Results obtained with a novel emotional Go/NoGo task allowing the investigation of facial mimicry (FM) during the production and inhibition of voluntary smiles are discussed. Healthy participants were asked to smile rapidly to happy faces and maintain a neutral expression to neutral faces, or the reverse. Replicating and extending previous results, happy faces induced FM, as shown by stronger a...

Happy facial expressions are recognized faster and more accurately than other expressions in categorization tasks, whereas detection in visual search tasks is widely believed to be faster for angry than happy faces. We used meta-analytic techniques for resolving this categorization versus detection advantage discrepancy for positive versus negative facial expressions. Effect sizes were computed...

The majority of mood-congruent memory research has confirmed the existence of a memory bias for affectively toned words or phrases. However, the current study investigated a memory bias for emotional facial expressions, in induced and naturally occurring mood states. In experiment 1 twenty-five dysphoric participants and twenty non-dysphoric participants were presented with a set of emotional f...

Previous studies have shown overlapping neural activations for observation and execution or imitation of emotional facial expressions. These shared representations have been assumed to provide indirect evidence for a human mirror neuron system, which is suggested to be a prerequisite of action comprehension. We aimed at clarifying whether shared representations in and beyond human mirror areas ...

To investigate whether subliminally priming for competition influences facial reactions to facial emotional displays, 49 participants were either subliminally competition primed or neutrally primed. Thereafter, they viewed computer generated avatar faces with happy, neutral, and sad expressions while Corrugator supercilii and Zygomaticus major reactions were recorded. Results revealed facial mi...

The present work represents the first study to investigate the relationship between adult attachment avoidance and anxiety and automatic affective responses to basic facial emotions. Subliminal affective priming methods allowed for the assessment of unconscious affective reactions. An affective priming task using masked sad and happy faces, both of which are approachrelated facial expressions, ...

BACKGROUND Maternal sensitive behavior depends on recognizing one's own child's affective states. The present study investigated distinct and overlapping neural responses of mothers to sad and happy facial expressions of their own child (in comparison to facial expressions of an unfamiliar child). METHODS We used functional MRI to measure dissociable and overlapping activation patterns in 27 ...

Early-latency theories of emotional processing state that at least coarse monitoring of the emotional valence (a pleasure-displeasure continuum) of facial expressions should be both rapid and highly automated (LeDoux, 1995; Russell, 1980). Research has largely substantiated early-latency differential processing of emotional versus non-emotional facial expressions; however, the effect of valence...

BACKGROUND Several studies have investigated the relationship between behavioral changes and the menstrual cycle in female subjects at a reproductive age. The present study investigated the relationship between the menstrual cycle and emotional face recognition by measuring the N170 component of ERPs. METHODS We measured N170 of twelve women in both follicular phase and late luteal phase who ...

Visual search task was used to explore the role of facial identity in the processing of facial expression. Participants were asked to search for a happy or sad face in a crowd of emotional face pictures. Expression search was more quickly and accurate when all the faces in a display belonged to one identity than two identities. This suggested the interference of identity variance on expression ...