Emotional faces are motivationally salient stimuli that automatically capture attention and rapidly potentiate neural processing. Because of their superior temporal resolution, scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) are ideal for examining rapid changes in neural activity. Some reports have found larger ERPs for fearful and angry faces compared with both neutral and other emotional face...

Volitional action and self-control-feelings of acting according to one's own intentions and in being control of one's own actions-are fundamental aspects of human conscious experience. However, it is unknown whether high-level cognitive control mechanisms are affected by socially salient but nonconscious emotional cues. In this study, we manipulated free choice decisions to act or withhold an a...

Objectives: The aim of this research is to design a neuro-cognitive program, based on dysfunctions and alterations of some neural circuits in dyslexics. The visual and auditory working memories in pre-schoolers were evaluated with this program in order to early screening for dyslexia. Methods: This study is a longitudinal descriptive research. A total of 259 randomly selected pre-schoolers, wi...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to identify brain activation to socially threatening stimuli in social phobic subjects during different experimental conditions. METHODS With event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, brain activation to photographs and schematic pictures depicting angry or neutral facial expressions was measured in social phobic subjects and healthy control sub...

Although it is well documented that fear responses develop following aversive Pavlovian conditioning, it is unclear whether fear learning also manifests in the form of attentional biases for fear-related stimuli. Boschen, Parker, and Neumann (Boschen, M. J., Parker, I., & Neumann, D. L. (2007). Changes in implicit associations do not occur simultaneously to Pavlovian conditioning of physiologic...

Among a crowd of distractor faces, threatening or angry target faces are identified more quickly and accurately than are nonthreatening or happy target faces, a finding known as the "face in the crowd effect." Two perceptual explanations of the effect have been proposed: (1) the "target orienting" hypothesis (i.e., threatening targets orient attention more quickly than do nonthreatening targets...

Previous neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have investigated the neural substrates which mediate responses to fearful, disgusted and happy expressions. No previous studies have investigated the neural substrates which mediate responses to sad and angry expressions. Using functional neuroimaging, we tested two hypotheses. First, we tested whether the amygdala has a neural response to s...

Patients with striate cortex damage and clinical blindness retain the ability to process certain visual properties of stimuli that they are not aware of seeing. Here we investigated the neural correlates of residual visual perception for dynamic whole-body emotional actions. Angry and neutral emotional whole-body actions were presented in the intact and blind visual hemifield of a cortically bl...

Vocal expressions commonly elicit activity in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortices, indicating a distributed network to decode vocally expressed emotions. We examined the involvement of this fronto-temporal network for the decoding of angry voices during attention towards (explicit attention) or away from emotional cues in voices (implicit attention) based on a reanalysis of previous...

In visual search tasks, an angry face surrounded by happy faces is more rapidly detected compared with a happy face surrounded by angry faces. This is called the anger superiority effect. The anger superiority effect has been mainly related to automatic attentional effects, but top-down mechanisms may also influence this effect. In a series of studies, we investigated the influence of holding e...