Researchers have proposed that blocking facial feedback via glabellar-region botulinum toxin injections can reduce depression. Random-effects meta-analyses of studies that administered GBTX...

Micro-expressions, as fleeting facial expressions, are very important for judging people’s true emotions, thus can provide an essential behavioral clue for lie and dangerous demeanor detection. From embodied accounts of cognition, we derived a novel hypothesis that facial feedback from upper and lower facial regions has differential effects on micro-expression recognition. This hypothesis was tested and supported across three studies. Specifically, the results of Study 1 showed that people became better judges of intense micro-expressions with a (...) duration of 450 ms when the facial feedback from upper face was enhanced via a restricting gel. Additional results of Study 2 showed that the recognition accuracy of subtle micro-expressions was significantly impaired under all duration conditions (50 ms, 150 ms, 333 ms, and 450 ms) when facial feedback from lower face was enhanced. In addition, the results of Study 3 also revealed that blocking the facial feedback of lower face, significantly boosted the recognition accuracy of subtle and intense micro-expressions under all duration conditions (150 ms and 450 ms). Together, these results highlight the role of facial feedback in judging the subtle movements of micro-expressions. (shrink)

Facial expressions influence our experience and perception of emotions—they not only tell other people what we are feeling but also might tell us what to feel via sensory feedback. We conducted three experiments to investigate the interaction between facial feedback phenomena and different environmental stimuli, by asking participants to remember emotional autobiographical memories. Moreover, we examined how people with schizotypal traits would be affected by their experience of emotional facial simulations. We found that using a (...) directed approach (gripping a pencil with teeth/lips) while remembering a specific autobiographical memory could successfully evoke participants’ positive (e.g. happy and excited)/negative (e.g. angry and sad) emotions (i.e. Experiment 1). When using indirective environmental stimuli (e.g. teardrop glasses), the results of our experiments (i.e. Experiments 2 and 3) investigating facial feedback and the effect of teardrop glasses showed that participants who scored low in schizotypy reported little effect from wearing teardrop glasses, while those with high schizotypy reported a much greater effect in both between- and within-subject conditions. The results are discussed from the perspective of sense of ownership, which people with schizophrenia are believed to have deficits in. (shrink)

Emotions are foremost self-regulating processes that permit rapid responses and adaptations to situations of personal concern. They have biological bases and are shaped ontogenetically via learning and experience. Many situations and events of personal concern are social in nature. Thus, social exchanges play an important role in learning about rules and norms that shape regulation processes. I argue that (a) emotions often are actively auto-regulating—the behavior implied by the emotional reaction bias to the eliciting event or situation modifies or terminates (...) the situation; (b) certain emotion components are likely to habituate dynamically, modifying the emotional states; (c) emotions are typically intra- and interpersonal processes at the same time, and modulating forces at these different levels interact; (d) emotions are not just regulated—they regulate. Important conclusions of my arguments are that the scientific analysis of emotion should not exclude regulatory processes, and that effortful emotion regulation should be seen relative to a backdrop of auto-regulation and habituation, and not the ideal notion of a neutral baseline. For all practical purposes unregulated emotion is not a realistic concept. (shrink)

Recent studies of emotion mindreading reveal that for three emotions, fear, disgust, and anger, deficits in face-based recognition are paired with deficits in the production of the same emotion. What type of mindreading process would explain this pattern of paired deficits? The simulation approach and the theorizing approach are examined to determine their compatibility with the existing evidence. We conclude that the simulation approach offers the best explanation of the data. What computational steps might be used, however, in simulation-style emotion (...) detection? Four alternative models are explored: a generate-and-test model, a reverse simulation model, a variant of the reverse simulation model that employs an “as if” loop, and an unmediated resonance model. (shrink)

