Akihiro Tanaka

<p>Previous research has revealed that nonverbal touch can communicate several emotions. This study compared the perception of emotions expressed by touch with that expressed by voice to examine the suitability of these channels to convey positive or negative emotions. In our experiment, the encoder expressed 12 emotions, including complex ones, by touching the decoder’s arm or uttering a syllable /e/, and the decoder judged the emotion. The results showed that positive emotions, such as love and gratitude, tended to be perceived more correctly when expressed by touch, while negative emotions such as sadness and disgust were perceived more correctly when expressed by voice. Interestingly, the average accuracy for touch and voice did not differ under the free expression method. These results suggest that different channels (touch and voice) have different superiority on the perception of positive and negative emotions.</p>

Abstract Emotion perception from facial and vocal expressions is a multisensory process critical for human social interaction. When asked to judge emotions by attending to either face or voice, the accuracy was higher when facial expressions are congruent with vocal expressions than when they are incongruent. This congruency effect was shown to be affected by cultural background. Here we conducted functional MRI alongside a multisensory emotion perception task involving Japanese and Dutch participants. They were presented with movies in which congruent or incongruent emotions were expressed through faces and voices. The participants were asked to judge the emotion of either the face or the voice. Consistent with previous studies, behavioral results showed an interaction between group and task. fMRI results revealed that during voice-based judgement, congruency effects of the primary visual cortex, by means of the task related activity of congruent stimuli subtracted by that of incongruent stimuli, were more prominent in the Dutch group than in Japanese group. Finally, behavioral and neural congruency effects of the primary visual cortex were positively correlated only in the Dutch group. Taken together, our results show that culture affects the activities of early sensory areas in multisensory perception from facial and vocal expressions.

We observed the preschoolers' brain activities in listening to /ra/ and /la/ phonemic contrast by using near-infrared spectroscopy. Based on an auditory oddball paradigm, we used two types of auditory stimulus period where /ra/ phonemes were repeated, and where /ra/ and /la/ phonemes were randomly presented. In the participants of 3-4 years old, there was no difference in brain activities regardless of their English experiences. In the participants of 4-5 years old, on the other hand, the preschoolers with higher exposure to English showed more significant brain activities in their left hemisphere than those with lower exposure to English. These results suggest that English experiences affect the developmental changes of brain activities for phonemic processing of the second language.