Severity and susceptibility: measuring the perceived effectiveness and believability of tobacco health warnings.

Background: Pictorial tobacco health warning labels (HWLs) have been shown to be more effective than text-only HWLs in changing smoking attitudes and intentions. However, there is contradictory evidence regarding how the severity of the content of HWLs influences responses to them.

Methods: We examined the perceived believability and effectiveness of HWLs in an online study using a convenience sample of non-smokers (N = 437) and smokers (N = 436).

Correction to 'Smoking status and attractiveness among exemplar and prototypical identical twins discordant for smoking'.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.161076.

StopWatch: The Preliminary Evaluation of a Smartwatch-Based System for Passive Detection of Cigarette Smoking.

Introduction: Recent developments in smoking cessation support systems and interventions have highlighted the requirement for unobtrusive, passive ways to measure smoking behavior. A number of systems have been developed for this that either use bespoke sensing technology, or expensive combinations of wearables and smartphones. Here, we present StopWatch, a system for passive detection of cigarette smoking that runs on a low-cost smartwatch and does not require additional sensing or a connected smartphone.

Smoking status and attractiveness among exemplar and prototypical identical twins discordant for smoking.

Smoking is associated with negative health of skin and increased signs of facial ageing. We aimed to address two questions about smoking and appearance: (1) does facial appearance alone provide an indication of smoking status, and (2) how does smoking affect the attractiveness of faces? We used faces of identical twins discordant for smoking, and prototypes made by averaging the faces of the twins. In Task 1, we presented exemplar twin sets and same sex prototypes side-by-side and participants ( = 590) indicated which face was the smoker.

Evaluating clinical stop-smoking services globally: towards a minimum data set.

Background And Aims: Behavioural and pharmacological support for smoking cessation improves the chances of success and represents a highly cost-effective way of preventing chronic disease and premature death. There is a large number of clinical stop-smoking services throughout the world. These could be connected into a global network to provide data to assess what treatment components are most effective, for what populations and in what settings.

State anxiety and emotional face recognition in healthy volunteers.

High trait anxiety has been associated with detriments in emotional face processing. By contrast, relatively little is known about the effects of anxiety on emotional face processing. We investigated the effects of state anxiety on recognition of emotional expressions (anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and happiness) experimentally, using the 7.

Aftereffects support opponent coding of expression.

We used aftereffects to investigate the coding mechanisms underlying perception of facial expression. Recent evidence that some dimensions are common to the coding of both expression and identity suggests that the same type of coding system could be used for both attributes. Identity is adaptively opponent coded by pairs of neural populations tuned to opposite extremes of relevant dimensions.

Association of Alcohol Consumption with Perception of Attractiveness in a Naturalistic Environment.

Aims: To investigate the relationship between objectively-assessed alcohol consumption and perception of attractiveness in naturalistic drinking environments, and to determine the feasibility and acceptability of conducting a large-scale study in these environments.

Methods: Observational study conducted simultaneously across three public houses in Bristol, UK. Participants were required to rate the attractiveness of male and female face stimuli and landscape stimuli administered via an Android tablet computer application, after which their expired breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) was measured.

Deciding on race: a diffusion model analysis of race-categorisation.

It has long been known that a person's race can affect their decisions about people of another race; an observation that clearly taps into some deep societal issues. However, in order to behave differently in response to someone else's race, you must first categorise that person as other-race. The current study investigates the process of race-categorisation.

Nine-year-old children use norm-based coding to visually represent facial expression.

Children are less skilled than adults at making judgments about facial expression. This could be because they have not yet developed adult-like mechanisms for visually representing faces. Adults are thought to represent faces in a multidimensional face-space, and have been shown to code the expression of a face relative to the norm or average face in face-space.

The expressions of strangers: our identity-independent representation of facial expression.

Evidence suggests that underlying the human system processing facial expressions are two types of representation of expression: one dependent on identity and the other independent of identity. We recently presented findings indicating that identity-dependent representations are encoded using a prototype-referenced scheme, in a manner notably similar to that proposed for facial identity. Could it be that identity-independent representations are encoded this way too? We investigated this by adapting participant to anti-expressions and asking them to categorize the expression aftereffect in a prototype probe that was either the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) identity to that of the adapter.

Anti-expression aftereffects reveal prototype-referenced coding of facial expressions.

Adaptation is a powerful experimental technique that has recently provided insights into how people encode representations of facial identity. Here, we used this approach to explore the visual representation of facial expressions of emotion. Participants were adapted to anti-expressions of six facial expressions.