Human face perception is a finely tuned, specialized process. When comparing faces between species, therefore, it is essential to consider how people make these observational judgments. Comparing facial expressions may be particularly problematic, given that people tend to consider them categorically as emotional signals, which may affect how accurately specific details are processed. The bared...

Accurately interpreting other's emotions through facial expressions has important adaptive values for social interactions. However, due to the stereotypical social perception of overweight individuals as carefree, humorous, and light-hearted, the body weight of those with whom we interact may have a systematic influence on our emotion judgment even though it has no relevance to the expressed em...

The two halves of the brain are believed to play different roles in emotional processing, but the specific contribution of each hemisphere continues to be debated. The right-hemisphere hypothesis suggests that the right cerebrum is dominant for processing all emotions regardless of affective valence, whereas the valence specific hypothesis posits that the left hemisphere is specialized for proc...

In the context of chronic childhood emotional maltreatment (CEM; emotional abuse and/or neglect), adequately responding to facial expressions is an important skill. Over time, however, this adaptive response may lead to a persistent vigilance for emotional facial expressions. The amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) are key regions in face processing. However, the neurobiological co...

Evidence that culture modulates on-line neural responses to the emotional meanings encoded by vocal and facial expressions was demonstrated recently in a study comparing English North Americans and Chinese (Liu et al., 2015). Here, we compared how individuals from these two cultures passively respond to emotional cues from faces and voices using an Oddball task. Participants viewed in-group emo...

The emotional and psychological activities associated with the visual perception of macroscopic and microscopic structure patterns of wood were investigated. The macroscopic and microscopic structure patterns of 18 different timber tree species of northeast China were selected as the research objects, and these were divided into eight categories for event-related potential analysis. The 30 effe...

Social phobia (SP) and panic disorder (PD) have been associated with aberrant amygdala responses to threat-related stimuli. The aim of the present study was to examine amygdala function and its connectivity with medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during emotional face perception in PD and SP, and the role of illness severity. Blood oxygen level dependent responses while perceiving emotional facial...

The emotional valence of facial expressions can be reliably discriminated even in the absence of conscious visual experience by patients with lesions to the primary visual cortex (affective blindsight). Prior studies in one such patient (GY) also showed that this non-conscious perception can influence conscious recognition of normally seen emotional faces. Here we report a similar online intera...

Little is known about the spread of emotions beyond dyads. Yet, it is of importance for explaining the emergence of crowd behaviors. Here, we experimentally addressed whether emotional homogeneity within a crowd might result from a cascade of local emotional transmissions where the perception of another's emotional expression produces, in the observer's face and body, sufficient information to ...

The dominance of the right hemisphere during face perception is associated with more accurate judgments of faces presented in the left rather than the right visual field (RVF). Previous research suggests that the left visual field (LVF) bias typically observed during face perception tasks is reduced in deaf adults who use sign language, for whom facial expressions convey important linguistic in...