Research on surprise relevant to the cognitive-evolutionary model of surprise proposed by Meyer, Reisenzein, and Schützwohl is reviewed. The majority of the assumptions of the model are found empirically supported. Surprise is evoked by unexpected events and its intensity is determined by the degree if schema-discrepancy, whereas the novelty and the valence of the eliciting events probably do not have an independent effect. Unexpected events cause an automatic interruption of ongoing mental processes that is followed by an attentional shift and (...) attentional binding to the events, which is often followed by causal and other event analysis processes and by schema revision. The facial expression of surprise postulated by evolutionary emotion psychologists has been found to occur rarely in surprise, for as yet unknown reasons. A physiological orienting response marked by skin conductance increase, heart rate deceleration, and pupil dilation has been observed to occur regularly in the standard version of the repetition-change paradigm of surprise induction, but the specificity of these reactions as indicators of surprise is controversial. There is indirect evidence for the assumption that the feeling of surprise consists of the direct awareness of the schema-discrepancy signal, but this feeling, or at least the self-report of surprise, is also influenced by experienced interference. In contrast, facial feedback probably does contribute substantially to the feeling of surprise and the evidence for the hypothesis that surprise is affected by the difficulty of explaining an unexpected event is, in our view, inconclusive. Regardless of how the surprise feeling is constituted, there is evidence that it has both motivational and informational effects. Finally, the prediction failure implied by unexpected events sometimes causes a negative feeling, but there is no convincing evidence that this is always the case, and we argue that even if it were so, this would not be a sufficient reason for regarding this feeling as a component, rather than as an effect of surprise. (shrink)

William James’s theory of emotion has been controversial since its inception, and a basic analysis of Cannon’s critique is provided. Research on the impact of facial expressions, expressive behaviors, and visceral responses on emotional feelings are each reviewed. A good deal of evidence supports James’s theory that these types of bodily feedback, along with perceptions of situational cues, are each important parts of emotional feelings. Extensions to James’s theory are also reviewed, including evidence of individual differences in the (...) effect of bodily responses on emotional experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne prestudy based on a corpus analysis and four experiments in which participants had to invent novel names for persons or objects investigated how the valence of a face or an object affects the phonological characteristics of the respective novel name. Based on the articulatory feedback hypothesis, we predicted that /i:/ is included more frequently in fictional names for faces or objects with a positive valence than for those with a negative valence. For /o:/, the pattern should reverse. An (...) analysis of the Berlin Affective Word List – Reloaded yielded a higher number of occurrences of /o:/ in German words with negative valence than in words with positive valence; with /i:/ the situation is less clear. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants named persons showing a positive or a negative facial expression. Names for smiling persons included more /i:/s and fewer /o:/s than names for persons with a negative facial expression. In Experiments 3 and 4, participant... (shrink)

Ruth Leys raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm , and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take (...) issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory—the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn. (shrink)

