Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Emotional expressions are critical tools for social communication; they inform conspecifics about important events in their environment, as well as provide valuable information about the emotional state of the emitter. As such, the ability to rapidly and accurately decode the emotional information carried by an expression is an essential aspect of daily life and can even become crucial for survival. Emotional communication is multi-modal, typically relying on both visual and acoustic channels (as well as touch, depending on circumstances). Importantly, emotional information conveyed through the auditory modality can be more efficient, as it does not require direct visual contact and can thus reach a large number of individuals scattered across a wide area.
There is strong evidence showing that emotional stimuli, especially those signalling possible danger, are better remembered than similar ones but with no affective value (i.e., neutral). Nonetheless, there are still several open questions regarding the nature and specificity of this memory facilitation by emotion, particularly for auditory information. Thus, the general aim of this research program is to answer these questions employing carefully-controlled experimental paradigms, using ecologically-valid stimuli and measuring brain responses with state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques, namely functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrarred spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG). Specifically, we will investigate the brain mechanisms involved in the processing of different types of emotion-conveying information — across modalities (visual and auditory), classes (facial vs. body expressions; speech vs. nonlinguistic vocalizations) and with different degrees of biological relevance (e.g., voice vs. music) — and their interaction with memory. The main questions to be addressed are:
(1) What are the spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity associated with memory encoding and retrieval across different emotion and modalities?
(2) How specific are emotional memories?
(3) How does stimulus relevance affect the emotional modulation of memory?
Our multipronged approach will allow us to gain a better characterization of brain responses associated with these processes, given the complementarity of the techniques used, in terms of temporal and spatial resolution. Moreover, it will provide invaluable information regarding the precise nature of the signals, and their relation to the underlying neuronal activity, obtained with these widely used methodologies.
Taken together, these studies will contribute to a better understanding of how the brain processes emotional information and how it interacts with cognitive processes across different classes and sensory modalities. This knowledge, in turn, will help to develop a supra-modal theory of emotion.