OBJECTIVES To elucidate the potential relationship between classification of emotional faces and impaired central processing in eating disorders and to investigate the potential mediatory role of alexithymia and depression in this relationship. METHODS Visual-evoked potentials (VEPs) to emotional faces and classification performance were assessed in 12 anorexic females and matched healthy con...

It is well known that emotion can modulate attentional processes. Previous studies have shown that even under restricted awareness, emotional facial expressions (especially threat-related) can guide the direction of spatial attention. However, it remains unclear whether emotional facial expressions under restricted awareness can affect temporal attention. To address this issue, we used a modifi...

Unpredictability about upcoming emotional events disrupts our ability to prepare for them and ultimately results in anxiety. Here, we investigated how attention modulates the neural responses to unpredictable emotional events. Brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants performed a variation of the emotional task. Behaviorally, we reported a...

Emotions are often encountered in a multimodal fashion. Consequently, contextual framing by other modalities can alter the way that an emotional facial expression is perceived and lead to emotional conflict. Whole brain fMRI data was collected when 35 healthy subjects judged emotional expressions in faces while concurrently being exposed to emotional (scream, laughter) or neutral (yawning) soun...

Attention may reflexively shift towards the location of perceived threats, but it is still unclear how these spatial biases recruit the distributed fronto-parietal cortical networks involved in other aspects of selective attention. We used event-related fMRI to determine how brain responses to a neutral visual target are influenced by the emotional expression of faces appearing at the same loca...

Differences in emotional processing are prevalent in adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and are related to clinical impairment, but substantial heterogeneity exists. Within ADHD, some individuals experience difficulty with positive/approach emotions, negative/withdrawal emotions, or both. These problems may reflect differences in emotional reactivity, emotion regul...

Instrumental decision making has long been argued to be vulnerable to emotional responses. Literature on multiple decision making systems suggests that this emotional biasing might reflect effects of a system that regulates innately specified, evolutionarily preprogrammed responses. To test this hypothesis directly, we investigated whether effects of emotional faces on instrumental action can b...

Shyness in healthy controls has been related to early event-related potential (ERP) responses to emotional faces. Patients with schizophrenia typically demonstrate increased shyness that is stable and related to reduced social functioning. We indexed early ERP responses to emotional faces in relation to shyness in 40 outpatients with schizophrenia and 39 healthy controls. Patients with low-to-m...