Plan-ahead becomes necessary for those movements which are over-and-done in less time than it takes for the feedback loop to operate. Natural selection for one of the ballistic movements (hammering, clubbing, and throwing) could evolve a plan-ahead serial buffer for hand-arm commands that would benefit the other ballistic movements as well. This same circuitry may also sequence other muscles (children learning handwriting often screw up their faces and tongues) and so novel oral-facial sequences may also benefit (as might (...) kicking and dancing). An elaborated version of the sequencer may constitute a Darwin Machine that spins scenarios, evolves sentences, and facilitates insight by offline simulation. An example is given of an evolutionary scenario from an apelike ancestor, demonstrating the transition behaviors and growth curve considerations that any such theory needs to have; this particular scenario (involving throwing improvements) also suggests an explanation for the puzzling design of the Acheulean "handaxe.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and ArtSusan FeaginDeeper Than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music, and Art, by Jenefer Robinson; 516 pp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005, $35.00.Jenefer Robinson's lucid yet closely-argued book has four parts. The first part presents a theory of the emotions in general. The second part develops and defends the view that "some works of literature... need to (...) be experienced emotionally if they are to be properly understood" (p. 3) and draws some implications for other arts. Part Three develops a new theory of expression, and Part Four examines the expression of emotion in and listeners' emotional responses to music. Robinson applies her theory of emotions and how they arise and are expressed in response to individual works of art throughout, and the extended discussions of Edith Wharton's The Reef and one of the intermezzi from Brahms's Opus 117 set are not to be missed.Robinson's use of psychological research to develop a philosophical theory of emotion is characteristic of an increasingly popular practice in the philosophy of mind. Her descriptions of this often highly technical literature are among the best with respect to accuracy and clarity. On most accounts, emotions are mental states; on Robinson's, they are mental processes. These processes are always initiated by "an automatic 'affective appraisal' [that] induces characteristic physiological and behavioral changes and is succeeded by... 'cognitive monitoring' of the situation" (p. 3). The appraisal is also referred to as a 'non-cognitive' appraisal, which may sound like an oxymoron. Robinson explains: these appraisals are non-cognitive "in the sense that they occur without any conscious deliberation or awareness, and that they do not involve any complex information processing" (p. 45; see also p. 59). Appraisals have a valence, positive or negative, sufficient to induce a characteristic pattern of physiological and (roughly, involuntary) behavioral responses, such as alterations in galvanic skin response and movements of facial muscles. These changes are succeeded by cognitive monitoring of the situation, resulting in conceptually more sophisticated assessments of one's initial response with respect to its suitability to the circumstances and in relation to one's beliefs. Thus, cognitive monitoring generates the more cognitively complex emotions, and here she is in agreement [End Page 420] with the "judgment theorists" (p. 90) that these emotions are individuated by cognitions. Robinson seeks a univocal account of emotions for humans and other sentient creatures, though with humans it is possible for a "complex cognition" to trigger the process that constitutes having an emotion and cognitive feedback may occur in general throughout the process in ways that are not possible for creatures lacking the relevant complex mental capacities (p. 93).The fact that complex cognitions can constitute the initial stage of an emotion makes it possible to respond emotionally to literature. As in emotional situations in real life, emotions are initiated by automatic affective appraisals that have to do with one's own wants and interests, calling our attention to something important in the novel, which may lay down its own memory system, linked with bodily feelings, which is then subject to cognitive appraisal and reappraisal. Cognitive reflection facilitates the understanding of narratives as well as characters, and with respect to the latter, she argues, deploys the same mental systems that are engaged in understanding people. Further, it is not merely the beliefs that one may acquire as a result of the process that is educational, but the process of emotional understanding itself (p. 155). Indeed, Robinson endorses the strong claim that for at least some novels, those that are part of the "Great Tradition" of nineteenth-century realistic British and American literature, it is necessary to experience them emotionally to understand them.Part Three exposits a theory of the expression of emotion simpliciter and then makes adjustments to it to build a theory of expression in art, taking advantage of Romantic theories of expression developed in the works of, for example, Collingwood. Reflection on ordinary expression allows an artist to clarify and articulate "what it is like to go through the emotion process," which may be revealed both in the... (shrink)

Multisensory integration allows us to link sensory cues from multiple sources and plays a crucial role in speech development. However, it is not clear whether humans have an innate ability or whether repeated sensory input while the brain is maturing leads to efficient integration of sensory information in speech. We investigated the integration of auditory and somatosensory information in speech processing in a bimodal perceptual task in 15 young adults (age 19 to 30) and 14 children (age 5 to 6). (...) The participants were asked to identify if the perceived target was the sound /e/ or /ø/. Half of the stimuli were presented under a unimodal condition with only auditory input. The other stimuli were presented under a bimodal condition with both auditory input and somatosensory input consisting of facial skin stretches provided by a robotic device, which mimics the articulation of the vowel /e/. The results indicate that the effect of somatosensory information on sound categorization was larger in adults than in children. This suggests that integration of auditory and somatosensory information evolves throughout the course of development. (shrink)

