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Finding one's way in unfamiliar environments is an essential ability. When navigating, people are overwhelmed with an enormous amount of information. However, some information might be more relevant than others. Despite the mounting knowledge about the mechanisms underlying orientational skills, and the notable effects of facial emotions on human behavior, little is known about emotions' effects on spatial navigation. Hereby, this study aimed to explore how exposure to others' negative emotional facial expressions affects wayfinding performances. Moreover, gender differences that characterize both processes were considered. Fiftyfive participants (31 females) entered twice in three realistic virtual reality environments: the first time, to encode a route to find an object and then to recall the learned path to reach the same object again. In between the two explorations of the virtual environment, participants were asked to undergo a gender categorization task during which they were exposed to sixty faces showing either neutral, fearful, or angry expressions. Results showed a significant interaction between emotions, time, and gender. In particular, the exposition to fearful faces, but not angry and neutral ones, decreased males' wayfinding performances (i.e., travel times and distance travelled), while females' performances were unaffected. Possible explanations for such gender and emotional dissimilarities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated whether the difficulties in body motion (BM) perception may led to deficit in emotion recognition in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To this aim, individuals with high-functioning ASD were asked to recognise fearful, happy, and neutral BM depicted as static images or dynamic point-light and full-light displays. Results showed slower response times in participants with ASD only in recognising dynamic stimuli, but no group differences in accuracy. This suggests that i) a deficit in action chaining mechanism in ASD may prevent the recognition of dynamic BM automatically and rapidly, ii) individuals with ASD and high cognitive resources can develop alternative—but equally successful—strategies to recognise emotional body expressions. Implications for treatment are discussed [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Polyvagal theory, the vagus nerve is the key phylogenetic substrate that supports efficient emotion recognition for promoting safety and survival. Previous studies showed that the vagus nerve affects people's ability to recognize emotions based on eye regions and whole facial images, but not static bodies. The purpose of this study was to verify whether the previously suggested causal link between vagal activity and emotion recognition can be generalized to situations in which emotions must be inferred from images of whole moving bodies. We employed transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), a noninvasive brain stimulation technique that stimulates the vagus nerve by a mild electrical stimulation to the auricular branch of the vagus, located in the anterior protuberance of the outer ear. In two sessions, participants received active or sham tVNS before and while performing three emotion recognition tasks, aimed at indexing their ability to recognize emotions from static or moving bodily expressions by actors. Active tVNS, compared to sham stimulation, enhanced the recognition of anger but reduced the ability to recognize sadness, regardless of the type of stimulus (static vs. moving). Convergent with the idea of hierarchical involvement of the vagus in establishing safety, as put forward by the Polyvagal theory, we argue that our findings may be explained by vagus-evoked differential adjustment strategies to emotional expressions. Taken together, our findings fit with an evolutionary perspective on the vagus nerve and its involvement in emotion recognition for the benefit of survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Updating is a crucial function responsible of working memory integrity, allowing relevant information to be active and inhibiting irrelevant one; updating has been studied mainly with verbal stimuli, less with faces, stimuli with high adaptive value and social meaning. Aim: Our aim was to test age-related differences in updating for different stimuli in three different age groups: young adults (range 20–30 years), young-old (range 60–75 years) and older-old participants (range 77–87 years). Methods: To this end, we administered control measures (i.e., vocabulary and visuospatial tasks), span tasks (forward, backward) and two updating tasks: one with no socially relevant material (i.e., letters) and another one with socially relevant material (i.e., human faces, where, in particular, the combination between facial expression and gaze direction was manipulated). In both tasks we collected response times (RTs) at different steps of an updating task (i.e., encoding, maintaining, and updating goal-relevant information). Results and discussion: We found that age linearly produces an increase in processing speed regardless the stimulus considered, either letter or human face. However, with face stimuli, the magnitude of the difference is greater for the letter updating task, than for the face updating task. In turn, the results claim for a stimulus-specific updating process as the age-related decline is less pronounced when socially meaningful stimuli are involved than when no socially meaningful ones are. