The perception of unpleasant stimuli enhances whereas the perception of pleasant stimuli decreases pain perception. In contrast, the effects of pain on the processing of emotional stimuli are much less known. Especially given the recent interest in facial expressions of pain as a special category of emotional stimuli, a main topic in this research line is the mutual influence of pain and facial...

Anxious individuals have been shown to be hyper-sensitive to cues for others’ negative emotional states. As most studies used facial expressions as emotional cues, we examined whether the trait anxiety affects the cross-modal perception of emotion in the face and voice that were simultaneously presented. The face and voice cues conveyed either matched (e.g., both positive) or mismatched emotion...

This paper adresses two questions. The first question is if perception of emotional prosody changes when visual stimuli are present. It has already been shown by others that the perception of vowels and consonants is augmented or changed when visual information is present.The question is then if perception of such categories as emotions, mainly expressed by prosody, are also affected by multimo...

The distributed model of face processing proposes an anatomical dissociation between brain regions that encode invariant aspects of faces, such as identity, and those that encode changeable aspects of faces, such as expression. We tested for a neuroanatomical dissociation for identity and expression in face perception using a functional MRI (fMRI) adaptation paradigm. Repeating identity across ...

BACKGROUND Certain facial configurations are believed to be associated with distinct affective meanings (i.e. basic facial expressions), and such associations are common across cultures (i.e. universality of facial expressions). However, recently, many studies suggest that various types of contextual information, rather than facial configuration itself, are important factor for facial emotion p...

We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like words on a page. Incorporating context during em...

THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES FOUR INTERRELATED RESEARCH QUESTIONS (1) Does experienced mood affect emotion perception in faces and is this perception mood-congruent or mood-incongruent?(2) Are there age-group differences in the interplay between experienced mood and emotion perception? (3) Does emotion perception in faces change as a function of the temporal sequence of study sessions and stimuli pre...

Human faces stand among the most unique stimuli in social and emotional communication. By looking at faces we can access a broad range of significant information about the other, such as personal identity, emotional state (facial expression), sex, age, race, attractiveness, attitudes (whether they are friendly or hostile), intentions, and thoughts (Dekowska et al., 2008; Adolphs, 2009). Because...