Background: Clinical and experimental findings have suggested that insomnia is associated with altered emotion processing, such as facial emotion recognition and impairments in executive functions. However, the results still appear non-consensual and have recently been presented by a few number of studies. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether patients with Insomnia disorder will present alterations in recognition of facial emotions and that such alterations will be related to Executive Functions and that Insomnia Disorder (...) patients will exhibit a lower Executive Functions performance when compared to normal controls individuals. Method: A total of 11 individuals diagnosed with insomnia disorder and 15 control participants took part in the present cross-sectional study. They completed questionnaires covering socio-demographic data, a sleep and mood evaluation, and a cognitive assessment. Moreover, they underwent a computerized Facial Emotional Recognition test, consisting of facial emotion labeling and facial emotion matching. Results: Individuals with insomnia presented a lower recognition of facial expressions of fear and sadness in comparison to control volunteers. Perceptual Organization Index was found to be statistically significant lower in the insomnia group compared to the control group. There was a statistically significant association between facial recognition emotional and cognitive processes of in executive functions performance, especially in processes related to the inhibitory control, planning capacity, problem solving and cognitive flexibility in insomnia group. Conclusions: Insomnia disorder impairs the facial emotion recognition of the fear and sadness. Insomniacs with impairment in the facial emotion recognition had impaired performance of executive functions. There is a negative impact on processes related to cognitive-emotional capacity than on processes related to social-emotional recognition. Keywords: insomnia, facial emotional recognition, sleep deprivation, cognition, executive functions. (shrink)

There are many ways to assess face perception skills. In this study, we describe a novel task battery FEAST (Facial Expression Action Stimulus Test) developed to test recognition of identity and expressions of human faces as well as stimulus control categories. The FEAST consists of a neutral and emotional face memory task, a face and object identity matching task, a face and house part-to-whole matching task, and a human and animal facial expression matching task. The identity and part-to-whole (...) matching tasks contain both upright and inverted conditions. The results provide reference data of a healthy sample of controls in two age groups for future users of the FEAST. (shrink)

Epistemologists spend a great deal of time thinking about how we should respond to our evidence. They spend far less time thinking about the ways that evidence can be acquired in the first place. This is an oversight. Some ways of acquiring evidence are better than others. Many normative epistemologies struggle to accommodate this fact. In this article I develop one that can and does. I identify a phenomenon – epistemic feedback loops – in which evidence acquisition has gone (...) awry, with the result that even beliefs based on the evidence are irrational. Examples include evidence acquired under the influence of confirmation bias and evidence acquired under the influence of cognitively penetrated experiences caused by implicit bias. I then develop a theoretical framework which enables us to understand why beliefs that are the outputs of epistemic feedback loops are irrational. Finally, I argue that many popular approaches to epistemic normativity may need to be abandoned on the grounds that they cannot comfortably explain feedback loops. The scope of this last claim is broad: it includes almost all contemporary theories of justified/rational belief and of the epistemology of cognitive penetration. (shrink)

This paper proposes that human expression of pain in the presence or absence of caregivers, and the detection of pain by observers, arises from evolved propensities. The function of pain is to demand attention and prioritise escape, recovery, and healing; where others can help achieve these goals, effective communication of pain is required. Evidence is reviewed of a distinct and specific facial expression of pain from infancy to old age, consistent across stimuli, and recognizable as pain by observers. Voluntary (...) control over amplitude is incomplete, and observers can better detect pain that the individual attempts to suppress rather than amplify or simulate. In many clinical and experimental settings, the facial expression of pain is incorporated with verbal and nonverbal vocal activity, posture, and movement in an overall category of pain behaviour. This is assumed by clinicians to be under operant control of social contingencies such as sympathy, caregiving, and practical help; thus, strong facial expression is presumed to constitute an attempt to manipulate these contingencies by amplification of the normal expression. Operant formulations support skepticism about the presence or extent of pain, judgments of malingering, and sometimes the withholding of caregiving and help. To the extent that pain expression is influenced by environmental contingencies, however, could equally plausibly constitute the release of suppression according to evolved contingent propensities that guide behaviour. Pain has been largely neglected in the evolutionary literature and the literature on expression of emotion, but an evolutionary account can generate improved assessment of pain and reactions to it. (shrink)

