Understanding emotions is central to human interaction, and difficulty interpreting the emotions of other people has been linked to social and emotional difficulties in some people who experience mental health problems. Emotions are normally expressed and perceived via multiple senses. This means that in order to fully understand how everyday emotion processing is altered in individuals with certain life experiences, it is necessary to investigate how emotions are recognised using multiple different senses.
In this study we will investigate multisensory processing of emotional information from faces and voices while recording heart rate, skin response and electrical brain activity. This will allow us to investigate whether the process of combining information from multiple senses to understand emotions might be altered in individuals with certain experiences, and whether this could help us to explain some of the social and emotional difficulties that are sometimes experienced as part of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).