Event-related potentials (ERPs), accuracy scores, and reaction times were used to examine the recognition of emotional expressions. Adults and 7-year-old children saw upright and inverted chromatic slides of the facial expressions of happiness, fear, surprise, and anger, and were asked to press a button for either "happy" or "angry" faces. A positive-going waveform (P300) was apparent at pariet...

Objective: Accurate processing of social and affective cues, especially facial cues, is important for human adaptation. Previous studies have examined depressed adults’ sensitivity to identify emotional facial expressions, yet only one study has investigated this in depressed youth. Additionally, very little is known about whether depressed individuals exhibit biases when incorrectly labeling, ...

BACKGROUND Chronic depression is characterized by a high degree of early life trauma, psychosocial impairment, and deficits in social cognition. Undisturbed recognition and processing of facial emotions are basic prerequisites for smooth social interactions. Intranasal application of the neuropeptide oxytocin has been reported to enhance emotion recognition in neuropsychiatric disorders and hea...

Previous studies have shown that early posterior components of event-related potentials (ERPs) are modulated by facial expressions. The goal of the current study was to investigate individual differences in the recognition of facial expressions by examining the relationship between ERP components and the discrimination of facial expressions. Pictures of 3 facial expressions (angry, happy, and n...

BACKGROUND From an early age, humans look longer at preferred stimuli and also typically look longer at facial expressions of emotion, particularly happy faces. Atypical gaze patterns towards social stimuli are common in autism spectrum conditions (ASC). However, it is unknown whether gaze fixation patterns have any genetic basis. In this study, we tested whether variations in the cannabinoid r...

A number of previous studies has shown that oxytocin (OT) promotes facial emotion recognition and enhances eye gaze to facial stimuli in humans. Other studies report valence-specific effects of OT, supporting the proposed prosocial role of OT in social interactions. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis whether OT might selectively enhance eye gaze to positive, approach-related, but no...

To develop novel interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) core symptoms, valid, reliable, and sensitive longitudinal outcome measures are required for detecting symptom change over time. Here, we tested whether a computerized analysis of quantitative facial expression measures could act as a marker for core ASD social symptoms. Facial expression intensity values during a semi-structured...

BACKGROUND Recent investigations suggest that experience plays an important role in the development of face processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential role of experience in the development of the ability to process facial expressions of emotion. METHOD We examined the potential role of experience indirectly by investigating the relationship between the emotional enviro...

Research indicates that some individuals who were maltreated in childhood demonstrate biases in social information processing. However, the mechanisms through which these biases develop remain unclear-one possible mechanism is via attachment-related processes. Childhood maltreatment increases risk for insecure attachment. The internal working models of self and others associated with insecure a...

The facial action coding system (FACS) was used to examine recognition rates in 105 healthy young men and women who viewed 128 facial expressions of posed and evoked happy, sad, angry and fearful emotions in color photographs balanced for gender and ethnicity of poser. Categorical analyses determined the specificity of individual action units for each emotion. Relationships between recognition ...