Research on facial emotion expression has mostly focused on emotion recognition, assuming that a small number of discrete emotions is elicited and expressed via prototypical facial muscle configurations as captured in still photographs. These are expected to be recognized by observers, presumably via template matching. In contrast, appraisal theories of emotion propose a more dynamic approach, suggesting that specific elements of facial expressions are directly produced by the result of certain appraisals and predicting the facial patterns (...) to be expected for certain appraisal configurations. This approach has recently been extended to emotion perception, claiming that observers first infer individual appraisals and only then make categorical emotion judgments based on the estimated appraisal patterns, using semantic inference rules. Here we report two related studies to empirically investigate the facial action unit configurations that are used by actors to convey specific emotions in short affect bursts and to examine to what extent observers can infer a person’s emotions from the predicted facial expression configurations. The results show that 1) professional actors use many of the predicted facial action unit patterns to enact systematically specified appraisal outcomes in a realistic scenario setting, and 2) naïve observers infer the respective emotions based on highly similar facial movement configurations with a degree of accuracy comparable to earlier research findings. Based on estimates of underlying appraisal criteria for the different emotions we conclude that the patterns of facial action units identified in this research correspond largely to prior predictions and encourage further research on appraisal-driven expression and inference. (shrink)

While numerous studies have examined the relationships between facial actions and emotions, they have yet to account for the ways that specific spontaneous facial expressions map onto emotional experiences induced without expressive intent. Moreover, previous studies emphasized that a fine-grained investigation of facial components could establish the coherence of facial actions with actual internal states. Therefore, this study aimed to accumulate evidence for the correspondence between spontaneous facial components and emotional experiences. We reinvestigated data from (...) previous research which secretly recorded spontaneous facial expressions of Japanese participants as they watched film clips designed to evoke four different target emotions: surprise, amusement, disgust, and sadness. The participants rated their emotional experiences via a self-reported questionnaire of sixteen emotions. These spontaneous facial expressions were coded using the Facial Action Coding System, the gold standard for classifying visible facial movements. We corroborated each facial action that was present in the emotional experiences by applying stepwise regression models. The results found that spontaneous facial components occurred in ways that cohere to the their evolutionary functions based on the rating values of emotional experiences (e.g., the inner brow raiser might be involved in the evaluation of novelty). This study provided new empirical evidence for the correspondence between each spontaneous facial component and first-person internal states of emotion as reported by the expresser. (shrink)

We discuss here one of our projects, aimed at developing an automatic facial expression interpreter, mainly in terms of signaled emotions. We present some of the relevant findings on facial expressions from cognitive science and psychology that can be understood by and be useful to researchers in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. We then give an overview of HCI applications involving automated facial expression recognition, we survey some of the latest progresses in this area reached by various (...) approaches in computer vision, and we describe the design of our facial expression recognizer. We also give some background knowledge about our motivation for understanding facial expressions and we propose an architecture for a multimodal intelligent interface capable of recognizing and adapting to computer users' affective states. Finally, we discuss current interdisciplinary issues and research questions which will need to be addressed for further progress to be made in the promising area of computational facial expression recognition. (shrink)

The lack of access to gender-affirming surgery represents a significant unmet health care need within the transgender community, frequently resulting in depression and self-destructive behavior. While some transgender people may have access to gender reassignment surgery, an overwhelming majority cannot afford facial feminization surgery. The former may be covered as a “medical necessity,” but FFS is considered “cosmetic” and excluded from insurance coverage. This demarcation between “necessity” and “cosmetic” in transgender health care based on specific body parts is in (...) direct opposition to the scientific community’s understanding of gender dysphoria and professional guidelines for transgender health. GRS affects one’s ability to function in an intimate relationship, while FFS has the same impact on social interactions an, therefore may have a far greater implication for one’s quality of life. FFS is a cost-effective intervention that needs to be covered by insurance policies. The benefits of such coverage far exceed the insignificant costs. (shrink)

