Immersive virtual environment technology is increasingly used by psychologists as a tool for researching social influence in realistic, yet experimentally controllable, settings. The present study demonstrates the validity and reliability of facial electromyography as a marker of affect in immersive virtual environments and further shows that the mere presence of virtual humans is enough to eli...

The relation between empathy subtypes and prosocial behavior was investigated in a sample of healthy adults. "Empathic concern" and "empathic happiness", defined as negative and positive vicarious emotion (respectively) combined with an other-oriented feeling of "goodwill" (i.e. a thought to do good to others/see others happy), were elicited in 68 adult participants who watched video clips extr...

To demonstrate the influence of unconscious affective processing on consciously processed information among people with and without schizophrenia, we used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to examine whether early and rapid processing of affective information influences first impressions of structurally neutral faces. People with and without schizophrenia rated visible neutral faces...

Global economic restructuring and technological change are transforming the map of global production and the global division of labor. Based on the perspectives of global value chains and global production networks, this study analyzes the production networks, value chains, and spatial organization of the computer industry in China. It was found that the notion of a symmetric, bell-shaped smili...

The smile is perhaps the most widely studied facial expression of emotion, and in this article we examine its status as a sign of physical dominance. We reason, on the basis of prior research, that prior to a physical confrontation, smiles are a nonverbal sign of reduced hostility and aggression, and thereby unintentionally communicate reduced physical dominance. Two studies provide evidence in...

Automatic facial expression recognition has gained much attention during the last decade because of its potential application in areas such as more engaging human-computer interfaces. Automatic facial expression recognition is a sub-area of face analysis research that is based heavily on methods of computer vision, machine learning, and image processing. Many efforts either to create a novel or...

Motivated by conflicting evidence in the literature, we re-assessed the role of facial feedback when detecting quantitative or qualitative changes in others' emotional expressions. Fifty-three healthy adults observed self-paced morph sequences where the emotional facial expression either changed quantitatively (i.e., sad-to-neutral, neutral-to-sad, happy-to-neutral, neutral-to-happy) or qualita...

Two studies explored the link between health care providers' patterns of nonverbal communication and therapeutic efficacy. In Study 1, physical therapists were videotaped during a session with a client. Brief samples of therapists' nonverbal behavior were rated by naive judges. Judges' ratings were then correlated with clients' physical, cognitive, and psychological functioning at admission, at...

The question discussed in the two following experiments concerns the effect of facial expressions on face recognition. Famous and unknown faces with neutral or smiling expression were presented for different inspection durations (15 ms vs 1000 ms). Subjects had to categorize these faces as famous or unknown (Experiment 1), or estimate their degree of familiarity on a rating scale (Experiment 2)...