A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing (...) subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant. (shrink)

BackgroundPrevious studies suggested a circadian variation of migraine attack onset, although, with contradictory results – possibly because of the existence of migraine subgroups with different circadian attack onset peaks. Migraine is primarily a brain disorder, and if the diversity in daily distribution of migraine attack onset reflects an important aspect of migraine, it may also associate with interictal brain activity. Our goal was to assess brain activity differences in episodic migraine subgroups who were classified according to their typical circadian peak (...) of attack onset.MethodsTwo fMRI studies were conducted with migraine without aura patients (n= 31 in Study 1,n= 48 in Study 2). Among them, three subgroups emerged with typical Morning, Evening, and Varying start of attack onset. Whole brain activity was compared between the groups in an implicit emotional processing fMRI task, comparing fearful, sad, and happy facial stimuli to neutral ones.ResultsIn both studies, significantly increased neural activation was detected to fearful (but not sad or happy) faces. In Study 1, the Evening start group showed increased activation compared to the Morning start group in regions involved in emotional, self-referential (left posterior cingulate gyrus, right precuneus), pain (including left middle cingulate, left postcentral, left supramarginal gyri, right Rolandic operculum) and sensory (including bilateral superior temporal gyrus, right Heschl’s gyrus) processing. While in Study 2, the Morning start group showed increased activation compared to the Varying start group at a nominally significant level in regions with pain (right precentral gyrus, right supplementary motor area) and sensory processing (bilateral paracentral lobule) functions.ConclusionOur fMRI studies suggest that different circadian attack onset peaks are associated with interictal brain activity differences indicating heterogeneity within migraine patients and alterations in sensitivity to threatening fearful stimuli. Circadian variation of migraine attack onset may be an important characteristic to address in future studies and migraine prophylaxis. (shrink)

When building personal relationships, it is important to select optimal partners, even based on the first meeting. This study was inspired by the idea that people who smile are considered more trustworthy and attractive. However, this may not always be true in daily life. Previous studies have used a relatively simple method of judging others by presenting a photograph of one person’s face. To move beyond this approach and examine more complex situations, we presented the faces of two people confronted (...) with each other to participants and asked them to judge them from a third-person perspective. Through three experiments, participants were asked to judge which of the two persons was more appropriate for forming alliances, more trustworthy, or more attractive, respectively. In all experiments, images were shown for a short or a long time. In all three experiments, the results showed that participants were more likely to choose persons with happy faces than those with neutral, sad, or angry faces when the image presentation was short. Contrarily, the facial expressions did not affect those judgments when the image presentation was long. Instead, judgments were correlated with personality estimated from the model’s neutral face in a single-person presentation. These results suggest that although facial expressions can affect the judgments of others when observing two-person confrontations from a third-person perspective, when participants have more time to elaborate their judgments, they go beyond expressions. (shrink)

Contextual affective information influences the processing of facial expressions at the relatively early stages of face processing, but the effect of the context on the processing of facial expressions with varying intensities remains unclear. In this study, we investigated the influence of emotional scenes on the processing of fear expressions at different levels of intensity during the early stages of facial recognition using event-related potential technology. EEG data were collected while participants performed a fearful facial expression recognition task. The results (...) showed that the recognition of high-intensity fear expression was higher than that of medium- and low-intensity fear expressions. Facial expression recognition was the highest when faces appeared in fearful scenes. Emotional scenes modulated the amplitudes of N170 for fear expressions with different intensities. Specifically, the N170 amplitude, induced by high-intensity fear expressions, was significantly higher than that induced by low-intensity fear expressions when faces appeared in both neutral and fearful scenes. No significant differences were found between the N170 amplitudes induced by high-, medium-, and low-intensity fear expressions when faces appeared in happy scenes. These results suggest that individuals may tend to allocate their attention resources to the processing of face information when the valence between emotional context and expression conflicts i.e., when the conflict is absent or is low. (shrink)

In this paper we investigated how justifications for price increases are associated with risky decision making and emotional responses. Across two studies with paired lottery choices and sequential decisions, we found that participants presented with a justification for price increases based on increasing demand decided to invest in a comparatively riskier asset more often than participants presented with a justification for price increases based on increasing tax or those presented with no justification at all. We also found that participants presented (...) with justifications for price increases based on increasing demand also reported more arousal displayed higher galvanic skin response than people in the other two justification conditions. Together, these studies provide evidence that the sole increasing demand underlying a price increase of a risky asset can influence the decision to buy it and suggests that emotional activation is involved in such a decision process. (shrink)