Facial expressions of emotion are innate, not learned, says new study

piggy submitted, created time 1 week 3 days (www.eurekalert.org)

Facial expressions of emotion are hardwired into our genes, according to a study published today in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research suggests that facial expressions of emotion are innate rather than a product of cultural learning. The study is the first of its kind to demonstrate that sighted and blind individuals use the same facial expressions, producing the same facial muscle movements in response to specific emotional stimuli

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In the brain, justice is served from many parts

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 weeks 3 days (www.sciencenews.org)

Making decisions about crime and punishment is, it turns out, as complicated as a legal brief. For the first time, scientists have peered into the brains of people who are deciding whether a crime deserves punishment and how severe the penalty should be.

Those decisions involve parts of the brain associated with rational thought, but emotion-processing regions weigh in too, a team of law and neuroscience researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., show in a new study in the Dec. 11 Neuron

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Emotion, Decision Making, and the Amygdala

kavin submitted, created time 6 months 2 weeks (www.neuron.org)

Emotion plays a critical role in many contemporary accounts of decision making, but exactly what underlies its influence and how this is mediated in the brain remain far from clear. Here, The authors review behavioral studies that suggest that Pavlovian processes can exert an important influence over choice and may account for many effects that have traditionally been attributed to emotion. They illustrate how recent experiments cast light on the underlying structure of Pavlovian control and argue that generally this influence makes good computational sense

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A cultural difference in the way Westerners and Asians view facial expressions?

Darkfrog submitted, created time 9 months 2 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

I know we've got a lot of Asians on this board, so tell me if you think this article is accurate. Participants were divided into two groups, "Western" and "Japanese." Both groups were shown the same set of pictures of children and asked to rate the facial expressions of one specific child in each photograph. The Westerners rated the target children's expressions the same way no matter what the other children in the picture were doing, but the Japanese participants rated children as happier if the children in the background looked happy, etc

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Bad memories can be supressed

bianjie submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.bioedonline.org)

People can will themselves to forget traumatic or emotional scenes, researchers have found. When the brain conducts such deletions, brain regions that process vision and emotion go quiet.

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Threatening a rubber hand that you feel is yours elicits a cortical anxiety response

cappuccion submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.pnas.org)

The feeling of body ownership is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. The underlying neural mechanisms can be studied by using the illusion where a person is made to feel that a rubber hand is his or her own hand by brushing the person's hidden real hand and synchronously brushing the artificial hand that is in full view. Here we show that threat to the rubber hand can induce a similar level of activity in the brain areas associated with anxiety and interoceptive awareness (insula and anterior cingulate cortex) as when the person's real hand is threatened.

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Embodying Emotion

cappuccion submitted, created time 1 year 7 months (www.sciencemag.org)

The embodiment of emotion, when induced in human participants by manipulations of facial expression and posture in the laboratory, causally affects how emotional information is processed. Congruence between the recipient's bodily expression of emotion and the sender's emotional tone of language, for instance, facilitates comprehension of the communication, whereas incongruence can impair comprehension. Taken all together, recent findings provide a scientific account of the familiar contention that "when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you."

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Enhanced Emotional and Physiological Sensitivity to Stress and Drug/Alcohol Craving in Abstinent Cocaine-Dependent Individuals Compared to Socially Drinking Controls

penguin submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.nature.com)

These findings in this research are the first to document a dysregulated stress and reward-related responding in abstinent cocaine patients that is marked by an enhanced sensitivity to stress and drug-related stimuli in the environment.

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Erythropoietin Improves Mood and Modulates the Cognitive and Neural Processing of Emotion 3 Days Post Administration

penguin submitted, created time 1 year 8 months (www.nature.com)

This article show the characterization of the effects of Epo in a clinically depressed group is warranted.

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