It is commonly assumed that early emotional signals provide relevant information for social cognition tasks. The goal of this study was to test the association between (a) cortical markers of face emotional processing and (b) social-cognitive measures, and also to build a model which can predict this association (a and b) in healthy volunteers as well as in different groups of psychiatric patie...

This two-part study addresses the question of whether emotional processing is a useful strategy for coping with dysphoria following a depressing life event. In Part I, after a covert, moderately distressing mood induction, subjects who were assigned to an emotional processing condition reported better mood in the long run than subjects who were assigned to either distraction or unemotional prob...

BACKGROUND Treatment of medical patients with the inflammatory cytokine, interferon-α (IFN-α), is frequently associated with the development of clinical depressive symptomatology. Several important biological correlates of the effect of IFN-α on mood have been described, but the neuropsychological changes associated with IFN-α treatment are largely unexplored. The aim of the present preliminary...

Event-related brain potential (ERP) studies consistently revealed that a relatively early (early posterior negativity; EPN) and a late (late positive potential; LPP) ERP component differentiate between emotional and neutral picture stimuli. Two studies examined the processing of emotional stimuli when preceded either by pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant context images. In both studies, distinct ...

Emotions are believed to converge both through emotional mimicry and social appraisal. The present study compared contagion of anger and happiness. In Experiment 1, participants viewed dynamic angry and happy faces, with facial electromyography recorded from the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii as emotional mimicry. Self-reported emotional experiences were analyzed as emotional conta...

Neuroimaging studies of implicit emotional processing are important for understanding the neural mechanisms and its social and evolutionary significance. Two major experimental tasks are used to explore the mechanisms of implicit emotional processing: masking tasks and inattention tasks, both using emotional faces as stimuli. However, it is unclear whether they have identical or distinct neural...

Recent event-related potential studies observed an early posterior negativity (EPN) reflecting facilitated processing of emotional images. The present study explored if the facilitated processing of emotional pictures is sustained while subjects perform an explicit non-emotional attention task. EEG was recorded from 129 channels while subjects viewed a rapid continuous stream of images containi...

The meaning of a speech stream is communicated by more than the particular words used by the speaker. For example, speech melody, referred to as prosody, also contributes to meaning. In a cross-modal priming study we investigated the influence of emotional prosody on the processing of visually presented positive and negative target words. The results indicate that emotional prosody modulates wo...

Artificial feelings and emotions are beginning to play an increasingly important role as mechanisms for facilitating learning in intelligent systems. Here we present an architectural framework for artificial neural emotions through the use of an emotional memory system, based on Dr. Peter Levine's Autonomic Nervous System States. Tying the notions of Human Autonomic Nervous System States to an ...

Introduction Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have some impairment in emotional relationship which can be due to problems in emotional processing. The present study investigated neural correlates of early stages of emotional face processing in this group compared with typically developing children using the Gamma Band Activity (GBA). Methods A total of 19 children...