OBJECTIVE Appropriate reactivity to emotional facial expressions, even if these are seen whilst we are engaged in another activity, is critical for successful social interaction. Children with conduct problems (CP) and high levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits are characterized by blunted reactivity to other people's emotions, while children with CP and low levels of CU traits can over-rea...

The neuropeptide oxytocin plays a critical role in social behavior and emotion regulation in mammals. The aim of this study was to explore how nasal oxytocin administration affects gazing behavior during emotional perception in domestic dogs. Looking patterns of dogs, as a measure of voluntary attention, were recorded during the viewing of human facial expression photographs. The pupil diameter...

INTRODUCTION We used an affective prime task composed of emotional (happy, angry, and neutral) prime faces and target words with either positive or negative valence. By asking subjects to attend to either the faces' emotional expression or to the glasses' shape, we assessed whether angry facial expressions were processed when they were unattended and task-irrelevant. METHODS We conducted a di...

Interpersonal communication involves the processing of multimodal emotional cues, particularly facial expressions (visual modality) and emotional speech prosody (auditory modality) which can interact during information processing. Here, we investigated whether the implicit processing of emotional prosody systematically influences gaze behavior to facial expressions of emotion. We analyzed the e...

Impairment in recognizing facial emotions is a prominent feature of schizophrenia patients, but the underlying mechanism of this impairment remains unclear. This study investigated the specific aspects of visual information that are critical for schizophrenia patients to recognize emotional expression. Using the Bubbles technique, we probed the use of visual information during a facial emotion ...

The human ability of identifying, processing and regulating emotions from social stimuli is generally referred as Emotional Intelligence (EI). Within EI, Ability EI identifies a performance measure assessing individual skills at perceiving, using, understanding and managing emotions. Previous models suggest that a brain "somatic marker circuitry" (SMC) sustains emotional sub-processes included ...

BACKGROUND There is growing support for the emotion context insensitivity hypothesis, which states that major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with a deficit in emotional reactivity. Under this hypothesis, depressed individuals exhibit reduced behavioral and physiological responses to both appetitive and aversive stimuli. We sought to examine this possibility using the late positive pote...

Medial temporal lobe structures such as the hippocampus have been shown to play a critical role in mnemonic processes, with additional recruitment of the amygdala when memories contain emotional content. Thus far, studies that have examined the relationship between amygdala activity and memory have typically relied on emotional content of the kind that is rarely encountered in day-to-day intera...

Painful events in our environment are often accompanied by stimuli from other sensory modalities. These stimuli may influence the perception and processing of acute pain, in particular when they comprise emotional cues, like facial expressions of people surrounding us. In this whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we examined the neuronal mechanisms underlying the influence of emotiona...

The amygdala is a key region in emotion processing. In particular, fMRI studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is active during the viewing of emotional faces. Previous research has consistently found greater amygdala responses to fearful than to neutral faces in adults, convergent with a focus in the animal literature on the amygdala's role in fear processing. Studies have shown that the ...