Facial expressions convey important information on emotional states of our interaction partners. However, in interactions between younger and older adults, there is evidence for a reduced ability to accurately decode emotional facial expressions. Previous studies have often followed up this phenomenon by examining the effect of the observers' age. However, decoding emotional faces is also likel...

Activation of the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA) are consistent findings in imaging studies on emotional face processing. There is evidence that these activations occur even when emotional faces are unattended; however, it was also shown that amygdala and FFA activation were modulated by the attentional resources allocated to these stimuli. Attentional resources might thereby not onl...

In the natural world, faces are not isolated objects but are rather encountered in the context of the whole body. Previous work has studied the perception of combined faces and bodies using behavioural and electrophysiological measurements, but the neural correlates of emotional face-body perception still remain unexplored. Here, we combined happy and fearful faces and bodies to investigate the...

The processing of emotional faces and bodies has been associated with brain regions related to empathic responding in interpersonal contexts. The aim of the present Electroencephalography (EEG) study was to investigate differences in the time course underlying the processing of bodies and faces showing neutral, happy, or angry expressions. The P100 and N170 were analyzed in response to the pres...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain was used to study whether the amygdala is activated in response to emotional stimuli, even in the absence of explicit knowledge that such stimuli were presented. Pictures of human faces bearing fearful or happy expressions were presented to 10 normal, healthy subjects by using a backward masking procedure that resulted in 8 of 10 s...

Acute administration of the primary psychoactive constituent of cannabis, Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), impairs human facial affect recognition, implicating the endocannabinoid system in emotional processing. Another main constituent of cannabis, cannabidiol (CBD), has seemingly opposite functional effects on the brain. This study aimed to determine the effects of THC and CBD, both alone and ...

The evidence for amygdala processing of emotional items outside the focus of attention is mixed. We hypothesized that differences in attentional demands may, at least in part, explain prior discrepancies. In the present study, attention was manipulated by parametrically varying the difficulty of a central task, allowing us to compare responses evoked by unattended emotion-laden faces while the ...

Social cognition is impaired in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The ability to perceive and interpret affect is integral to successful social functioning and has an extended developmental course. However, the neural mechanisms underlying emotional face processing in ASD are unclear. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), the present study explored neural activation during implicit emotional face p...

Within a second of seeing an emotional facial expression, people typically match that expression. These rapid facial reactions (RFRs), often termed mimicry, are implicated in emotional contagion, social perception, and embodied affect, yet ambiguity remains regarding the mechanism(s) involved. Two studies evaluated whether RFRs to faces are solely nonaffective motor responses or whether emotion...

Brain regions modulated by cognitive tasks during emotional processing were investigated using fMRI. Participants performed indirect and direct emotional processing tasks on positive and negative faces and pictures. We used a multivariate technique, partial least squares (PLS) to determine spatially distributed patterns of brain activity associated with different tasks and stimulus conditions, ...