2012 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
Recognition of facial expressions and prosodic cues with graded emotional intensities in late childhood, adolescence and adult
| Project/Area Number |
23700253
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Research Field |
Sensitivity informatics/Soft computing
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| Research Institution | Nagasaki University |
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Principal Investigator |
FUJISAWA Takashi 長崎大学, 大学院・医歯薬学総合研究科, 助教 (90434894)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2011 – 2012
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| Keywords | 感性脳科学 / 感性認知科学 / 感性生理学 |
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| Research Abstract |
This study investigated the development of late childhood, adolescence and adults to recognize emotional categories of facialexpressions and emotional prosodies with graded emotional intensities. Moreover, we examined investigated the development of the individuals with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which showed poorer recognition performance for angry and sad expressions from both facial and vocal information. As a result, 1) in emotion recognition task, adolescent females were more sensitive to happy and sad prosody than males but not to angry prosody, whereas there were no sex-related differences in emotional prosody in late childhood for any of the emotional categories. 2) The individuals with ASD outperformed the control participants in recognizing inverted sad expressions, indicating enhanced processing of local facial information representing sad emotion. 3) In a brain imaging study, we found that the right PFC in normal development was significantly higher activation than that in ASD group. These results suggest that the emotional development is complexly intertwined with sex and developmental stage.
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