It is hypothesized that human faces judged to be attractive by people possess two features—averageness and symmetry—that promoted adaptive mate selection in human evolutionary history by way of production of offspring with parasite resistance. Facial composites made by combining individual faces are judged to be attractive, and more attractive than the majority of individual faces. The composites possess both symmetry and averageness of features. Facial averageness may reflect high individual protein heterozygosity and thus an array of proteins to (...) which parasites must adapt. Heterozygosity may be an important defense of long-lived hosts against parasites when it occurs in portions of the genome that do not code for the essential features of complex adaptations. In this case heterozygosity can create a hostile microenvironment for parasites without disrupting adaptation. Facial bilateral symmetry is hypothesized to affect positive beauty judgments because symmetry is a certification of overall phenotypic quality and developmental health, which may be importantly influenced by parasites. Certain secondary sexual traits are influenced by testosterone, a hormone that reduces immunocompetence. Symmetry and size of the secondary sexual traits of the face (e.g., cheek bones) are expected to correlate positively and advertise immunocompetence honestly and therefore to affect positive beauty judgments. Facial attractiveness is predicted to correlate with attractive, nonfacial secondary sexual traits; other predictions from the view that parasite-driven selection led to the evolution of psychological adaptations of human beauty perception are discussed. The view that human physical attractiveness and judgments about human physical attractiveness evolved in the context of parasite-driven selection leads to the hypothesis that both adults and children have a species-typical adaptation to the problem of identifying and favoring healthy individuals and avoiding parasite-susceptible individuals. It is proposed that this adaptation guides human decisions about nepotism and reciprocity in relation to physical attractiveness. (shrink)

This study explores the evolutionary-based hypothesis that facial attractiveness (a guiding force in mate selection) is a cue for physical fitness (presumably an important contributor to mate value in ancestral times). Since fluctuating asymmetry, a measure of developmental stability, is known to be a valid cue for fitness in several biological domains, we scrutinized facial asymmetry as a potential mediator between attractiveness and fitness. In our sample of young women, facial beauty indeed indicated physical fitness. The relationships (...) that pertained to asymmetry were in the expected direction. However, a closer analysis revealed that facial asymmetry did not mediate the relationship between fitness and attractiveness. Unexpected problems regarding the measurement of facial asymmetry are discussed. (shrink)

Facial blushing involves a reddening of the face elicited in situations involving unwanted social attention. Such situations include being caught committing a social transgression, which is typical...

Facial recognition is an artificial intelligence-based technology that, like many other forms of artificial intelligence, suffers from an accuracy deficit. This paper focuses on one particular use of facial recognition, namely identification, both as authentication and as recognition. Despite technological advances, facial recognition technology can still produce erroneous identifications. This paper addresses algorithmic identification failures from an upstream perspective by identifying the main causes of misidentifications (in particular, the probabilistic character of this technology, its ‘black box’ nature (...) and its algorithmic bias) and from a downstream perspective, highlighting the possible legal consequences of such failures in various scenarios (namely liability lawsuits). In addition to presenting the causes and effects of such errors, the paper also presents measures that can be deployed to reduce errors and avoid liabilities. (shrink)

Drawing on research reviewed in this special section, the present article discusses how various contextual factors impact on production and decoding of emotion-related facial activity. Although emotion-related variables often contribute to activation of prototypical “emotion expressions” and perceivers can often infer emotional meanings from these facial configurations, neither process is invariant or direct. Many facial movements are directed towards or away from events in the shared environment, and their effects depend on these relational orientations. Facial activity (...) is not only a medium for descriptive representation of internal affective states, but also a means of adjusting to, and operating on, external objects, and of influencing other people’s appraisals of those objects. (shrink)

