Accurate perception of an individual’s identity and emotion derived from their actions and behavior is essential for successful social functioning. Here we determined the role of identity in the representation of emotional whole-body actions using visual adaptation paradigms. Participants adapted to actors performing different whole-body actions in a happy and sad fashion. Following adaptation subsequent neutral actions appeared to convey the opposite emotion. We demonstrate two different emotional action aftereffects showing distinctive adaptation characteristics. For one short-lived aftereffect, adaptation to the (...) emotion expressed by an individual resulted in biases in the perception of the expression of emotion by other individuals, indicating an identity-independent representation of emotional actions. A second, longer lasting, aftereffect was observed where adaptation to the emotion expressed by an individual resulted in longer-term biases in the perception of the expressions of emotion only by the same individual; this indicated an additional identity-dependent representation of emotional actions. Together, the presence of these two aftereffects indicates the existence of two mechanisms for coding emotional actions, only one of which takes into account the actor’s identity. The results that we observe might parallel processing of emotion from face and voice. (shrink)

Accurate perception of the emotional signals conveyed by others is crucial for successful social interaction. Such perception is influenced not only by sensory input, but also by knowledge we have about the others’ emotions. This study addresses the issue of whether knowing that the other’s emotional state is congruent or incongruent with their displayed emotional expression (“genuine” and “fake”, respectively) affects the neural mechanisms underpinning the perception of their facial emotional expressions. We used a visual adaptation paradigm to investigate this (...) question in three experiments employing increasing adaptation durations. The adapting stimuli consisted of photographs of emotional facial expressions of joy and anger, purported to reflect (in-)congruency between felt and expressed emotion, displayed by professional actors. A Validity checking procedure ensured participants had the correct knowledge about the (in-)congruency. Significantly smaller adaptation aftereffects were obtained when participants knew that the displayed expression was incongruent with the felt emotion, following all tested adaptation periods. This study shows that knowledge relating to the congruency between felt and expressed emotion modulates face expression aftereffects. We argue that this reflects that the neural substrate responsible for the perception of facial expressions of emotion incorporates the presumed felt emotion underpinning the expression. (shrink)