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Looking for Emotions in the Absence of Sight

Projektbeschreibung

Wahrnehmung von Emotionen ohne Sehvermögen

Der Gesichtsausdruck eines Menschen offenbart seinen Gefühlszustand. Die Interpretation von Gefühlen von Zufriedenheit und Erstaunen bis hin zu Angst und Abscheu beruht auf dem Erkennen vordergründiger Informationen – vornehmlich mithilfe des Sehvermögens. Affektive Signale werden durch nonverbale Kommunikation vermittelt und können daher nur über das Sehen erlebt und wahrgenommen werden. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird das EU-finanzierte Projekt LEAS untersuchen, wie Emotionen ohne Sehvermögen wahrgenommen werden, insbesondere wie geburtsblinde Menschen Gefühle mithilfe von Sprache beschreiben. Dazu wird das Projektteam erforschen, inwieweit die Repräsentation emotionaler körperlicher Wahrnehmung vom Sehvermögen abhängt und ob der Affektstrom in den Gehirnen sehender und blinder Menschen unterschiedlich kodiert wird.

Ziel

Affective abilities are crucial for social interactions, as understanding, predicting and responding to emotional signals is necessary for the optimal functioning of daily life. Of note, emotion recognition relies on the detection of salient information, a task chiefly accomplished through vision. As a matter of fact, affective signals are largely conveyed through nonverbal communication, and can be perceived exclusively through sight, as the redness on the cheeks when feeling embarrassed. Indeed, previous behavioral evidence and functional brain data point to the crucial role of sight in emotional processing. Therefore, a question naturally arises: how emotions are experienced/perceived in absence of vision? Specifically, how do congenitally blind individuals describe emotions through language? Is their representation of affective states in the body different from a sighted subject? Do they retain the same mechanisms of emotional coding in the brain? To answer these questions, the proposal (1) will explore the emotion ontology of sighted and congenitally blind individuals, revealing to what extent emotion semantics develops independently from the sense of vision; (2) will study how much the representation of emotional bodily sensations depends on sight; (3) will investigate whether the stream of affect is differently encoded in the brain of sighted and blind individuals. The action will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, exploiting methods ranging from computational linguistics to psychological assessment, as well as from behavioral to neuroimaging investigations. The innovative framework here proposed will advance our knowledge of sensory deprivation and emotion by mapping affective states in language, body and brain. Importantly, the current action will highlight factors influencing the psychological wellbeing of visually impaired subjects and provide new insights to foster their inclusion in a society which strongly depends on sight.

Wissenschaftliches Gebiet

Koordinator

UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN
Netto-EU-Beitrag
€ 166 320,00
Adresse
PLACE DE L UNIVERSITE 1
1348 Louvain La Neuve
Belgien

Auf der Karte ansehen

Region
Région wallonne Prov. Brabant Wallon Arr. Nivelles
Aktivitätstyp
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Gesamtkosten
€ 166 320,00