️
(Thanks to lab member Olivia Merulla for this explainer! 🙏)
Welcome back to our third installment of our Brain & Emotions series! 🧠 This episode is about understanding risk-taking in adolescence. Compared to children and adults, teenagers tend to take more risks than children and adults in their daily lives. 🚫 Why is that? There are many theories about this, but one theory is the “dual systems model”. This theory suggests that there are changes in the teenage brain that make risk-taking more likely. 💥 On one hand, the teenage brain is very sensitive to rewards (see episode 2 about this!). 🍭 At the same time, the brain systems that allow us to regulate (or control) our behaviours may not be fully developed yet. The mismatch between these two brain systems is thought to make teenagers more likely to take risks.
Let’s talk about this theory! Do you think this makes sense to explain risk-taking in adolescence? Let us know in the comments below! 👇 (Special thanks to former DSEC Lab volunteer Bingyi Lin for her work in creating these slides!)
Parents tend to speak to their young babies using “babytalk”, which researchers call “infant-directed speech”. 👶 This is thought to help promote bonding, attention, emotion processing, and language development in children. Former lab coordinator Emma Ilyaz put together an infographic describing the results of one of our studies on the impact of infant-directed speech (during a parent-child play session) on children’s later language abilities. Let us know what questions you have about this below! 🧑🍼
#research #parentchildinteraction #parenting #vocalcues #parentese #babytalk #languagedevelopment
Welcome back to our second installment of our Brain & Emotions series! 🧠 This episode is about the reward system. There are a number of regions in the brain that tend to activate when we encounter rewarding things. 🍭 Adolescence is often accompanied by heightened response to reward in this brain system. How does it work? ❓ Swipe through to learn more! (Special thanks to former DSEC Lab volunteer Bingyi Lin for her work in creating these slides!)
#psychology #neuroscience #research #explainittome #brain #reward #adolescence
One big focus of the DSEC Lab’s work is to better understand how we communicate emotions and attitudes through our tone of voice. 🗣️ Beyond the words we say, *how* we say something matters! 🗯️ But, how do we measure that “how”? PhD student Daniel Nault put together a primer of the 3️ main characteristics of the voice that can be combined to communicate emotional meaning. Swipe through the slides to learn more! 👉
#psychology #research #explainittome #acoustics #voice #speechanalysis #prosody #primer
New post in our Psychology Terms Made Easy series… on attentional biases! The DSEC Lab is interested in how humans direct their attention to different things in our social environments. 👀 Certain things (like threatening faces, for example) are more likely to draw our attention than others. ❗ Is everyone likely to show attentional biases? Are some people more likely than others to experience this? Check out these slides by DSEC Lab directed research student Olivia Merulla for some answers to these questions! 🕵️
Let us know what questions you have for us in the comments below! What terms should we cover next? 🤗
#PTME #research #psychology #attention #explain
How do we measure facial expressions? 😀 DSEC Lab volunteer Kate Cullen put together a brief explanation of two methods researchers can use to measure someone’s facial movements. 📐 Although we don’t know for sure what a particular facial movement means (a smile could indicate feelings of joy, but also politeness or sarcasm!), others’ facial expressions are part of the rich social signals that we humans try to interpret as we move around the world. 🎭
You might already know that the DSEC Lab is interested in how we *learn* to use facial expressions to communicate nonverbally with others. We are currently recruiting 10-15 participants for the EXPRESS-1 study, which focuses on just that! 🌟 You can find more information about the study and how to sign up in the link in bio.
