Emotion influences memory in many ways. For example, when a mood-dependent processing shift is operative, happy moods promote global processing and sad moods direct attention to local features of complex visual stimuli. We hypothesized that an emotional context associated with to-be-learned facial stimuli could preferentially promote global or local processing. At learning, faces with neutral e...

The effect of the emotional quality of study-phase background music on subsequent recall for happy and sad facial expressions was investigated. Undergraduates (N = 48) viewed a series of line drawings depicting a happy or sad child in a variety of environments that were each accompanied by happy or sad music. Although memory for faces was very accurate, emotionally incongruent background music ...

We used a happy/sad classification task and a psychophysical model to study the tuning properties of facial expression processors across viewing conditions. Using morphed faces, in this study we measured the extent to which classification of facial expressions depends on the intensity of a particular expression on either the upper or lower face. In the fovea, the upper and lower parts of the te...

The aim was to explore whether emotional empathy is related to the capacity to react with rapid facial reactions to facial expressions of emotion, and if emotional empathy is related to the ability to experience a similar emotion as expressed by another person. People high or low in emotional empathy were exposed to pictures of happy and angry faces while their facial electromyography from the ...

Multiple lines of evidence converge on the human amygdala as a core moderator of facial emotion perception. The major subregions of the human amygdala have been anatomically delineated, but the individual contribution of these subregions to facial emotion perception is unclear. Here we combined functional MRI (fMRI) with cytoarchitectonically defined maximum probabilistic maps to investigate th...

We investigated facial recognition memory (for previously unfamiliar faces) and facial expression perception with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Eight healthy, right-handed volunteers participated. For the facial recognition task, subjects made a decision as to the familiarity of each of 50 faces (25 previously viewed; 25 novel). We detected signal increase in the right middle te...

Enhanced attention to fear expressions in adults is primarily driven by information from low as opposed to high spatial frequencies contained in faces. However, little is known about the role of spatial frequency information in emotion processing during infancy. In the present study, we examined the role of low compared to high spatial frequencies in the processing of happy and fearful facial e...

Three experiments examine multimodal integration of tone pitch (high/low), facial expression stimuli (happy/angry), and responses (happy/angry) in a compatibility paradigm. When the participants' task is to imitate facial expressions (Experiment 1), smiles are facilitated by high tones whereas frowns are facilitated by low tones. Experiments 2 and 3 further analyse this effect and show that the...

Depression risk genes in combination with childhood events have been associated with biased processing as an intermediate phenotype for depression. The aim of the present conceptual replication study was to investigate the role of biased automatic approach-avoidance tendencies as a candidate intermediate phenotype for depression, in the context of genes (5-HTTLPR polymorphism) and childhood tra...

It is well known that memory can be modulated by emotional stimuli at the time of encoding and consolidation. For example, happy faces create better identity recognition than faces with certain other expressions. However, the influence of facial expression at the time of retrieval remains unknown in the literature. To separate the potential influence of expression at retrieval from its effects ...