The N170 is widely regarded as a face sensitive potential, having its maximum at occipito-temporal sites, with right-hemisphere dominance. However, it is debatable whether the N170 is modulated by different emotional expressions of a face. The aim of this study was to analyze the N170 elicited by schematic happy and angry faces when the emotional expression is semantically processed. To investi...

Previous research on approachability judgments has indicated that facial expressions modulate how these judgments are made, but the relationship between emotional empathy and context in this decision-making process has not yet been examined. This study examined the contribution of emotional empathy to approachability judgments assigned to emotional faces in different contexts. One-hundred and t...

Social phobia has been associated with an attentional bias for angry faces. This study aimed at further characterising this attentional bias by investigating reaction times, heart rates, and ERPs while social phobics, spider phobics, and controls identified either the colour or the emotional quality of angry, happy, or neutral schematic faces. The emotional expression of angry faces did not int...

In primates, visual stimuli with social and emotional content tend to attract attention. Attention might be captured through rapid, automatic, subcortical processing or guided by slower, more voluntary cortical processing. Here we examined whether irrelevant faces with varied emotional expressions interfere with a covert attention task in macaque monkeys. In the task, the monkeys monitored a ta...

As people get older, they tend to remember more positive than negative information. This age-by-valence interaction has been called "positivity effect." The current study addressed the hypotheses that baseline functional connectivity at rest is predictive of older adults' brain activity when learning emotional information and their positivity effect in memory. Using fMRI, we examined the relati...

Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) are preoccupied with perceived physical defects or flaws, often facial features, which may be due to distorted perception. Previous studies have demonstrated abnormalities in visual processing of faces and figures, and misinterpretations of emotional expressions. The objective of this study was to determine in BDD how viewing faces with emotional ...

Previous research has found that a common polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) is an important mediator of individual differences in brain responses associated with emotional behaviour. In particular, relative to individuals homozygous for the l-allele, carriers of the s-allele display heightened amygdala activation to emotional compared to non-emotional stimuli. However, t...

Visual working memory (WM) for face identities is enhanced when faces express negative versus positive emotion. To determine the stage at which emotion exerts its influence on memory for person information, we isolated expression (angry/happy) to the encoding phase (Experiment 1; neutral test faces) or retrieval phase (Experiment 2; neutral study faces). WM was only enhanced by anger when expre...

Emotional facial expressions are important social cues that convey salient affective information. Infants, younger children, and adults all appear to orient spatial attention to emotional faces with a particularly strong bias to fearful faces. Yet in young children it is unclear whether or not both happy and fearful faces extract attention. Given that the processing of emotional faces is believ...