title: Emotional and movement-related body postures modulate visual processing.
abstract: Human body postures convey useful information for understanding others' emotions and intentions. To investigate at which stage of visual processing emotional and movement-related information conveyed by bodies is discriminated, we examined event-related potentials elicited by laterally presented images of bodies with static postures and implied-motion body images with neutral, fearful or happy expressions. At the early stage of visual structural encoding (N190), we found a difference in the sensitivity of the two hemispheres to observed body postures. Specifically, the right hemisphere showed a N190 modulation both for the motion content (i.e. all the observed postures implying body movements elicited greater N190 amplitudes compared with static postures) and for the emotional content (i.e. fearful postures elicited the largest N190 amplitude), while the left hemisphere showed a modulation only for the motion content. In contrast, at a later stage of perceptual representation, reflecting selective attention to salient stimuli, an increased early posterior negativity was observed for fearful stimuli in both hemispheres, suggesting an enhanced processing of motivationally relevant stimuli. The observed modulations, both at the early stage of structural encoding and at the later processing stage, suggest the existence of a specialized perceptual mechanism tuned to emotion- and action-related information conveyed by human body postures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy, CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cesena Campus, University of Bologna, 47521 Cesena, Italy.
authors.forename: Khatereh
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Borhani
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy, CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cesena Campus, University of Bologna, 47521 Cesena, Italy.
authors.forename: Elisabetta
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Làdavas
authors.affiliation: CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cesena Campus, University of Bologna, 47521 Cesena, Italy, Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany, and.
authors.forename: Martin E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Maier
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy, CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cesena Campus, University of Bologna, 47521 Cesena, Italy, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, 00142 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Alessio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Avenanti
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, 40126 Bologna, Italy, CSRNC, Centre for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cesena Campus, University of Bologna, 47521 Cesena, Italy, caterina.bertini@unibo.it.
authors.forename: Caterina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bertini
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007697:Kinesics; D008297:Male; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011187:Posture / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: N190; body postures; early posterior negativity (EPN); emotion perception; visual structural encoding