The Relationship Between Bodily, Autonomic, and Communicative Behaviors and the Experiential and Cognitive Aspects of Emotion

Background/Objectives: Facial expressions are central to nonverbal communication and social cognition, and their recognition is shaped not only by facial features but also by contextual cues and prior experience. In high-threat contexts, rapid and accurate decoding of others’ emotions is adaptively advantageous. Grounded in neurocognitive models of face processing and vigilance, we tested whether brief perceptual adaptation to emotionally salient scenes, real-world disaster exposure, and pre-traumatic stress reactions enhance facial-emotion categorization. Methods: Fifty healthy adults reported prior direct exposure to catastrophic events (present/absent) and completed the Pre-Traumatic Stress Reactions Checklist (Pre-Cl; low/high). In a computerized task, participants viewed a single adaptor image for 5 s—negative (disaster), positive (pleasant environment), or neutral (phase-scrambled)—and then categorized a target face as emotional (fearful, angry, happy) or neutral as quickly and accurately as possible. Performance was compared across adaptation conditions and target emotions and examined as a function of disaster exposure and Pre-Cl. Results: Emotional adaptation (negative or positive) yielded better performance than neutral adaptation. Higher-order interactions among adaptation condition, target emotion, disaster exposure, and Pre-Cl indicated that the magnitude of facilitation varied across specific facial emotions and was modulated by both experiential (exposed vs. non-exposed) and dispositional (low vs. high Pre-Cl) factors. These effects support a combined influence of short-term contextual tuning and longer-term experience on facial-emotion categorization. Conclusions: Brief exposure to emotionally salient scenes facilitates subsequent categorization of facial emotions relative to neutral baselines, and this benefit is differentially shaped by prior disaster exposure and pre-traumatic stress. The findings provide behavioral evidence that short-term perceptual adaptation and longer-term experiential predispositions jointly modulate a fundamental communicative behavior, consistent with neurocognitive accounts in which context-sensitive visual pathways and salience systems dynamically adjust to support adaptive responding under threat. Full article

Background: Emotional prosody refers to the variations in pitch, pause, melody, rhythm, and stress of pronunciation conveying emotional meaning during speech. Although several studies demonstrated that the cerebellum is involved in the network subserving recognition of emotional facial expressions, there is only preliminary evidence suggesting its possible contribution to recognising emotional prosody by modulating the activity of cerebello-prefrontal circuits. The present study aims to further explore the role of the left and right cerebellum in the recognition of emotional prosody in a sample of healthy individuals who were required to identify emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, and neutral) from vocal stimuli selected from a validated database (EMOVO corpus). Methods: Anodal transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) was used in offline mode to modulate cerebellar activity before the emotional prosody recognition task, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to monitor stimulation-related changes in oxy- and deoxy- haemoglobin (O2HB and HHB) in prefrontal areas (PFC). Results: Right cerebellar stimulation reduced reaction times in the recognition of all emotions (except neutral and disgust) as compared to both the sham and left cerebellar stimulation, while accuracy was not affected by the stimulation. Haemodynamic data revealed that right cerebellar stimulation reduced O2HB and increased HHB in the PFC bilaterally relative to the other stimulation conditions. Conclusions: These findings are consistent with the involvement of the right cerebellum in modulating emotional processing and in regulating cerebello-prefrontal circuits. Full article

Background: Acute stress induction is essential in psychology research for understanding physiological and psychological responses. In this study, ‘acute stress’ refers to a short-term, immediate stress response—distinct from chronic, long-term stress exposure. Traditional methods, such as the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), have ecological validity and resource-efficiency limitations. This study introduces the Interactive Multitask Performance Response Observation (IMPRO) protocol, a novel stress-induction method utilizing speech improvisation in a dynamic and unpredictable social setting. Methods: Thirty-five healthy adults (aged 18–38 years; 19 males, 16 females) participated in the study. The IMPRO protocol consisted of three speech improvisation tasks with increasing cognitive and social stressors. Salivary cortisol was used as a biochemical marker of acute stress, while electrodermal activity (EDA) provided real-time autonomic arousal measurements. Stress responses were assessed using paired t-tests for cortisol levels and repeated-measures ANOVA for EDA variations across experimental stages. Results: Salivary cortisol levels significantly increased from baseline (M = 2.68 nM, SD = 0.99) to post-task (M = 3.54 nM, SD = 1.25, p = 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.59), confirming hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis activation. EDA showed a significant rise during the anticipation phase (p < 0.001), peaking at the final task and decreasing during recovery (η² = 0.643). Conclusions: The IMPRO protocol effectively induces acute stress responses, providing a scalable, ecologically valid alternative to traditional stress paradigms. Its low-cost, adaptable design makes it ideal for research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral sciences. Future studies should explore its application in clinical populations and group settings. Full article