Julie Grèzes

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris | ENS · Département d'Etudes Cognitives

When entering a subway car affording multiple targets for action, how do we decide, very quickly, where to sit, particularly when in the presence of a potential danger? It is unclear, from existing motor and emotion theories, whether our attention would be allocated toward the seat on which we intend to sit on or whether it would be oriented toward...

Several studies have shown that individuals automatically integrate the actions of other individuals into their own action plans, thus facilitating action coordination. What happens to this mechanism in situations of danger? This capacity could either be reduced, in order to allocate more cognitive resources for individualistic actions, or be maint...

Adaptation to our social environment requires learning how to avoid potentially harmful situations, such as encounters with aggressive individuals. Threatening facial expressions can evoke automatic stimulus-driven reactions, but whether their aversive motivational value suffices to drive instrumental active avoidance remains unclear. When asked to...

Social adaptation requires humans to respond to others’ nonverbal emotional cues, by selecting and executing adaptive motor responses. In this chapter, we provide a general overview of how visual perception of others’ emotional expressions, particularly threatening faces and bodies, promotes rapid processing and elaboration of multiple opportunitie...

Depression is linked to dysfunctional appetitive and aversive motivational systems and effort-based decision-making, yet whether such deficits extend to social decisions remains unclear. Participants (23 non-depressed, 48 depressed - 24 with a past history of suicide attempt) completed a social decision-making task consisting in freely choosing whe...

We often effortlessly take the perceptual perspective of others: we represent some aspect of the environment that others currently perceive. However, taking someone's perspective can interfere with one's perceptual processing: another person's gaze can spontaneously affect our ability to detect stimuli in a scene. But it is still unclear whether ou...

Sharing emotions with other individuals is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research proposed that experiencing intense and similar emotions with other individuals reinforces social bonds. However, several aspects of this phenomenon remain unclear, notably whether social bonding requires the convergence and synchronization of emotions in the group...

Avoiding threatening individuals is pivotal for adaptation to our social environment. Yet, it remains unclear whether social threat avoidance is subtended by goal-directed processes, in addition to stimulus-response associations. To test this, we manipulated outcome predictability during spontaneous approach/avoidance decisions from avatars display...

Background Individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are characterized by atypicalities in social interactions, compared to Typically Developing individuals (TD). The social motivation theory posits that these difficulties stem from diminished anticipation, reception, and/or learning from social rewards. Although learning from socioemotional...

Theatre is a multisecular, social and aesthetic experience. As such, it presents a promising ground to explore the collective and emotional bases of audience enjoyment. In this framework, our goal was to investigate the relationship between individual emotion, collective effervescence and enjoyment of theatrical plays. For this purpose, we measured...

Emotional signals, notably those signaling threat, benefit from prioritized processing in the human brain. Yet, it remains unclear whether perceptual decisions about the emotional, threat-related aspects of stimuli involve specific or similar neural computations compared to decisions about their non-threatening/non-emotional components. We develope...

Adaptative action selection in threatening social contexts, for example when facing aggressive individuals, is core to social behavior. It is debated whether, when facing threat, initial action opportunities are mostly determined by automatic action tendencies – i.e., reactive stimulus-response (SR) associations – or by rapid and implicit goal-dire...

Recent research suggests that goal-directed processes, in addition to stimulus-response associations, play a central role in social threat avoidance. To test this, we manipulated outcome predictability in avoidance decisions from avatars displaying angry facial expressions by manipulating action-outcome contingencies predictability, which affects g...

Sharing emotions with other individuals is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research proposed that experiencing intense and similar emotions with other individuals reinforces social bonds. However, several aspects remain unclear, notably whether social bonding requires the convergence and synchronization of emotions in the group, and whether these...

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are characterized by atypicalities in social interactions, compared to Typically Developing individuals (TD). The social motivation theory posits that these difficulties stem from diminished anticipation, reception, and/or learning from social rewards. Although learning from socioemotional outcomes i...

