Spatial frequencies and emotional perception
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Andrea De Cesarei
Andrea De Cesarei is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna. His main research interests involve the relationships between perception and emotional responses.
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Maurizio Codispoti
Maurizio Codispoti is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna, and Director of the Emotional Perception Laboratory. His research focuses on emotion, perception and memory, using a multi-method approach, and includes measures of emotion experience, expressive behavior, autonomic physiology, and brain activation.
Abstract
It has been suggested that, during evolution, specific mechanisms developed in order to optimize the detection of threats and opportunities even in perceptually degraded conditions. A naturalistic example of perceptual degradation can be found in blurry images, which contain the coarsest elements of a scene (low spatial frequencies) but lack the fine-grained details (high spatial frequencies). In the past decade, several studies have examined the relation between spatial frequencies and emotions, using a variety of methods, stimuli, and rationales. Here, we conduct a literature survey on the studies that have examined the relation between emotion and spatial frequencies. Some studies have suggested that the low spatial frequencies of emotional stimuli may be processed by a subcortical neural pathway, eventually eliciting emotional responses. However, the evidence provided by the reviewed studies does not support this possibility, for conceptual and methodological reasons (e.g., mistaking the processing of a fuzzy stimulus for subcortical processing). Here, the conceptual and methodological problems present in the reviewed studies are analyzed and discussed, along with suggestions for future research.
About the authors
Andrea De Cesarei is postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna. His main research interests involve the relationships between perception and emotional responses.
Maurizio Codispoti is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna, and Director of the Emotional Perception Laboratory. His research focuses on emotion, perception and memory, using a multi-method approach, and includes measures of emotion experience, expressive behavior, autonomic physiology, and brain activation.
©2013 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Masthead
- Dissecting circuit mechanisms by genetic manipulation of specific neural pathways
- The basal ganglia: motor and cognitive relationships in a clinical neurobehavioral context
- Putting an object in context and acting on it: neural mechanisms of goal-directed response to contextual object
- Aversive motivation and the maintenance of monogamous pair bonding
- The roles of MAGE-D1 in the neuronal functions and pathology of the central nervous system
- Multiple sclerosis and glutamate excitotoxicity
- Spatial frequencies and emotional perception
- A review on the effectiveness of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on post-stroke aphasia
