The role of facial expression in the determination of infants’ reaction to the sudden still-face of a social partner was investigated. In a within subject design, 2, 4 and 6-month-old infants were tested in periods of normal interaction interspersed with periods of prolonged still-face episodes in which the female adult social partner adopted either a happy, neutral, or sad static facial expres...

This study builds on the literature on child exposure to marital conflict by testing whether mother-reported marital conflict exposure predicts a child’s P3 event-related potential (ERP) components generated in response to viewing quasi–marital conflict photos. We collected ERP data from 23 children (9–11 years of age) while presenting photos of actors pretending to be a couple depicting interp...

Decoding someone's facial expressions provides insights into his or her emotional experience. Recently, Automatic Facial Coding (AFC) software has been developed to provide measurements of expressions. Previous studies provided first evidence for the sensitivity such systems detect responses in study participants. In present experiment, we set out generalise these results affective as they can ...

Emotion and reward have been proposed to be closely linked to conscious experience, but empirical data are lacking. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a central role in the hedonic dimension of conscious experience; thus potentially a key region in interactions between emotion and consciousness. Here we tested the impact of emotion on conscious experience, and directly investigated the r...

In five studies, the authors examined the effects on cognitive performance of coherence and incoherence between conceptual and experiential sources of affective information. The studies crossed the priming of happy and sad concepts with affective experiences. In different experiments, these included approach or avoidance actions, happy or sad feelings, and happy or sad expressive behaviors. In ...

When I entered “medical student stress” into the search window for Google Scholar I got over 1.5M hits. Judging by my own experience and the few (compared to 1.5M) articles I have read, we don’t find a very happy family portrait. Many of the articles which compose this issue of CMEJ speak to high levels of stress and burnout, worries about finding residency positions and jobs, and the experienc...