We often effortlessly take the perceptual perspective of others: we represent some aspect of the environment that others currently perceive. However, taking someone's perspective can interfere with one's perceptual processing: another person's gaze can spontaneously affect our ability to detect stimuli in a scene. But it is still unclear whether ou...

Research on collective emotion spans social sciences, psychology and philosophy. There are detailed case studies and diverse theories of collective emotion. However, experimental evidence regarding the universal characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective emotion remains sparse. Moreover, current research mainly relies on emotion se...

Individuals’ opportunities for action in threatening social contexts largely depend on their social power. While powerful individuals can afford to confront aggressors and dangers, powerless individuals need others’ support and better avoid direct challenges. Here, we investigated if adopting expansive or contracted poses, which signal dominance an...

Under threat, the combinations of fearful display and gaze orientation emitted by others can provide crucial information about the presence and location of the danger, as well as whether other individuals are in distress and need help. While it has been shown that threat-induced anxiety facilitates the processing of fearful faces, the question rema...

Feeling happy, or judging whether someone else is feeling happy are two distinct facets of emotions that nevertheless rely on similar physiological and neural activity. Differentiating between these two states, also called Self/Other distinction, is an essential aspect of empathy, but how exactly is it implemented? In non-emotional cognition, the t...

Adaptation to our social environment requires learning how to avoid potentially harmful situations, such as encounters with aggressive individuals. Threatening facial expressions can evoke automatic stimulus-driven reactions, but whether their aversive motivational value suffices to drive instrumental active avoidance remains unclear. When asked to...

Feeling happy, or seeing someone feeling happy are two distinct facets of emotions that nevertheless rely on similar physiological and neural activity. The distinction between those two facets is essential, but how is it implemented? In non-emotional cognition, the transient neural response evoked at each heartbeat, or heartbeat evoked response (HE...

Objectif Malgré la connaissance d’un fonctionnement cognitif et socio-émotionnel altéré par une privation totale de sommeil (PTS), les mécanismes par lesquels la PTS altère les décisions dans des contextes sociaux sont peu rapportés. Nous voulons ici : – caractériser, pour des sujets en PTS, les décisions de contacts sociaux avec des individus mena...

A bustling literature spanning philosophy, psychology and social sciences aims for a better understanding of the collective patterns of emotions stirring human society. To date, however, this endeavour is still in need of a unifying conceptual framework and empirical evidence regarding the characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective...

Reactions to danger have been depicted as antisocial but research has shown that supportive behaviors (e.g., helping injured others, giving information or reassuring others) prevail in life-threatening circumstances. Why is it so? Previous accounts have put the emphasis on the role of psychosocial factors, such as the maintenance of social norms or...

Interoceptive Accuracy (IAc), the precision with which one assesses the signals arising from one’s own body, is receiving increasing attention in the literature. IAc has mainly been approached as an individual trait and has been investigated through the cardiac modality using mostly non ecological methods. Such studies consensually designate the an...

Study Objectives Total sleep deprivation is known to have significant detrimental effects on cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms by which total sleep loss disturbs decision-making in social contexts are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of total sleep deprivation on approach/avoidance decisions w...

Social trust is linked to a host of positive societal outcomes, including improved economic performance, lower crime rates and more inclusive institutions. Yet, the origins of trust remain elusive, partly because social trust is difficult to document in time. Building on recent advances in social cognition, we design an algorithm to automatically g...

The ability to swiftly and accurately respond to others' non-verbal signals, such as their emotional expressions, constitutes one of the building blocks for social adaptation. It is debated whether rapid action tendencies to socio-emotional signals solely depend upon stimulus-evoked pre-decisional motor bias or can also engage goal-directed (decisi...

Progress in understanding the emergence of pathological anxiety depends on the availability of paradigms effective in inducing anxiety in a simple, consistent and sustained manner. The Threat-of-Shock paradigm has typically been used to elicit anxiety, but poses ethical issues when testing vulnerable populations. Moreover, it is not clear from past...

