We investigated the effects of psychopathy on emotional memory among a predominantly female undergraduate sample. Undergraduates (N = 153, mean age = 20.1; 80.1% female; 57.1% Caucasian) completed a facial memory task. Participants were presented with a series of faces (sad, scared, angry, happy, neutral), completed a self-report measure of psychopathy, and were presented with another series of...

People make trait inferences based on facial appearance despite little evidence that these inferences accurately reflect personality. The authors tested the hypothesis that these inferences are driven in part by structural resemblance to emotional expressions. The authors first had participants judge emotionally neutral faces on a set of trait dimensions. The authors then submitted the face ima...

Recent studies have suggested that the extent to which primary task demands draw on attentional resources determines whether or not task-irrelevant emotional stimuli are processed. Another important factor that can bias task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimulus competition is the bottom-up factor of stimulus salience. Here, we investigated the effect of stimulus salience associated with a prim...

Recent neuroimaging studies have examined the effects of anxiety on cognitive processing in the presence of emotional distractors. However, when the target stimuli themselves are emotional, it is unclear whether emotion acts as a distracting or enhancing influence. We predicted that anxiety levels would modulate the effect of emotion on neural activity in a valence-specific manner. In the curre...

One patient with left spatial neglect (FM) and four right-brain damaged controls without neglect were tested on a line bisection task with pictures of neutral and emotional faces of the same size as unilateral cues. Our aim was to investigate whether bisection biases induced by cuing can be better explained as the result of a direct perceptual lengthening of the cued part of the line or, altern...

Typical adults mimic facial expressions within 1000 ms, but adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not. These rapid facial reactions (RFRs) are associated with the development of social-emotional abilities. Such interpersonal matching may be caused by motor mirroring or emotional responses. Using facial electromyography (EMG), this study evaluated mechanisms underlying RFRs during childh...

Research has demonstrated that both attention and emotion influence temporal perception. Even though behavioral findings support a common system for temporal and numerical estimations, no research has investigated the impact of emotion on numerical estimation or the role that attention plays in that process. Using a numerical bisection task, the current research investigated enumeration of emot...

Previous research has provided inconsistent results regarding visual search for emotional faces, yielding evidence for either anger superiority (i.e., more efficient search for angry faces) or happiness superiority effects (i.e., more efficient search for happy faces), suggesting that these results do not reflect on emotional expression, but on emotion (un-)related low-level perceptual features...

For some time the relationship between processing of facial expression and facial identity has been in dispute. We re-examined this relationship and evaluated whether the same relationship characterized both perception and short-term memory. In three experiments we examined perception and memory for realistic, synthetic human faces. Experiment 1 used subjects’ judgments to identify, from a larg...

From a phenomenological perspective, faces are perceived differently from objects as their perception always involves the possibility of a relational engagement (Bredlau, 2011). This is especially true for familiar faces, i.e., faces of people with a history of real relational engagements. Similarly, valence of emotional expressions assumes a key role, as they define the sense and direction of ...