INTRODUCTION Recognition memory may be enhanced for emotional stimuli compared to neutral ones. Neuropsychological studies in adults with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) have reported disorders in this emotional memory enhancement but few studies have focused on children and adolescents with TLE. However these young patients are at particular risk for memory impairments. METHODS We included 25 p...

The universality across cultures for recognizing the facial expression of anger suggests an evolved mechanism for dealing with threat. Using low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and a paradigm involving color-naming latencies for angry, fearful and neutral faces, and for emotional and neutral words respectively, we found evidence for a hemispheric specialization acc...

In a set of three rapid serial visual presentation experiments, we investigated the effect of fearful and neutral face stimuli on the report of trailing scene targets. When the emotional expression of the face stimuli had to be indicated, fearful faces induced a stronger attentional blink (AB) than did neutral faces. However, with identical physical stimulation, the enhancement of the AB by fea...

Theoretical models of attention for affective information have assigned a special status to the cognitive processing of emotional facial expressions. One specific claim in this regard is that emotional faces automatically attract visual attention. In three experiments, the authors investigated attentional cueing by angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions that were presented under condition...

It is known that happy faces create more robust identity recognition memory than faces with some other expressions. However, this advantage was not verified against all basic expressions. Moreover, no research has assessed whether similar differences also exist among other expressions. To tackle these questions, we compared the effects of six basic emotional expressions on recognition memory us...

There is some evidence that faces with a happy expression are recognized better than faces with other expressions. However, little is known about whether this happy-face advantage also applies to perceptual face matching, and whether similar differences exist among other expressions. Using a sequential matching paradigm, we systematically compared the effects of seven basic facial expressions o...

Empirical evidence suggests that words are powerful regulators of emotion processing. Although a number of studies have used words as contextual cues for emotion processing, the role of what is being labeled by the words (i.e., one's own emotion as compared to the emotion expressed by the sender) is poorly understood. The present study reports results from two experiments which used ERP methodo...

BACKGROUND Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are associated with severe impairments in social functioning. Because faces provide nonverbal cues that support social interactions, many studies of ASD have examined neural structures that process faces, including the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and superior and middle temporal gyri. However, increases or decreases in activation are often...