If collective reactions to danger have long been portrayed as antisocial and self-preservative, research has shown that prosociality is maintained and sometimes fostered in life-threatening circumstances. In this research, we interviewed 32 survivors of the attacks at ‘Le Bataclan’ (on the evening of 13-11-2015 in Paris, France) with the aims of of...

Individuals’ opportunities for action in threatening social contexts largely depend on their social power. While powerful individuals can afford to confront aggressors and dangers, powerless individuals need others’ support and better avoid direct challenges. Here, we investigated if adopting expansive or constrictive postures, which function as so...

Socially-relevant signals benefit from prioritized processing, from initial orientation to behavioral choice elaboration. Yet it remains unclear whether such prioritized processing engages specific or similar neural computations as the processing of non-social cues during decision-making. To address this question, we developed a novel behavioral pa...

Progress in understanding the emergence of pathological anxiety depends on the availability of paradigms effective in inducing anxiety in a simple, consistent and sustained way. Much progress has been made using the Threat-of-Shock paradigm (TOS), which generates anxiety through the delivery of unpredictable electric shocks to participants. However...

Background: Adopting expansive vs. constrictive postures related to high vs. low levels of social power has been suggested to induce changes in testosterone and cortisol levels, and thereby to mimic hormonal correlates of dominance behavior. However, these findings have been challenged by several non-replications recently. Despite this growing bod...

Most emotional stimuli, including facial expressions, are judged not only by their intrinsic characteristics, but also by the context in which they appear. Gaze direction, for example, modifies the salience of explicitly presented facial displays. Yet, it is unknown whether this effect persists when facial displays are no longer task-relevant. Here...

Background. Adopting expansive versus constrictive postures related to high versus low levels of social power has been suggested to induce changes in testosterone and cortisol levels, and thereby to mimic hormonal correlates of dominance behavior. However, these findings have been challenged by several non-replications recently. Although there is t...

Background. Adopting expansive versus constrictive postures related to high versus low levels of social power has been suggested to induce changes in testosterone and cortisol levels, and thereby to mimic hormonal correlates of dominance behavior. However, these findings have been challenged by several non-replications recently. Although there is t...

Facial morphology has been shown to influence perceptual judgments of emotion in a way that is shared across human observers. Here we demonstrate that these shared associations between facial morphology and emotion coexist with strong variations unique to each human observer. Interestingly, a large part of these idiosyncratic associations does not...

Mere affiliation to a social group alters people’s perception of other individuals. One suggested mechanism behind such influence is that group membership triggers divergent visual facial representations for in-group and out-group members, which could constrain face processing. Here, using EEG under fMRI during a group categorization task, we inves...

Individual reactions to danger in humans are often characterized as antisocial and self-preservative. Yet, more than 50 years of research have showed that humans often seek social partners and behave pro-socially when confronted by danger. This research has relied on post hoc verbal reports, which fall short of capturing the more spontaneous reacti...

Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people's leader preferences are partly driven by early s...

Although, the quest to understand emotional processing in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has led to an impressive number of studies, the picture that emerges from this research remains inconsistent. Some studies find that Typically Developing (TD) individuals outperform those with ASD in emotion recognition tasks, others find no s...

Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people’s leader preferences are partly driven by early s...

Emotional signals influence others' behavior. They trigger a host of responses in the observer. Perception of emotional signals incorporates not only the appraisal of the emotional content of the signal but also the preparation of an adaptive reaction to it. This interplay between two processes is reflected in the limbic–motor interactions in the h...

Efficient detection and reaction to negative signals in the environment is essential for survival. In social situations, these signals are often ambiguous and can imply different levels of threat for the observer, thereby making their recognition susceptible to contextual cues – such as gaze direction when judging facial displays of emotion. Howeve...

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two...

