Age constitutes a salient feature of a face and signals group membership. There is evidence of greater attention to and better memory for own-age than other-age faces. However, little is known about the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying processing differences for own-age vs. other-age faces. Even less is known about the impact of emotion expressed in faces on such own-age effects. Usi...

Smile is an irrefutable expression that shows the physical state of the mind in both true and deceptive ways. Generally, it shows happy state of the mind, however, ‘smiles’ can be deceptive, for example people can give a smile when they feel happy and sometimes they might also give a smile (in a different way) when they feel pity for others. This work aims to distinguish spontaneous (felt) smil...

BACKGROUND Childhood adversity is associated with significantly increased risk of psychiatric disorder. To date, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of children have mainly focused on institutionalisation and investigated conscious processing of affect. AIMS To investigate neural response to pre-attentively presented affect cues in a community sample of children with document...

People rapidly and automatically evaluate faces along many social dimensions. Here, we focus on judgments of trustworthiness, which approximate basic valence evaluation of faces, and test whether these judgments are an overgeneralization of the perception of emotional expressions. We used a behavioral adaptation paradigm to investigate whether the previously noted perceptual similarities betwee...

BACKGROUND Although evidence exists for abnormal brain function across various anxiety disorders, direct comparison of neural function across diagnoses is needed to elicit abnormalities common across disorders and those distinct to a particular diagnosis. AIMS To delineate common and distinct abnormalities within generalised anxiety (GAD), panic and social anxiety disorder (SAD) during affect...

The purpose of this study is to explore whether subjects exposed to stimuli of facial expressions respond with facial electromyographic (EMG) reactions consistent with the hypothesis that facial expressions are contagious. This study further examines whether males and females differ in facial EMG intensity. Two experiments demonstrated that subjects responded with facial EMG activity over the c...

Facial features differ in the amount of expressive information they convey. Specifically, eyes are argued to be essential for fear recognition, while smiles are crucial for recognising happy expressions. In three experiments, we tested whether expression modulates the perceptual saliency of diagnostic facial features and whether the feature's saliency depends on the face configuration. Particip...

The authors examined face perception models with regard to the functional and temporal organization of facial identity and expression analysis. Participants performed a manual 2-choice go/no-go task to classify faces, where response hand depended on facial familiarity (famous vs. unfamiliar) and response execution depended on facial expression (happy vs. angry). Behavioral and electrophysiologi...

Observing facial expressions automatically prompts imitation, as can be seen with facial electromyography. To investigate whether this reaction is driven by automatic mimicry or by recognition of the emotion displayed we recorded electromyograph responses to presentations of facial expressions, face-voice combinations and bodily expressions, which resulted from happy and fearful stimuli. We obs...

In three studies (N’s = 360, 68, 160), children (2 to 7 years of age) were asked to categorize various facial expressions. The emotion category was specified to the child by its label (such as happy), its facial expression (such as a smile), or both. From the youngest to the oldest children and for all 3 emotion categories examined (happiness, anger, and sadness), results showed a Label Superio...