Angry facial expressions hamper subsequent target identification.

The commitment function of angry facial expressions.

What function do facial expressions have? We tested the hypothesis that some expressions serve as honest signals of subjective commitments-in particular, that angry faces increase the effectiveness of threats. In an ultimatum game, proposers decided how much money to offer a responder while seeing a film clip depicting an angry or a neutral facial expression, together with a written threat that...

Electrophysiological evidence for attentional capture by irrelevant angry facial expressions.

Attention is believed to be biased toward threatening objects or faces. Therefore, we tested whether angry face stimuli would capture attention even when they are irrelevant to the task. Observers searched for a neutral face with a tilted nose. On some trials, the target was shown together with an irrelevant angry or happy face and we measured the N2pc (an electrophysiological marker of attenti...

Illusory conjunctions of angry facial expressions follow intergroup biases.

Empathy, emotional contagion, and rapid facial reactions to angry and happy facial expressions.

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 ...

Facial reactions to happy and angry facial expressions: evidence for right hemisphere dominance.

Previous research on asymmetric effects of emotional expression and brain-hemispheric asymmetry has supported opposing theories of hemispheric dominance in the control of emotional reactions. In the present study, 32 subjects were exposed to pictures of happy and angry facial stimuli while facial electromyographic (EMG) activity from the zygomatic major and the corrugator supercilii muscle regi...