Facial expression is one of the most expressive ways for human beings to deliver their emotion, intention, and other nonverbal messages in face to face communications. In this chapter, a layered parametric framework is proposed to synthesize the emotional facial expressions for an MPEG4 compliant talking avatar based on the three dimensional PAD model, including pleasure-displeasure, arousal-no...

The emotional experience elicited by music is largely dependent on structural characteristics such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics. We examine here to what extent amusic adults, who have experienced pitch perception difficulties all their lives, still maintain some ability to perceive emotions from music. Amusic and control participants judged the emotions expressed by unfamiliar musical clips i...

Background: Understanding leisure time physical inactivity is a priority in Westernized nations where participation rates are low. The present study sought to address this priority by examining whether the extraversion and emotional instability to leisure time exercise relationships were mediated through Elliot’s (1999) 2 2 achievement goals. Methods: Participants were 116 female and 97 male vo...

The primary aim of this study was to examine the impact of an inhibition manipulation on the effect of age on theory of mind (ToM) in an ecologically valid, affective ToM task. Participants were 30 young and 30 old adults. The Cambridge Mindreading Face-Voice Battery was used to measure ToM; in addition, measures of fluid and crystallized intelligence were taken. Participants were subjected to ...

Recent event-related brain potential studies revealed the selective processing of emotional and threatening pictures. Integrating the picture viewing and threat-of-shock paradigm, the present study examined the processing of emotional pictures while they were explicitly instructed to cue threat of real world danger (i.e. electric shocks). Toward this end, 60 pleasant, neutral and unpleasant IAP...

Emotional stimuli capture and hold attention without explicit instruction. The late positive potential (LPP) component of the event related potential can be used to track motivated attention toward emotional stimuli, and is larger for emotional compared to neutral pictures. In the frequency domain, the steady state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) has also been used to track attention to stimuli...

Emotions are often expressed metaphorically, and both emotion and metaphor are ways through which abstract meaning can be grounded in language. Here we investigate specifically whether motion-related verbs when used metaphorically are differentially sensitive to a preceding emotional context, as compared to when they are used in a literal manner. Participants read stories that ended with ambigu...

The amygdala is implicated in emotional processing, and its rich subcortical connections have led to suggestions that processing of emotional stimuli occurs independently of attention. Using a novel attentional manipulation in conjunction with fMRI, we showed that emotion-related amygdala activity was modulated by attention, but that the degree of such modulation correlated with the personality...

Emotional intelligence (EI) was once touted as the panacea for a satisfying and successful life. Consequently, there has been much emphasis on developing interventions to promote this personal resource in applied settings. Despite this, a growing body of research has begun to identify particular contexts when EI does not appear helpful and may even be deleterious to a person, or those they have...

In this fMRI study we contrasted emotional responses to literary reading in late bilinguals' first or second language. German participants with adequate English proficiency in their second language (L2) English read short text passages from Harry Potter books characterized by a "negative" or "positive" versus "neutral" emotional valence manipulation. Previous studies have suggested that given s...