Cross-Species Emotional Priming Effect on the Attention for Emotional Expressions

Perceiving and correctly interpreting emotional expressions is one of the most important abilities for social animals’ communication. It determines the majority of social interactions, group dynamics, and cooperation, being highly relevant for an individual’s survival. With the evolutionary implications of understanding emotions, and the phylogenetical closeness between humans and non-human primates, the core mechanisms of this ability have been hypothesized to be shared across closely related species. In the current study, we aimed to find homologies in human processing of different species’ facial expressions using eye-tracking. Introducing a prime-target paradigm, we tested the influences on human’s attention elicited by priming with differently valenced emotional stimuli depicting human and chimpanzee faces. We demonstrated a shift of attention towards the conspecific emotional target picture that was congruent with the valence depicted on the primer picture. We did not find...Show morePerceiving and correctly interpreting emotional expressions is one of the most important abilities for social animals’ communication. It determines the majority of social interactions, group dynamics, and cooperation, being highly relevant for an individual’s survival. With the evolutionary implications of understanding emotions, and the phylogenetical closeness between humans and non-human primates, the core mechanisms of this ability have been hypothesized to be shared across closely related species. In the current study, we aimed to find homologies in human processing of different species’ facial expressions using eye-tracking. Introducing a prime-target paradigm, we tested the influences on human’s attention elicited by priming with differently valenced emotional stimuli depicting human and chimpanzee faces. We demonstrated a shift of attention towards the conspecific emotional target picture that was congruent with the valence depicted on the primer picture. We did not find this effect to occur with heterospecific primers, although based on post-hoc valence and arousal ratings, the emotional expressions in chimpanzees were interpreted correctly. Explanations of this finding, as well as implications about the involvement of related emotion processing mechanisms between humans and chimpanzees are discussed. Additional systematic investigations of emotional expressions across species are needed to unravel whether the emotion representation mechanisms can extend to process other species’ faces. Through cross-species investigations, we continue to address the gap of a shared evolutionary ancestry between humans and other animals to ultimately answer the question of “Where emotions come from?”.Show less

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Cross-Species Emotional Priming Effect on the Attention for Emotional Expressions