#research #YGK #Kingston #developmentalpsychology #emotions
Our brain allows us to make sense of our environment and guides our behaviour. How does it do this? 🧠 These slides are brief overviews of some key regions of the brain that work together to process all the social and emotional information we encounter in our daily lives. Think about it: your brain has to detect, interpret, and respond to lots of information from other people… including their smiles or frowns, the content of what they say to us, and the context we are in! 🤯
Think of this as a primer to your brain in its social environment. But, make sure to check out the last slide: none of these brain regions work alone! 🧩
Shout out to @DSECLab volunteer and former directed lab student Jay Burns for this guide of the social brain! Have you heard of these brain regions before? ❔
#psychology #neuroscience #brain #research
Welcome to a new series: Psychology Terms Made Easy! 🙌 We’ll be breaking down the terms we use for concepts we study in the lab. First up: nonverbal encoding! 🎭 Flip through the slides to see an explanation of this concept, and an example of when you would be encountering nonverbal encoding in the real world!
Shout out to Honours student Sarah Robichaud for her work in creating this installment of #PTME! What terms do you want us to tackle next? 😁
In our previous posts, we’ve talked about how facial expressions can be measured using electromyography or automated facial movement coding software. 🖥️ Today, DSEC Lab volunteer Logan Goldring explains how one of those programs works! How do we quantify facial expressions? 📏 Flip through these slides to find out!
📢 Something to note: our lab is currently using this type of software to understand how teenagers and adults express their emotions. 🎭 Visit the link in bio if you are interested in being a participant for this study! 🤝
#research #psychology #developmentalpsychology #emotion #explainittome #YGK #YGKstudies #YGKresearch #YGKfamilies #kingstonON
Have you ever heard of ✨ fMRI ✨? It stands for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging! This is a tool that neuroscientists use to understand the brain’s structure and how it works. 🧠 Flip through this slide deck for more info on how fMRI works, and how it was used in one of our lab’s studies to understand how youth’s brains respond to emotional faces and voices! 👉 (Special thanks to Reem Atallah for putting these helpful slides together!)
Have you ever been in an fMRI study? Let us know below! 🤷♂️
What is the amygdala?! 🧠 Neuroscientists have spent a lot of time trying to understand how this part of the brain works! We know that the amygdala responds to important things in our environment, and that its shape and function change across development. Flip through the slides made by DSEC Lab volunteer Bingyi Lin to learn more! 👉
Have you ever wondered whether children and adults express emotions in the same way? 🎭 Think of a toddler getting frustrated with a toy that won’t work, or of a teenager being angry about the rules their parents set. Is their expression of anger similar to that of an angry adult? 💭 This 2017 study looked at whether teenagers and adults used their voice differently when asked to communicate different emotions vocally (meaning, using their tone of voice). 🗣️ Speech analysis of their recordings showed that the two age groups, in fact, were NOT equivalent in the way they used pitch (how high or low your voice sounds) to express various emotions. 🤯 The results of this study suggest that teenagers don’t express their emotions in the same way adults do. This is important to keep in mind when interacting with adolescents! 💬 Have you noticed this in your daily life? Let us know in the comments below! (Thank you to Daniel Nault and Olivia Merulla for preparing these slides!) #research #ygk #developmentalpsychology #psychology #development #adolescence #science
Think back to the last time you felt angry: how did you express it? Like all emotions, anger can be expressed with high emotional intensity (screaming, yelling 🤬) or with low emotional intensity (seething, annoyance 😠). How easy is it for listeners to recognize that someone is feeling angry at these different levels of intensity? 📈 And, what about other emotions? This post covers the findings from one of our recent studies looking at how emotional intensity affects the way listeners interpret vocal expressions of emotion. We found that listeners’ ability to correctly say what emotion the speaker was feeling improved with increasing emotional intensity… but that this pattern was different for different emotions. 🧮 Interesting, no? Tell us what you think in the comments below! 👇 (Special thanks to former @DSECLab Honours student Julia Stratton for preparing this post!)
How do other people know when we're feeling angry or upset? 🎭 Beyond the words we use to communicate, our nonverbal cues (like our facial expression, or the tone of voice we use) can also help others to understand how we are feeling. What we say is only one piece of the puzzle... the way we say something also matters! #nonverbal #communication (Thanks to Daniel Nault & Jay Burns for creating these slides!)