To define the determinants of impaired facial emotion recognition (FER) in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy associated with hippocampal sclerosis (MTLE-HS), we examined 76 patients with unilateral MTLE-HS, 36 prior to antero-mesial temporal lobectomy (AMTL) and 40 after AMTL, and 28 healthy control subjects with a FER test consisting of 60 items (20 each for anger, fear, and happiness). Mean percentages of the accurate responses were calculated for different subgroups: right vs. left MTLE-HS, early (age at onset <6 (...) years) vs. late-onset, and before vs. after AMTL. After controlling for years of education, duration of epilepsy and number of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) taken, on multivariate analysis, fear recognition was profoundly impaired in early-onset right MTLE-HS patients compared to other MTLE patients and control subjects. Happiness recognition was significantly better in post-AMTL MTLE-HS patients compared to pre-AMTL patients while anger and fear recognition did not differ. We conclude that patients with right MTLE-HS with age at seizure onset <6 years are maximally predisposed to impaired fear recognition. In them, right AMTL does not further worsen FER abilities. Longitudinal studies comparing FER in the same patients before and after AMTL will be required to refine and confirm our cross-sectional observations. (shrink)

The use of facial recognition technology (FRT) as a form of intelligence has recently made a prominent public appearance in the theater of war. During the early months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian authorities relied on FRT as part of the country's defensive activities, harnessing the technology for a variety of purposes, such as unveiling covert Russian agents operating amid the Ukrainian population; revealing the identity of Russian soldiers who committed war crimes; and even identifying dead Russian soldiers. (...) This constellation of uses of FRT—in a war increasingly waged on the digital and information front—warrants ethical examination. The essay discusses some of the most serious concerns with FRT in the context of war, including the infringement of informational privacy; the indiscriminate and disproportionate harms it may inflict, particularly when the technology is coupled with social media intelligence; and the potential abuse of the technology once the fog of war dissipates. Some of these concerns parallel those to be found in nations that are not engulfed in war, but others are unique to war-torn settings. (shrink)

Prior studies provide consistent evidence of deficits for psychopaths in processing verbal emotional material but are inconsistent regarding nonverbal emotional material. To examine whether psychopaths exhibit general versus specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing, 34 psychopaths and 33 nonpsychopaths identified with Hare's (R. D. Hare, 1991) Psychopathy Checklist-Revised were asked to complete a facial affect recognition test. Slides of prototypic facial expressions were presented. Three hypotheses regarding hemispheric lateralization anomalies in psychopaths were also tested (right-hemisphere dysfunction, reduced lateralization, (...) and reversed lateralization). Psychopaths were less accurate than nonpsychopaths at classifying facial affect under conditions promoting reliance on right-hemisphere resources and displayed a specific deficit in classifying disgust. These findings demonstrate that psychopaths exhibit specific deficits in nonverbal emotional processing. (shrink)

Although the prevalence of facial recognition-based COVID-19 surveillance tools and techniques, China does not have a facial recognition law to protect its residents’ facial data. Oftentimes, neither the public nor the government knows where people’s facial images are stored, how they have been used, who might use or misuse them, and to what extent. This reality is alarming, particularly factoring in the wide range of unintended consequences already caused by good-intentioned measures and mandates amid the pandemic. (...) Biometric data are matters of personal rights and national security. In light of worrisome technologies such as deep-fake pornography, the protection of biometric data is also central to the protection of the dignity of the citizens and the government, if not the industry as well. This paper discusses the urgent need for the Chinese government to establish rigorous and timely facial recognition laws to protect the public’s privacy, security, and dignity amid COVID-19 and beyond. (shrink)

This article discusses how research on the image-based analysis of facial images has informed this debate by demonstrating that a single representational system for facial identity and facial expression is not only computationally viable, but can simulate existing cognitive data demonstrating apparent dissociable processing of these two facial properties. It discusses the increasing number of cognitive studies that provide support for this view. Neuropsychological case studies of brain-injured patients and provide limited evidence for separate visual routes (...) processing facial identity and facial expression. It deals with neuroimaging studies addressing both facial identity and facial expression processing which shows that the fusiform gyrus contributes to the recognition of both facial properties. Research continues to reinforce the proposal that a common visual framework supports the representation of at least some aspects of facial identity and facial expression. (shrink)