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has been applied successfully to task-based and resting-based fMRI recordings to investigate which neural markers distinguish individuals with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) from controls. While most studies have focused on brain connectivity during resting state episodes and regions of interest approaches (R...

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of s...

The contagion model of emotional propagation has almost become a dogma in cognitive science. We turn here to the evolutionary approach to communicative interactions to probe the limits of the contagion model. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The contagion model of emotional propagation has almost become a dogma in cognitive science. We turn here to the evolutionary approach to communicative interactions to probe the limits of the contagion model.

Socially situated thought and behaviour are pervasive and vitally important in human society. The social brain has become a focus of study for researchers in the neurosciences, psychology, biology and other areas of behavioural science, and it is becoming increasingly clear that social behaviour is heavily dependent on shared representations. Any s...

It is expected that natural selection has endowed our auditory apparatus with the ability to adaptively prioritize information that is crucial for survival and reproduction, such as vocal emotional signals emitted by our conspecifics, even in a noisy and dynamic natural environment (signals progressively emerge or fade away in noise as conspecifics...

An important evolutionary function of emotions is to prime individuals for action. Although functional neuroimaging has provided evidence for such a relationship, little is known about the anatomical substrates allowing the limbic system to influence cortical motor-related areas. Using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and probabilistic...

Buts de l’étude Le niveau d’expertise motrice des individus influence la manière de percevoir les actions d’autrui. Des individus observant des actions motrices qu’ils maîtrisent parfaitement recruteront plus intensément le réseau neuronal de l’observation d’actions que des sujets ne possédant pas le bagage moteur leur permettant de réaliser ces ac...

Humans convey emotions through different ways. Gait is one of them. Here we propose to use gait data to highlight features that characterize emotions. Gait analysis study usually focuses on stance phase, frequency, footstep length. Here the study is based on the joint angles obtained from inverse kinematics computation from the 3D motion-capture da...

Research in social cognition has mainly focused on the detection and comprehension of others' mental and emotional states. Doing so, past studies have adopted a "contemplative" view of the role of the observer engaged in a social interaction. However, the adaptive problem posed by the social environment is first and foremost that of coordination, w...

The emotional component of human walking patterns can be characterized by a limited set of kinematic cues [8]. Here, we tested whether artificial synthesis of emotional gaits based on these cues can facilitate emotion perception in human observers. To this purpose, we recorded neutral gaits and artificially modified the walking speed, the upper-bod...

We question the idea that the mirror neuron system is the substrate of social affordances perception, and we suggest that most of the activity seen in the parietal and premotor cortex of the human brain is independent of mirroring activity as characterized in macaques, but rather reflects a process of one's own action specification in response to s...

Little is known about the spread of emotions beyond dyads. Yet, it is of importance for explaining the emergence of crowd behaviors. Here, we experimentally addressed whether emotional homogeneity within a crowd might result from a cascade of local emotional transmissions where the perception of another's emotional expression produces, in the obser...

People display facial reactions when exposed to others' emotional expressions, but exactly what mechanism mediates these facial reactions remains a debated issue. In this study, we manipulated two critical perceptual features that contribute to determining the significance of others' emotional expressions: the direction of attention (toward or away...

Mean (SEM) intensity ratings of feelings (DOC)

Mean (SEM) recognition rate. (DOC)

Mean activity (SEM) between 300 and 700 ms for the Corrugator muscle region submitted to a repeated measures ANOVA with within-subject factors of Target of Attention (Self or Other) and Level of Emotion (1, 2, 3, 4). (DOC)

Mean (SEM) data from the zygomatic activity submitted to a repeated measures ANOVA using Target of Attention (Self or Other), Level of Emotion (1, 2, 3, 4) and Time Windows (10) as within-subject factors. (DOC)

Mean (SEM) data from the Corrugator activity submitted to a repeated measures ANOVA using Target of Attention (Self or Other), Level of Emotion (1, 2, 3, 4) and Time Windows (10) as within-subject factors. (DOC)