Why and How We Study Socio-Emotional Processing Development

Time: 6^th May 14:00 CEST

It might seem that skill in processing of faces and voices, as well as the emotional expressions they convey, is a simple matter. We analyse faces and voices along many different metrics everyday without so much as a second thought. However, human faces and voices are uniquely richly communicative, and upon closer examination, it seems as though these skills we take for granted are in fact not present at birth. The journey to typical adult processing of facial and vocal expressions is a protracted one, and there are many different points at which deficits can (and often do) emerge. Impairments in these early building blocks of more sophisticated social processing can have wide-reaching implications for mature functioning. So, now knowing the reasons for studying these processes, the question of ‘how’ emerges—adult and child paradigms cannot work with preverbal, largely immobile infants, and so psychologists have had to construct many innovative ways to study this age-group. We will explore the behavioural and physiological methods that have been employed, especially EEG and ERP. The group-work component for this workshop will be a study-design task.

Workshop content

• We will address the question of why it is useful to study socio-emotional skills, especially emotional expression processing
• We will discuss why it is important to understand the developmental trajectory of these skills.
• We will discuss methods for studying these processes (behavioural and physiological) in infants and young children.
• We will introduce the basics of EEG and how to understand the results.
• We will discuss which EEG and ERP components are relevant to the literature here.
• Students will be split into groups and asked to design a study in this field.

Reading List

Kret, M. E., Prochazkova, E., Sterck, E. H., & Clay, Z. (2020). Emotional expressions in human and non-human great apes. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Bryant, G., & Barrett, H. C. (2008). Vocal emotion recognition across disparate cultures. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(1-2), 135-148.

Poulin-Dubois, D., Hastings, P. D., Chiarella, S. S., Geangu, E., Hauf, P., Ruel, A., & Johnson, A. (2018). The eyes know it: Toddlers' visual scanning of sad faces is predicted by their theory of mind skills. PloS one, 13(12), e0208524.

For an Overview of Methodologies Used

EEG/ERP: Sur, S., & Sinha, V. K. (2009). Event-related potential: An overview. Industrial psychiatry journal, 18(1), 70. *