Little is known about how emotions expressed by others influence social decisions and associated brain responses in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). We investigated the neural mechanisms underlying fairness decisions in response to explicitly expressed emotions of others in boys with ASD and typically developing (TD) boys. Participants with ASD adjusted their allocation behavior in response to ...

the emotions of others is an essential part of being a socially functioning human. Without it we would not know what actions will most likely make others around us happy versus mad or sad. Our abilities to please friends, placate enemies, inspire our children, and secure cooperation from our colleagues would suffer. For these reasons a truly intelligent human-level AI will need the ability to r...

Socially anxiety may be related to a different pattern of facial mimicry and contagion of others' emotions. We report two studies in which participants with different levels of social anxiety reacted to others' emotional displays, either shown on a computer screen (Study 1) or in an actual social interaction (Study 2). Study 1 examined facial mimicry and emotional contagion in response to displ...

Four studies using open-ended and experimental methods test the hypothesis that in Japanese contexts, emotions are understood as between people, whereas in American contexts, emotions are understood as primarily within people. Study 1 analyzed television interviews of Olympic athletes. When asked about their relationships, Japanese athletes used significantly more emotion words than American at...

The mechanism by which humans perceive others differs greatly from how humans perceive inanimate objects. Unlike inanimate objects, humans have the distinct property of being "like me" in the eyes of the observer. This allows us to use the same systems that process knowledge about self-performed actions, self-conceived thoughts, and self-experienced emotions to understand actions, thoughts, and...

The current study examined the longitudinal association of social cognition (Theory Mind, empathy) and self-affect (self-conscious emotions) with 99 adolescents’ positive negative dimensions self-compassion over two years (T1: 10.75 years, T2: 12.08 years). For total sample, analysis showed no relations among variables, but separate gender revealed differences in correlational patterns. boys on...

Facial expressions of emotions are often described statically at their apex. Lately several researchers (Keltner, 1995) have shown through analysis of video corpora that emotions are expressed through a sequence of micro-behaviours. These micro-behaviours correspond to signals spread over the whole body (face, head, gaze, gesture, etc). All these signals do not have to occur simultaneously. Som...

Reasoning about others’ emotions is a crucial component in social cognition. Here, we tested the ability of preschool children to reason about an agent’s emotions following an unexpected outcome. Importantly, we controlled for the actual payoff of the outcome, while varying the prior expectation of the agents. Five-year-olds, but not four-year-olds, were able to correctly judge an agent’s emoti...

Facing a protagonist's emotional mental state can trigger social emotions (or 'fortune of others' emotion), such as envy or gloating, which reflect one's assessment of the consequences of the other's fortune. Here we suggest that these social emotions are mediated by the mentalizing network. The present article explores the notion that the understanding of social competitive emotions is particu...