BACKGROUND Despite the increased risk for suicidal ideation (SI) in children of mothers with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD), little is known about specific risk factors for SI in these children. The present study is the first to our knowledge to examine the potential role of biases in the identification of facial expressions of emotion. METHODS Participants were 202 children (ag...

The self-face processing advantage (SPA) refers to the research finding that individuals generally recognize their own face faster than another's face; self-face also elicits an enhanced P3 amplitude compared to another's face. It has been suggested that social evaluation threats could weaken the SPA and that self-esteem could be regarded as a threat buffer. However, little research has directl...

Although anger is an important emotion that underlies much overt aggression at great social cost, little is known about how to quantify anger or to specify the relationship between anger and the overt behaviors that express it. This paper proposes a novel statistical model which provides both a metric for the intensity of anger and an approach to determining the quantitative relationship betwee...

Cognitive models of psychopathology posit that the content or focus of information-processing biases (e.g., attentional biases) is disorder specific: Depression is hypothesized to be characterized by attentional biases specifically for depression-relevant stimuli (e.g., sad facial expressions), whereas anxiety should relate particularly to attentional biases to threat-relevant stimuli (e.g., an...

WHAT IS COLOR GOOD FOR? Although our distant ancestors probably first used color vision to find fruit in trees, it is still useful to us. Even though most of us will never have to defuse a bomb (Figure 1), colors are used to send all sorts of important messages in the modern world. Traffic lights turn from green to red to tell us to stop (Figure 2), warning lights turn orange on the car dashboa...

“Here we are just playing Angry Birds,” says Wilson To. “How do we unlock [the] smartphone’s potential?” To is trying to do just that at Caradigm, a joint health technology venture of GE Healthcare and Microsoft Corporation. To is the lead researcher and codeveloper of Lifelens, a mobile phone– based diagnostic tool. Lifelens is still in its visionary stage, but the hope is to change point-of-c...

In accordance with influential models proposing prioritized processing of threat, previous studies have shown automatic brain responses to angry prosody in the amygdala and the auditory cortex under auditory distraction conditions. However, it is unknown whether the automatic processing of angry prosody is also observed during cross-modal distraction. The current fMRI study investigated brain r...

Facial expressions are valuable for conveying and understanding the inner thoughts and feelings of the expressor. However, the adaptive value associated with a specific expression on a male face is different from a female face. The present review uses a functional-evolutionary analysis to elucidate the evolutionary advantage in the expression and perception of angry-male and happy-female faces ...

Decision making is influenced by social cues, but there is little understanding of how social information interacts with other cues that determine decisions. To address this quantitatively, participants were asked to learn which of two faces was associated with a higher probability of reward. They were repeatedly presented with two faces, each with a different, unknown probability of reward, an...