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...

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF FACIAL EMOTION PERCEPTION HAS BEEN DOMINATED BY TWO SEEMINGLY OPPOSING THEORIES: the categorical and dimensional theories. However, we have recently demonstrated that hybrid processing involving both categorical and dimensional perception can be induced in an implicit manner (Fujimura etal., 2012). The underlying neural mechanisms of this hybrid processing remain unknown. I...

Seeing a face gaze at an object elicits rapid attention shifts toward the same object. We tested whether gaze cueing is predictive: do people shift their attention toward objects others are merely expected to look at? Participants categorized objects while a face either looked at this object, at another object, or straight ahead. Unbeknownst to participants, one face would only look at drinks a...

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has been repeatedly reported to play an essential role in the regulation of social cognition in humans in general, and specifically in enhancing the recognition of emotions from facial expressions. The later was assessed in different paradigms that rely primarily on isolated and decontextualized emotional faces. However, recent evidence has indicated that the perc...

It has been hypothesized that social developmental disorders (SDD) like autism, Asperger's disorder and the social-emotional processing disorder may be associated with prosopagnosic-like deficits in face recognition. We studied the ability to recognize famous faces in 24 adults with a variety of SDD diagnoses. We also measured their ability to discriminate changes in internal facial configurati...

Faces are key social stimuli that convey a wealth of information essential for person perception and adaptive interpersonal behaviour. Studies in the domain of cognitive, affective, and social neuroscience have put in light that the processing of faces recruits specific visual regions and activates a distributed set of brain regions related to attentional, emotional, social, and memory processe...

BACKGROUND The Vegetative State (VS) is a severe disorder of consciousness in which patients are awake but display no signs of awareness. Yet, recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have demonstrated evidence for covert awareness in VS patients by recording specific brain activations during a cognitive task. However, the possible existence of incommunicable subjective emoti...

Perceiving facial expressions of emotion to infer the emotional states of others is central to the regulation of individual and social behavior. Results from individual studies on whether those with Parkinson’s disease (PD) are impaired in perceiving facial expressions of emotion are mixed. Despite these mixed results, a recent meta-analysis (Gray & Tickle-Degnen, 2010) showed an overall averag...

There are many ways to assess face perception skills. In this study, we describe a novel task battery FEAST (Facial Expressive Action Stimulus Test) developed to test recognition of identity and expressions of human faces as well as stimulus control categories. The FEAST consists of a neutral and emotional face memory task, a face and shoe identity matching task, a face and house part-to-whole ...