Previous studies have shown that preferences for direct versus averted gaze are modulated by emotional expressions and physical attractiveness. For example, preferences for direct gaze are stronger when judging happy or physically attractive faces than when judging disgusted or physically unattractive faces. Here we show that preferences for front versus three-quarter views of faces, in which g...

BACKGROUND Individuals with social phobia (SP) have altered behavioral and neural responses to emotional faces and are hypothesized to have deficits in inhibiting emotion-related amygdala responses. We tested for such amygdala deficits to emotional faces in a sample of individuals with SP. METHOD We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural substrates of emotiona...

The aim of the present study was to investigate distracter inhibition ability for emotional faces in depression using a negative affective priming (NAP) task combined with event-related potentials (ERP). The reaction times and the ERP amplitudes were recorded during the task. In a first behavioral experiment, control participants (NC), participants who were currently remitted (RMD), and partici...

To investigate the functions of the amygdala in visual information processing and in emotional and social responses, recordings were made from single neurons in the amygdala of the monkey. A population of neurons (40 of more than 1000 recorded in 4 monkeys) was investigated which responded primarily to faces. These neurons typically (1) responded to some human or monkey faces, which were presen...

Individuals with high anxiety show heightened neural activation in affective processing regions, including the amygdala and insula. Activations have been shown to be correlated with anxiety severity, but although anxiety is a heterogeneous state, prior studies have not systematically disentangled whether neural activity in affective processing circuitry is uniquely related to specific domains o...

Previous findings suggest that visual working memory (VWM) preferentially remembers angry looking faces. However, the meaning of facial actions is construed in relation to context. To date, there are no studies investigating the role of perceiver-based context when processing emotional cues in VWM. To explore the influence of affective context on VWM for faces, we conducted two experiments usin...

The ability to extract sequential regularities embedded in the temporal context or temporal structure of sensory events and to predict upcoming events based on the extracted sequential regularities plays a central role in human cognition. In the present study, we demonstrate that, without any intention, upcoming emotional faces can be predicted based on sequential regularities, by showing that ...

BACKGROUND We examined social approachability judgments in a psychiatric population that frequently experiences interpersonal difficulties and reduced social satisfaction, individuals with generalized social phobia (gSP). METHODS Our objective was to broaden the understanding of the social cognitive tendencies of individuals with gSP by systematically investigating their interpretation of pos...