Best Article Award Ceremony in New York with Annika Ziereis and Anne Schacht

For humans, voices and faces are important sources of social and emotional information. Their perception is also influenced by situational factors and the content associated with them. Psychologists Annika Ziereis and Anne Schacht from the University of Göttingen have investigated how learned emotional contextual stimuli influence the perception of faces at different processing levels. Their research was honored with the "Best Article Award" of the journal Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New York City on November 23-24.

"Several lines of evidence suggest that we can automatically integrate and process such emotional aspects. Our results also show relatively early emotion effects in neural face processing for negative stimuli, regardless of the task participants were performing in the experiment," said Schacht, head of the Department of Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior at the Georg Elias Müller Institute of Psychology at the University of Göttingen.

The test subjects first studied different faces and voices with negative, positive and neutral expressions on a computer at home and learned to correctly match the pairs. The researchers then tested the associations learned in the laboratory with two tasks. The use of neurophysiological EEG measurements allowed the temporal dynamics of these processes to be studied in detail. "We can show that attention plays a special role in a later processing phase," says first author Ziereis. "When participants were asked to classify the associated faces into positive, negative or neutral categories, the associated emotional effects lasted longer and were also detectable for positive stimuli. The findings make an important contribution to understanding the neural basis of emotional face processing and the role of motivational attention in this process.

More than 2700 researchers from over 40 countries attended the 65th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society 2024. The annual meeting is one of the most important international gatherings in cognitive science and psychology. The research was conducted as part of Ziereis' doctoral work in the Research Training Group 2070 Understanding Social Relationships. More information is available at www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/de/anap/forschung and www.uni-goettingen.de/de/509586.html.

Press release by the University of Göttingen