Oxytocin is an evolutionarily highly preserved neuropeptide that contributes to the regulation of social interactions including the processing of facial stimuli. We hypothesized that its improving effect on social approach behavior depends on perceived sexual features and, consequently, on sexual orientation. In 19 homosexual and 18 heterosexual healthy young men, we investigated the acute effe...

Facial expressions aid social transactions and serve as socialization tools, with smiles signaling approval and reward, and angry faces signaling disapproval and punishment. The present study examined whether the subjective experience of positive vs. negative facial expressions differs between children and adults. Specifically, we examined age-related differences in biases toward happy and angr...

Studies have found that older compared with young adults are less able to identify facial expressions and have worse memory for negative than for positive faces, but those studies have used only young faces. Studies finding that both age groups are more accurate at recognizing faces of their own than other ages have used mostly neutral faces. Thus, age differences in processing faces may not ex...

Previous studies have examined testosterone's role in regulating the processing of facial displays of emotions (FDEs). However, the reciprocal process - the influence of FDEs, an evolutionarily ancient and potent class of social signals, on the secretion of testosterone - has not yet been studied. To address this gap, we examined the effects of emotional content and sex of facial stimuli in mod...

background: to investigate the prevalence of metabolic syndrome (mets) in young chinese population and assess the as­sociation between homa-ir and different components of mets in young chinese men. methods: overall 5576 young chinese subjects (age range [19-44 yr], 3636 men) were enrolled in, who visited our health care center for a related health checkup from march to december 2008. the intern...

Three studies examined the relationships among anger, gender, and status conferral. As in prior research, men who expressed anger in a professional context were conferred higher status than men who expressed sadness. However, both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupatio...

We investigated how age of faces and emotion expressed in faces affect young (n=30) and older (n=20) adults' visual inspection while viewing faces and judging their expressions. Overall, expression identification was better for young than older faces, suggesting that interpreting expressions in young faces is easier than in older faces, even for older participants. Moreover, there were age-grou...

The amygdala is critically involved in mediating physiological and behavioral responses to threat. In particular, neuroimaging research indicates that the amygdala is highly responsive to facial signals of threat such as fearful and angry expressions. However, individuals differ substantially in both their relative sensitivity to threat and the magnitude of amygdala reactivity to facial signals...