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! 👉
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!)
If you’ve been following us for some time (👋), you may already know that children and adolescents are less accurate than adults in vocal emotion recognition tasks, where they are asked to identify what another person is feeling based on their tone of voice. WHY might that be? 🤔 One potential explanation may be that youth and adults perceive vocal emotions differently 👂… which could influence how they interpret them in emotion recognition tasks. Flip through to read more about an earlier study that looked at this very question, and let us know what you think below! 👍 (Special thanks to Bingyi Lin, who put together this infographic about the study!) #research #developmentalpsychology #emotionrecognition #scicomm
