The processing of emotional body expressions within architectural experience: electroencephalography and eye-tracking studies in virtual reality

The perception of emotional body expressions is crucial to human social behavior. Historically, researchers have investigated how we perceive emotional body expressions isolated from their context, characterizing the underlying brain mechanisms without considering the effect of the natural background in which we typically interact. Therefore, the present dissertation aims to study how the processing of emotional body expression is influenced by the surrounding architectural space in which human beings spend most of their lifetime. To this aim, I conducted two initial studies to characterize both avatars’ body postures and virtual architectures in terms of their affective components. The obtained results laid the basis for a third study where avatars and architectural spaces were combined to recreate a controlled environment resembling a social scenario. Specifically, using Virtual Reality (VR) technology, participants dynamically experienced the surrounding architectural space and then faced a virtual avatar with different emotional body postures. The analysis of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals and eye-gaze behavior revealed that the processing of emotional body expressions was influenced by the architectural experience, which modulated early evoked potentials and oscillatory activity related to attentional mechanisms as well as the visual exploration of the avatar’s body. Moreover, the source localization analysis revealed that the processing of both the architecture and body expressions activated motor-related brain areas, proving that the space/cognition interplay is rooted in common neural substrates. Overall, these studies demonstrate that the architectural experience modulates brain mechanisms underpinning the processing of others’ affective states, showing that the mere manipulation of the surrounding architecture is sufficient to influence human behavior in social interactions.