The ability to accurately perceive emotions is crucial for effective social interaction. Many questions remain regarding how different sources of emotional cues in speech (e.g., prosody, semantic information) are processed during emotional communication. Using a cross-modal emotional priming paradigm (Facial affect decision task), we compared the relative contributions of processing utterances ...

Cognitive and emotional processing is seen as critical to successful adjustment to traumatic experiences, such as breast cancer. Cognitive and emotional processing can be facilitated by dispositional and social environmental factors. Emotional intelligence is a dispositional characteristic defined as the ability to understand, accurately perceive, express, and regulate emotions (J. D. Mayer & P...

BACKGROUND Apart from a progressive decline of motor functions, Parkinson's disease (PD) is also characterized by non-motor symptoms, including disturbed processing of emotions. This study aims at assessing emotional processing and its neurobiological correlates in PD with the focus on how medicated Parkinson patients may achieve normal emotional responsiveness despite basal ganglia dysfunction...

Various prefrontal cortical regions have been shown to be activated during emotional stimulation, whereas neurochemical mechanisms underlying emotional processing in the prefrontal cortex remain unclear. We therefore investigated the influence of the GABA-A potentiator lorazepam on prefrontal cortical emotional-motor spatio-temporal activation pattern in a combined functional magnetic resonance...

In the present issue we discuss a theoretical model for processing of emotional speech during text analysis and synthesis. The model is developed for description of speech influence in affective mass media texts and also applies to several other types of emotional communication, including conflict, complaint and speech aggression. The model follows H-CogAff architecture of cognitive models and ...

Presented is a model suggesting that the right hemisphere (RH) directly mediates the identification and comprehension of positive and negative emotional stimuli, whereas the left hemisphere (LH) contributes to higher level processing of emotional information that has been shared via the corpus callosum. RH subcortical connections provide initial processing of emotional stimuli, and their innerv...

It has been long debated to what extent emotional words can be processed in the absence of awareness. Behavioral studies have shown that the meaning of emotional words can be accessed even without any awareness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have revealed that emotional words that are unconsciously presented do not activate the brain regions involved in semantic or emot...

Traditionally, emotional stimuli have been thought to be automatically processed via a bottom-up automatic "capture of attention" mechanism. Recently, this view has been challenged by evidence that emotion processing depends on the availability of attentional resources. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, direct evidence reconciling them is lacking. One limitation of previous i...

Early-latency theories of emotional processing state that at least coarse monitoring of the emotional valence (a pleasure-displeasure continuum) of facial expressions should be both rapid and highly automated (LeDoux, 1995; Russell, 1980). Research has largely substantiated early-latency differential processing of emotional versus non-emotional facial expressions; however, the effect of valence...

A plethora of research demonstrates that the processing of emotional faces is prioritised over non-emotive stimuli when cognitive resources are limited (this is known as 'emotional superiority'). However, there is debate as to whether competition for processing resources results in emotional superiority per se, or more specifically, threat superiority. Therefore, to investigate prioritisation o...