Processing of emotional body expressions in health and disease

  

Description:

The perception of emotion is impaired for a variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, or autism spectrum diorder. We model emotional body movements with highly controlled properties by morphing techniques and techniques that are based on learned movement primitives, which we derive from data by blind source separation.These highly controlled stimuli are used in studies with patients to quantify their capability to recognize emotions form body movements. In additon, we use such stimuli to investigate correclates of the processing of emotion from body movements in imaging experiments.

 Motion style recogniton in schizophrenic patients

Figure 1: Emotion and gender recogniton from body motion in schizophrenic patients (SZ) and healthy contgrols (CO) (from Peterman et a. 2013).

 

NIRS activity for emotional body expressions

Figure 2: Activity patterns measured by Near Infrared Süectroscopy (NIRS) contrasting different emotional body expressions (from Schneider et al. 2013).

 

 

Publications

Sperber, C., Christensen, A., Ilg, W., Giese, M. A. & Karnath, H.-O. (2018). Apraxia of object-related action does not depend on visual feedback. Cortex, 99:103-117. [More] 
Goldberg, H., Christensen, A., Flash, T., Giese, M. A. & Malach, R. (2015). Brain activity correlates with emotional perception induced by dynamic avatars. NeuroImage, 122:306-317. [More] 
Sacheli, L. M., Christensen, A., Giese, M. A., Taubert, N., Pavone, E. F., Aglioti, S. M. et al. (2015). Prejudiced interactions: implicit racial bias reduces predictive simulation during joint action with an out-group avatar. Scientific Reports, 5, 8507. [More] 
Schneider, S., Christensen, A., Häußinger, F., Fallgatter, A. J., Giese, M. A. & Ehlis, A.-C. (2014). Show me how you walk and I tell you how you feel - A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study on emotion perception based on human gait. Neuroimage, 85, 380-390. [More] 
Peterman, J. S., Christensen, A., Giese, M. A. & Park, S. (2014). Extraction of social information from gait in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine, 1-10. [More]