Humans optimize behavior by deriving context-based expectations. Contextual data that are important for survival are extracted rapidly, using coarse information, adaptive decision strategies, and dedicated neural infrastructure. In the field of object perception, the influence of a surrounding context has been a major research theme, and it has generated a large literature. That visual context,...

Darwin's evolutionary approach to organisms' emotional states attributes a prominent role to expressions of emotion in whole-body actions. Researchers in social psychology [1,2] and human development [3] have long emphasized the fact that emotional states are expressed through body movement, but cognitive neuroscientists have almost exclusively considered isolated facial expressions (for review...

Stereotype threat, the fear of failing in a way that reinforces derogatory stereotypes of one’s social group, undermines performance in school, sports and the workplace. Recently researchers have developed a more sophisticated understanding of how such anxiety arises, how to combat it and how to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Relatively simple and brief confidence-boosting exerci...

The paper shows how a state controlled religious institution used religion, fear, trauma, insecurity, grievances, and conspiracy theories to dehumanise community, presented it as an existential threat the nation, global community of believers by investigating case Turkey’s Directorate Religious Affairs’ (the Diyanet) securitizing role under authoritarian Islamist Erdo?anist rule. article provid...

Negative racial stereotypes tend to associate Black people with threat. This often leads to the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons held by a Black individual. Yet, little is known about how bodily states impact the expression of racial stereotyping. By tapping into the phasic activation of arterial baroreceptors, known to be associated with changes in the neural processing of fear...

At a 1993 meeting of his organization Operation PUSH, on the topic of street crime, the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the audience, “‘There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery . . . . Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.’”1 Jackson’s observation reflects an unfortunate but oft...

for instance, "Reminds me of happiness." Anxiety (Ax)—a 3-point scale for rating the degree of anxiety apparent in the content of the response as reflected in feelings or attitudes ("frightened animal"), expressive behavior ("girl escaping"), symbolic responses ("dead person"), or cultural stereotypes of fear ("witch"); score 1 when debatable or indirect, and score 2 when clearly evident. Hosti...

Surprised expressions are interpreted as negative by some people, and as positive by others. When compared to fearful expressions, which are consistently rated as negative, surprise and fear share similar morphological structures (e.g. widened eyes), but these similarities are primarily in the upper part of the face (eyes). We hypothesised, then, that individuals would be more likely to interpr...

In the current study we examined whether timeline-reversals and emotional direction of dynamic facial expressions affect subjective experience of human observers. We recorded natural movies of faces that increased or decreased their expressions of fear, and played them either in the natural frame order or reversed from last to first frame (reversed timeline). This led to four conditions of incr...