Descripción del proyecto
Cómo se perciben las emociones ante la ausencia de visión
Las expresiones faciales desvelan el estado emocional de las personas. Desde la felicidad y la sorpresa, hasta el miedo y la aversión, la interpretación se basa en la detección de la información saliente. Se trata de una labor que principalmente se lleva a cabo a través de la visión. Las señales afectivas se transmiten mediante la comunicación no verbal y se pueden experimentar y percibir exclusivamente a través de la vista. En este contexto, el proyecto LEAS, financiado con fondos europeos, investigará cómo se perciben las emociones ante la ausencia de visión. En concreto, de qué modo las personas con ceguera congénita describen las emociones a través del lenguaje. A fin de encontrar las respuestas, LEAS estudiará cuál es la proporción que depende de la visión en la representación de las sensaciones corporales emocionales y si el flujo de afecto se codifica de forma diferente en el encéfalo de las personas con visión y las personas con ceguera.
Objetivo
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.
Ámbito científico
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Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinador
1348 Louvain La Neuve
Bélgica