Future Motor Action Rewrites Emotion Evoked by Previous Event: Emotion Modified by Swiping Up or Down on a Screen Discovered!

　A research team including Kyoshiro Sasaki, a first year doctoral student at the Kyushu University Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies and Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Associate Professor Yuki Yamada of the Faculty of Arts and Science, and Professor Kayo Miura of the Faculty of Human- Environment Studies has discovered a new phenomenon in the realm of human emotion.
　Specifically, the team discovered that emotion evoked by a visual image was modified more positively by subsequent upward swipe on the screen immediately after viewing the image, and more negatively by subsequent downward swipe. That is, the motor actions retrospectively modulated emotion induced by the previous event. This phenomenon suggests that emotion is post-determined: Emotion is formed through the integration of multimodal information input within a short temporal window.

The results of this study were published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, at 08:00 (UK time) on Wednesday, March 25, 2015.

Schematic representation of retrospective modulation of emotion.
The visual image was evaluated positively (negatively) when participants moved their arm upward (downward) immediately after the image disappeared.