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of research has investigated both the emotional elaboration of facial stimuli in adults and the development of children’s recognition of emotional expressions. Yet, it is still not clear whether children’s ability to recognize an emotional face may be modulated by prior exposure to a different face, and whether an emotional expression may exert an effect on the processing of subsequently encountered facial emotional expressions. We tested in three experiments the recognition of happy and angry target faces preceded by neutral faces or objects (Experiment 1) and happy or angry faces (Experiment 2A and Experiment 2B) using an affective priming task in adults and 7- and 5-year-old children. Results showed a standard prime effect for neutral faces (Experiment 1) for all participants, and for happy faces in children (Experiment 2A) and adults (Experiment 2B). Otherwise, angry faces elicited negative priming effects in all participants (Experiment 2A). Overall, our findings showed that both prior exposure to a face per se and the emotional valence of the prime face have an impact on subsequent processing of facial emotional information. Implications for emotional processing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social exclusion is a painful experience that is felt as a threat to the human need to belong and can lead to increased aggressive and anti-social behaviours, and results in emotional and cognitive numbness. Excluded individuals also seem to show an automatic tuning to positivity: they tend to increase their selective attention towards social acceptance signals. Despite these effects known in the literature, the consequences of social exclusion on social information processing still need to be explored in depth. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of social exclusion on processing two features that are strictly bound in the appraisal of the meaning of facial expressions: gaze direction and emotional expression. In two experiments (N = 60, N = 45), participants were asked to identify gaze direction or emotional expressions from facial stimuli, in which both these features were manipulated. They performed these tasks in a four-block crossed design after being socially included or excluded using the Cyberball game. Participants’ empathy and self-reported emotions were recorded using the Empathy Quotient (EQ) and PANAS questionnaires. The Need Threat Scale and three additional questions were also used as manipulation checks in the second experiment. In both experiments, excluded participants showed to be less accurate than included participants in gaze direction discrimination. Modulatory effects of direct gaze (Experiment 1) and sad expression (Experiment 2) on the effects of social exclusion were found on response times (RTs) in the emotion recognition task. Specific differences in the reaction to social exclusion between males and females were also found in Experiment 2: excluded male participants tended to be less accurate and faster than included male participants, while excluded females showed a more accurate and slower performance than included female participants. No influence of social exclusion on PANAS or EQ scores was found. Results are discussed in the context of the importance of identifying gaze direction in appraisal theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study was to investigate how gaze direction of same identity faces impacts on updating and memorizing processes. Faces are multidimensional stimuli, crucial for interpersonal relations. All their features must be bound and combined together to form a coherent social percept; in particular, the combinations between gaze direction and facial expression convey very relevant information concerning behavioral and social appraisal. In two experiments we manipulated the face's social and adaptive meaning by means of different association between gaze direction and facial expression: strong observer self-meaningful associations (e.g., joy-direct gaze) were compared to weak ones (e.g., joy-averted gaze). Shorter latencies were needed to update strongly associated combinations than weak ones (Exp. 1). More interestingly, the updating of strongly associated combinations was faster than simply memorizing them (Exp. 2). The findings are discussed with reference to updating and memorizing processes in social cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether the type of stimulus (pictures of static faces vs. body motion) contributes differently to the recognition of emotions. The performance (accuracy and response times) of 25 Low Autistic Traits (LAT group) young adults (21 males) and 20 young adults (16 males) with either High Autistic Traits or with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HAT group) was compared in the recognition of four emotions (Happiness, Anger, Fear, and Sadness) either shown in static faces or conveyed by moving body patch-light displays (PLDs). Overall, HAT individuals were as accurate as LAT ones in perceiving emotions both with faces and with PLDs. Moreover, they correctly described non-emotional actions depicted by PLDs, indicating that they perceived the motion conveyed by the PLDs per se. For LAT participants, happiness proved to be the easiest emotion to be recognized: in line with previous studies we found a happy face advantage for faces, which for the first time was also found for bodies (happy body advantage). Furthermore, LAT participants recognized sadness better by static faces and fear by PLDs. This advantage for motion kinematics in the recognition of fear was not present in HAT participants, suggesting that (i) emotion recognition is not generally impaired in HAT individuals, (ii) the cues exploited for emotion recognition by LAT and HAT groups are not always the same. These findings are discussed against the background of emotional processing in typically and atypically developed individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of studies have shown that adults rely more heavily on information conveyed by the left side of the face in judging emotional state, gender and identity. This phenomenon, called left perceptual bias (LPB), suggests a right hemisphere lateralization of face processing mechanisms. Although specialization of neural mechanisms for processing over-experienced face categories begins during the first year of life, little is known about the developmental trajectory of the LPB and whether or when the bias becomes selective for specific face categories as a result of experience. To address these questions we tested adults (Experiment 1) and 5-year-old children (Experiment 2) with null or limited experience with infants in an identity matching-to-sample task with chimeric adult and infant faces, for which both adults and children have been shown to manifest differential processing abilities. Results showed that 5-year-olds manifest a