The role of feedback was investigated with respect to conscious and unconscious knowledge acquired during artificial grammar learning . After incidental learning of training sequences, participants classified further sequences in terms of grammaticality and reported their decision strategy with or without explicit veridical feedback. Sequences that disobeyed the learning structure conformed to an alternative structure. Feedback led to an increase in the amount of reported conscious knowledge of structure but did not increase its accuracy. Conversely, feedback (...) maintained the accuracy of unconscious knowledge of structure which otherwise degraded. Results support a dual-process account of AGL. They suggest that implicit learning of the to-be-rejected structure at test contaminates familiarity-based classifications whereas feedback allows competing familiarity signals to be contextualised, which is incompatible with theories that consider familiarity context-insensitive. (shrink)

Facial responses to pain might be the result of evolution but Williams' interesting “Just So” story provides no convincing evidence for her hypothesis. Contrary to her hope, casting facial action in an evolutionary perspective will probably not reduce the common practice of health care professionals blaming patients for their problems; instead, it may discourage appropriate treatment.

Following Yik and Russell (1999) a judgement paradigm was used to examine to what extent differential accuracy of recognition of facial expressions allows evaluation of the well-foundedness of different theoretical views on emotional expression. Observers judged photos showing facial expressions of seven emotions on the basis of: (1) discrete emotion categories; (2) social message types; (3) appraisal results; or (4) action tendencies, and rated their confidence in making choices. Emotion categories and appraisals were judged significantly more accurately and (...) confidently than messages or action tendencies. These results do not support claims of primacy for message or action tendency views of facial expression. Based on a componential model of emotion it is suggested that judges can infer components from categories and vice versa. (shrink)

In this article, we review empirical evidence regarding the relationship between facial expression and emotion during infancy. We focus on differential emotions theory’s view of this relationship because of its theoretical and methodological prominence. We conclude that current evidence fails to support its proposal regarding a set of pre-specified facial expressions that invariably reflect a corresponding set of discrete emotions in infants. Instead, the relationship between facial expression and emotion appears to be more complex. Some facial (...) expressions may have different meanings in infants than in children and adults. In addition, nonemotion factors may sometimes lead to the production of “emotional” facial expressions. We consider alternative perspectives on the nature of emotion and emotional expression in infancy with particular focus on differentiation and dynamical systems approaches. (shrink)

Feedback such as backchannels and clarification requests often occurs subsententially, demonstrating the incremental nature of grounding in dialogue. However, although such feedback can occur at any point within an utterance, it typically does not do so, tending to occur at Feedback Relevance Spaces. We present a corpus study of acknowledgements and clarification requests in British English, and describe how our low-level, semantic processing model in Dynamic Syntax accounts for this feedback. The model trivially accounts for the (...) 85% of cases where feedback occurs at FRSs, but we also describe how it can be integrated or interpreted at non-FRSs using the predictive, incremental and interactive nature of the formalism. This model shows how feedback serves to continually realign processing contexts and thus manage the characteristic divergence and convergence that is key to moving dialogue forward. (shrink)

Facial expression is a mode of close‐proximity non‐vocal communication used by primates and is produced by mimetic/facial musculature. Arguably, primates make the most‐intricate facial displays and have some of the most‐complex facial musculature of all mammals. Most of the earlier ideas of primate mimetic musculature, involving its function in facial displays and its evolution, were essentially linear “scala natural” models of increasing complexity. More‐recent work has challenged these ideas, suggesting that ecological factors and social systems (...) have played a much larger role in explaining the diversity of structures than previously believed. The present review synthesizes the evidence from gross muscular, microanatomical, behavioral and neurobiological studies in order to provide a preliminary analysis of the factors responsible for the evolution of primate facial musculature with comparisons to general mammals. In addition, the unique structure, function and evolution of human mimetic musculature are discussed, along with the potential influential roles of human speech and eye gaze. BioEssays 30:212–225, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)