During communication, we perceive and express emotional information through many different channels, including facial expressions, prosody, body motion, and posture. Although historically the human body has been perceived primarily as a tool for actions, there is now increased understanding that the body is also an important medium for emotional expression. Indeed, research on emotional body la...

We receive emotional signals from different sources, including the face, the whole body, and the natural scene. Previous research has shown the importance of context provided by the whole body and the scene on the recognition of facial expressions. This study measured physiological responses to face-body-scene combinations. Participants freely viewed emotionally congruent and incongruent face-b...

Faces are multi-dimensional stimuli bearing important social signals, such as gaze direction and emotion expression. To test whether perception of these two facial attributes recruits distinct cortical areas within the right hemisphere, we used single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in healthy volunteers while they performed two different tasks on the same face stimuli. In each ta...

We studied the categorical perception on transitions between seven basic emotional facial expressions and explored the influencing factors. In Experiment 1, participants performed a multiple-choice emotion labeling task while observing basic or morphed (blended between a pair of basic emotions) facial expressions. In Experiment 2, other participants completed AB-X discrimination task. They obse...

Abstract Cognitive-experimental and neuropsychological studies provided strong evidence for the specificity of face cognition. In individual differences research, face tasks are used within a broader variety of tasks, usually with the intention to measure some social skills. Contemporary individual differences research still focuses on the distinction between socialemotional vs. academic intell...

Humans use facial cues to convey social dominance and submission. Despite the evolutionary importance of this social ability, how the brain recognizes social dominance from the face is unknown. We used event-related brain potentials (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural mechanisms underlying social dominance perception from facial cues. Participants made g...

Listening to music often drives people to move along to the beat of that music. Past research has suggested that motor resources are recruited not just to produce a beat, but also to perceive a beat. The present study extends this correlational work and examines whether the motor system plays a functional role in beat perception using a dual-task behavioral paradigm. Wßhile performance on a bea...

• We tested intergroup mind perception with morphs between human and inanimate faces. • Participants had more lenient thresholds for perceiving minds in in-group faces. • Individual differences in collective identification moderated this bias. • Out-group threat was associated with lenient out-group mind perception. • Mind perception depends on contextual information in addition to bottom-up cues.