leftward bias selective for adult faces, and the magnitude of the bias is larger for adult compared to infant faces in adults. This evidence is in line with earlier demonstrations of a perceptual processing advantage for adult faces in adults and children and points to the role of experience in shaping neurocognitive specialization for face processing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have shown that facial recognition and emotional expressions are dissociable. However, it is unknown if a single system supports the processing of emotional and non-emotional facial expressions. We aimed to understand if individuals with impairment in face recognition from birth (congenital prosopagnosia, CP) can use non-emotional facial expressions to recognize a face as an already seen one, and thus, process this facial dimension independently from features (which are impaired in CP), and basic emotional expressions. To this end, we carried out a behavioral study in which we compared the performance of 6 CP individuals to that of typical development individuals, using upright and inverted faces. Four avatar faces with a neutral expression were presented in the initial phase. The target faces presented in the recognition phase, in which a recognition task was requested (2AFC paradigm), could be identical (neutral) to those of the initial phase or present biologically plausible changes to features, non-emotional expressions, or emotional expressions. After this task, a second task was performed, in which the participants had to detect whether or not the recognized face exactly matched the study face or showed any difference. The results confirmed the CPs' impairment in the configural processing of the invariant aspects of the face, but also showed a spared configural processing of non-emotional facial expression (task 1). Interestingly and unlike the non-emotional expressions, the configural processing of emotional expressions was compromised in CPs and did not improve their change detection ability (task 2). These new results have theoretical implications for face perception models since they suggest that, at least in CPs, non-emotional expressions are processed configurally, can be dissociated from other facial dimensions, and may serve as a compensatory strategy to achieve face recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaze direction and facial expressions are critical components of face processing and have been shown to influence attention deployment. We investigated whether gaze direction (direct vs. averted) combined with a neutral or angry expression modulates the deployment of attentional resources over time. In a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm participants had to decide the gender of a neutral or an angry target face with direct or averted gaze (T1) and then to judge the orientation of a target picture of a landscape (T2), following the face at different time intervals. Results showed no attentional blink effect (i.e., no deterioration in T2 accuracy) when T1 was an angry face with direct gaze, whereas it was present for angry faces with averted gaze or neutral faces with either averted or direct gaze. These findings are consistent with appraisal theories and are discussed against the background of automatic processing of threat stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eyes are key social features providing a wealth of information about the attention, interest, emotion, and intention of others. Humans are typically very adept at detecting gaze direction, but there is a large decrement in gaze discrimination ability when eye images change from positive to negative polarity. This is thought to show an expert system for gaze perception that applies a contrast-specific heuristic to determine where someone else is looking. Autism spectrum conditions (ASC) are characterized by social deficits including difficulties in face-processing and in the social use of gaze. People with ASC are thought to have less expertise for gaze processing compared to typical controls, though little research has tested this. We investigated gaze direction perception in typical males and females, and males with ASC using facial stimuli with positive or negative polarity of the eyes. Results showed that the ASC group was worse at judging gaze direction with positive stimuli, and showed less of a decrement in performance when eye stimuli changed from positive to negative polarity. The differences in gaze perception for the ASC group were most evident when information from the eyes was more difficult and ambiguous. Typical females performed better at gaze direction detection with positive polarity than typical males, who in turn performed better than males with ASC. This latter finding is consistent with the extreme male brain theory of autism, and with the idea that people with ASC have less gaze expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While abundant literature suggests that both performing congruent actions and emotional stimuli can enhance memory, their combined impact on memory for action phrases remains underexplored. This study investigated the effects of enactment with emotionally charged stimuli on memory performance. Sixty participants encoded action sentences with negative, neutral, or positive emotional connotations using either enactment or verbal-reading methods. Memory performance was assessed through immediate free recall tasks and a delayed yes-no recognition task. Results demonstrated a significant memory advantage for action-enacted sentences compared to verbal reading in recall and recognition tasks. Moreover, recall accuracy was higher for negative action sentences, while recognition performance was enhanced for negative and positive sentences. No interaction was found between encoding type and emotional connotation in memory tasks. Our findings revealed that both enactment and valence independently enhance memory performance, extending the benefits of enactment to emotional stimuli. Furthermore, our results highlight the differential effects of valence on free recall and recognition tasks, suggesting task-specific processes related to memory for negative and positive stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]