Experiential Influences on Multimodal Perception of Emotion

Abstract

The impact of 2 types of learning experiences on children's perception of multimodal emotion cues was ex- amined. Children (aged 7-12 years) were presented with conflicting facial and vocal emotions. The effects of familiarity were tested by varying whether emotions were presented by familiar or unfamiliar adults. The sa- lience of particular emotional expressions was tested by contrasting the performance of physically abused and nonabused children. Children exhibited a preference for auditory expressions produced by their mothers but not by strangers. Additionally, abused children were biased to rely on auditory cues when their own abusive mother was expressing anger. These results are discussed in terms of the impact of both typical and atypical early experiences on the development of emotion perception. Children are confronted early in life with the task of learning to decode and make sense of multiple si- multaneously presented emotional signals. Emo- tional information is conveyed in the form of linguistic (i.e., semantic content of spoken language) and paralinguistic (e.g., facial expression, vocal prosody, physical gestures, and body posture) cues. These affective signals are typically congruent, and this redundancy facilitates efficient processing of multiple emotional signals (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000; deGelder, Bocker, Tuomainen, Hensen, & Vroomen, 1999). Indeed, infants are able to accurately perceive multimodal signals in the first months of life (e.g., Lewkowicz, 1996). Moreover, although inputs from different modalities are processed in separate areas of the brain, our conscious experience is one of co- herent, unified perceptions, reflecting that informa- tion becomes integrated across sensory modalities (Fingelkurts, Fingelkurts, Krause, Moettoenen, & Sams, 2003). Indeed, auditory and visual information are efficiently integrated when sensory information is redundant (Bahrick, Lickliter, & Flom, 2004). However, when sensory channels convey distinct or conflicting information, perceivers must resolve con- flict between signals by preferentially attending to one source of information. Little is currently known about the role of the developing child's experiences in learning to respond to multiple emotion signals. Most research on the development of emotion