Compassion is an affective response to another's suffering and a catalyst of prosocial behavior. In the present studies, we explore the peripheral physiological changes associated with the experience of compassion. Guided by long-standing theoretical claims, we propose that compassion is associated with activation in the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. Across 4...

Background As known from everyday experience and experimental research, alcohol modulates emotions. Particularly regarding social interaction, the effects of alcohol on the facial expression of emotion might be of relevance. However, these effects have not been systematically studied. We performed a systematic review on acute alcohol effects on social drinkers' facial expressions of induced pos...

We present the results of a study testing the often-theorized role of musical expectations in inducing listeners' emotions in a live flute concert experiment with 50 participants. Using an audience response system developed for this purpose, we measured subjective experience and peripheral psychophysiological changes continuously. To confirm the existence of the link between expectation and emo...

OBJECTIVES Anxiety leads to biases in processing personally relevant information. This study set out to examine whether anxious parents also experience biases in processing child-relevant material. DESIGN AND METHODS Ninety parents acted as a control condition, or received a social anxiety or child-related anxiety induction. They completed a task examining attentional biases in relation to ch...

Compassion is an affective response to another's suffering and a catalyst of prosocial behavior. In the present studies we explore the peripheral physiological changes associated with the experience of compassion. Guided by longstanding theoretical claims, we propose that compassion is associated with activation in the parasympathetic autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve. Across fou...

BACKGROUND Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is the most prevalent anxiety disorder among the elderly and has high functional and cognitive morbidity. However, late-life GAD is relatively understudied and its functional neuroanatomy is uncharted. Several imaging studies have suggested abnormalities in the cognitive control systems of emotion regulation in anxiety disorders in young adults. The...

In our present society, the cinema has become one of the major forms of entertainment providing unlimited contexts of emotion elicitation for the emotional needs of human beings. Since emotions are universal and shape all aspects of our interpersonal and intellectual experience, they have proved to be a highly multidisciplinary research field, ranging from psychology, sociology, neuroscience, e...

An important question that confronts current research in affective neuroscience as well as in the treatment of emotional disorders is whether it is possible to determine the emotional state of a person based on the measurement of brain activity alone. Here, we first show that an online support vector machine (SVM) can be built to recognize two discrete emotional states, such as happiness and di...

Psychosocial stress affects resources for adequate coping with environmental demands. A crucial question in this context is the extent to which acute psychosocial stressors impact empathy and emotion regulation. In the present study, 120 participants were randomly assigned to a control group vs. a group confronted with the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), an established paradigm for the inducti...

Hemodynamic mismatch responses can be elicited by deviant stimuli in a sequence of standard stimuli even during cognitive demanding tasks. Emotional context is known to modulate lateralized processing. Right-hemispheric negative emotion processing may bias attention to the right and enhance processing of right-ear stimuli. The present study examined the influence of induced mood on lateralized ...