TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schwarz, Katharina A.
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
A1  - Gerdes, Antje B. M.
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Why are you looking like that? How the context influences evaluation and processing of human faces
JF  - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
N2  - Perception and evaluation of facial expressions are known to be heavily modulated by emotional features of contextual information. Such contextual effects, however, might also be driven by non-emotional aspects of contextual information, an interaction of emotional and non-emotional factors, and by the observers’ inherent traits. Therefore, we sought to assess whether contextual information about self-reference in addition to information about valence influences the evaluation and neural processing of neutral faces. Furthermore, we investigated whether social anxiety moderates these effects. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants viewed neutral facial expressions preceded by a contextual sentence conveying either positive or negative evaluations about the participant or about somebody else. Contextual influences were reflected in rating and fMRI measures, with strong effects of self-reference on brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and right fusiform gyrus. Additionally, social anxiety strongly affected the response to faces conveying negative, self-related evaluations as revealed by the participants’ rating patterns and brain activity in cortical midline structures and regions of interest in the left and right middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that face perception and processing are highly individual processes influenced by emotional and non-emotional aspects of contextual information and further modulated by individual personality traits.
KW  - social anxiety
KW  - facial expression
KW  - context
KW  - self-reference
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-132126
VL  - 8
IS  - 4
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
A1  - Gerdes, Antje B. M.
A1  - Reicherts, Philipp
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Mutual influences of pain and emotional face processing
JF  - Frontiers in Psychology
N2  - The perception of unpleasant stimuli enhances whereas the perception of pleasant stimuli decreases pain perception. In contrast, the effects of pain on the processing of emotional stimuli are much less known. Especially given the recent interest in facial expressions of pain as a special category of emotional stimuli, a main topic in this research line is the mutual influence of pain and facial expression processing. Therefore, in this mini-review we selectively summarize research on the effects of emotional stimuli on pain, but more extensively turn to the opposite direction namely how pain influences concurrent processing of affective stimuli such as facial expressions. Based on the motivational priming theory one may hypothesize that the perception of pain enhances the processing of unpleasant stimuli and decreases the processing of pleasant stimuli. This review reveals that the literature is only partly consistent with this assumption: pain reduces the processing of pleasant pictures and happy facial expressions, but does not – or only partly – affect processing of unpleasant pictures. However, it was demonstrated that pain selectively enhances the processing of facial expressions if these are pain-related (i.e., facial expressions of pain). Extending a mere affective modulation theory, the latter results suggest pain-specific effects which may be explained by the perception-action model of empathy. Together, these results underscore the important mutual influence of pain and emotional face processing.
KW  - emotion
KW  - facial expression
KW  - ERPs
KW  - perception-action
KW  - pain
Y1  - 2014
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-118446
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 5
ER  -