Freie Universität Berlin, Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” 117: 2008–2011

Do different modalities of media reception trigger comparable affective processing? Can a dependency on the temporal dynamic of these effects be demonstrated for various stimulus modalities? Are the same brain regions involved in the affective processing of the various modalities?

In three parallel subprojects, neuroscientists pursued the question, whether differences in the processing of affective information can be detected depending on the modality of the stimulus material. A subproject took on the basic comparison of the spatial (fMRT) and temporal (EEG) neurocognitive correlates in processing affective and non-affective representations of specific objects. In another subproject, the question of modality was investigated on the narrative level. To this end, the neuronal processing of picture- and listening-stories was investigated in studies with adults and children at the age of four to eight years. The investigation was conducted with the means of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

In a third, interdisciplinary subproject, film scholars and neuroscientists jointly addressed the question of how music modulates affective reactions to film scenes. To this end, an fMRI study aimed to measure the extent to which the addition of sad or happy music influences the neuronal activity of the viewer when watching a selected set of film scenes. With the help of eMAEX, it was possible to create a set of film clips that met the requirements for an experimental study from a neuroscientific perspective (homogeneous affective valence, high degree of standardization of the staging, large number of comparable scenes). While eMAEX in this project served to ensure methodological standards of experimental research, it also allowed central questions of film studies to be empirically addressed. For example, follow-up studies (“Investigations on the dynamics of affective viewer responses to film”) experimentally investigated the relationship between the aesthetic expressive quality of audiovisual images and the narrativity of film fiction with regard to the emotionalization of viewers.

Staff:

Head of Project:

Prof. Dr. Hermann Kappelhoff
Prof. Dr. Lars Kuchinke

Research Assistants:

Jan-Hendrik Bakels, M.A.
Corinna Pehrs, M.A.
Lorna Schlochtermeier, M.A.