Neural Responses to Object Priming of Fearful and Happy Facial Expressions

B. Heptonstall; M. Thorpe; B. Xu; J. Tanaka

doi:10.1167/14.10.1390

What you morph is not what you get: Subjective and neural responses to facial expressions of emotion depend on perceived intensity/arousal (not on amount of morphing)

10.31234/osf.io/qda9m ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Fernando Ferreira-Santos ◽

Mariana R. Pereira ◽

Tiago O. Paiva ◽

Pedro R. Almeida ◽

Eva C. Martins ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Facial Expressions ◽

Electrophysiological Study ◽

Objective Measure ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Supporting Evidence ◽

Emotional Intensity ◽

Neural Responses ◽

Facial Stimuli ◽

Facial Expressions Of Emotion ◽

Processing Techniques

The behavioral and electrophysiological study of the emotional intensity of facial expressions of emotions has relied on image processing techniques termed ‘morphing’ to generate realistic facial stimuli in which emotional intensity can be manipulated. This is achieved by blending neutral and emotional facial displays and treating the percent of morphing between the two stimuli as an objective measure of emotional intensity. Here we argue that the percentage of morphing between stimuli does not provide an objective measure of emotional intensity and present supporting evidence from affective ratings and neural (event-related potential) responses. We show that 50% morphs created from high or moderate arousal stimuli differ in subjective and neural responses in a sensible way: 50% morphs are perceived as having approximately half of the emotional intensity of the original stimuli, but if the original stimuli differed in emotional intensity to begin with, then so will the morphs. We suggest a re-examination of previous studies that used percentage of morphing as a measure of emotional intensity and highlight the value of more careful experimental control of emotional stimuli and inclusion of proper manipulation checks.

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Effects of a α2C-Adrenoreceptor Gene Polymorphism on Neural Responses to Facial Expressions in Depression

Neuropsychopharmacology ◽

10.1038/sj.npp.1301010 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 31 (8) ◽

pp. 1750-1756 ◽

Cited By ~ 64

Author(s):

Alexander Neumeister ◽

Wayne C Drevets ◽

Inna Belfer ◽

David A Luckenbaugh ◽

Shannan Henry ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Gene Polymorphism ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Neural Responses

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Neural Responses to Ambiguity Involve Domain-general and Domain-specific Emotion Processing Systems

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00363 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 25 (4) ◽

pp. 547-557 ◽

Cited By ~ 25

Author(s):

Maital Neta ◽

William M. Kelley ◽

Paul J. Whalen

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Visual Processing ◽

Neural Responses ◽

Social Signals ◽

Emotional Facial Expressions ◽

Biologically Relevant ◽

Domain Specific ◽

Specific Emotion ◽

On Line

Extant research has examined the process of decision making under uncertainty, specifically in situations of ambiguity. However, much of this work has been conducted in the context of semantic and low-level visual processing. An open question is whether ambiguity in social signals (e.g., emotional facial expressions) is processed similarly or whether a unique set of processors come on-line to resolve ambiguity in a social context. Our work has examined ambiguity using surprised facial expressions, as they have predicted both positive and negative outcomes in the past. Specifically, whereas some people tended to interpret surprise as negatively valenced, others tended toward a more positive interpretation. Here, we examined neural responses to social ambiguity using faces (surprise) and nonface emotional scenes (International Affective Picture System). Moreover, we examined whether these effects are specific to ambiguity resolution (i.e., judgments about the ambiguity) or whether similar effects would be demonstrated for incidental judgments (e.g., nonvalence judgments about ambiguously valenced stimuli). We found that a distinct task control (i.e., cingulo-opercular) network was more active when resolving ambiguity. We also found that activity in the ventral amygdala was greater to faces and scenes that were rated explicitly along the dimension of valence, consistent with findings that the ventral amygdala tracks valence. Taken together, there is a complex neural architecture that supports decision making in the presence of ambiguity: (a) a core set of cortical structures engaged for explicit ambiguity processing across stimulus boundaries and (b) other dedicated circuits for biologically relevant learning situations involving faces.

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Machiavellianism and early neural responses to others’ facial expressions caused by one's own decisions

Psychiatry Research ◽

10.1016/j.psychres.2018.12.037 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 271 ◽

pp. 669-677

Author(s):

Takahiro Osumi ◽

Koki Tsuji ◽

Midori Shibata ◽

Satoshi Umeda

Keyword(s):

Facial Expressions ◽

Neural Responses

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Differential neural responses to overt and covert presentations of facial expressions of fear and disgust

NeuroImage ◽

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.12.013 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 21 (4) ◽

pp. 1484-1496 ◽

Cited By ~ 185

Author(s):

Mary L. Phillips ◽

Leanne M. Williams ◽

Maike Heining ◽

Catherine M. Herba ◽

Tamara Russell ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Facial Expressions ◽

Neural Responses

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Neural and Behavioral Responses to Ambiguous Facial Expressions of Emotion

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190613501.003.0013 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Paul J. Whalen ◽

Maital Neta ◽

M. Justin Kim ◽

Alison M. Mattek ◽

F. C. Davis ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Facial Expression ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Behavioral Responses ◽

Experimental Paradigm ◽

Neural Responses ◽

Conditioned Stimuli ◽

Environmental Cue ◽

Facial Expressions Of Emotion ◽

Prefrontal Circuitry

When it comes to being social, there is no other nonverbal environmental cue that is more important for humans than the facial expression of another person. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli that, when presented as images in an experimental paradigm, evoke neural and behavioral responses that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expression. We will cover data showing that the expressions of others alter our attention to the environment, our biases in interpreting these facial expressions, and our neural responses within an amygdala-prefrontal circuitry related to normal variations in reported anxiety.

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