An investigation of the modulatory effects of empathic and autistic traits on emotional and facial motor responses during live social interactions.

A close relationship between emotional contagion and spontaneous facial mimicry has been theoretically proposed and is supported by empirical data. Facial expressions are essential in terms of both emotional and motor synchrony. Previous studies have demonstrated that trait emotional empathy enhanced spontaneous facial mimicry, but the relationship between autistic traits and spontaneous mimicry remained controversial.

Asynchrony enhances uncanniness in human, android, and virtual dynamic facial expressions.

Objective: Uncanniness plays a vital role in interactions with humans and artificial agents. Previous studies have shown that uncanniness is caused by a higher sensitivity to deviation or atypicality in specialized categories, such as faces or facial expressions, marked by configural processing. We hypothesized that asynchrony, understood as a temporal deviation in facial expression, could cause uncanniness in the facial expression.

Electromyographic Validation of Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Detection Using Automated Facial Action Coding.

Although electromyography (EMG) remains the standard, researchers have begun using automated facial action coding system (FACS) software to evaluate spontaneous facial mimicry despite the lack of evidence of its validity. Using the facial EMG of the zygomaticus major (ZM) as a standard, we confirmed the detection of spontaneous facial mimicry in action unit 12 (AU12, lip corner puller) via an automated FACS. Participants were alternately presented with real-time model performance and prerecorded videos of dynamic facial expressions, while simultaneous ZM signal and frontal facial videos were acquired.

Differences in configural processing for human versus android dynamic facial expressions.

Humanlike androids can function as social agents in social situations and in experimental research. While some androids can imitate facial emotion expressions, it is unclear whether their expressions tap the same processing mechanisms utilized in human expression processing, for example configural processing. In this study, the effects of global inversion and asynchrony between facial features as configuration manipulations were compared in android and human dynamic emotion expressions.

The inversion effect on the cubic humanness-uncanniness relation in humanlike agents.

The uncanny valley describes the typically nonlinear relation between the esthetic appeal of artificial entities and their human likeness. The effect has been attributed to specialized (configural) processing that increases sensitivity to deviations from human norms. We investigate this effect in computer-generated, humanlike android and human faces using dynamic facial expressions.

Enhanced mirror neuron network activity and effective connectivity during live interaction among female subjects.

Facial expressions are indispensable in daily human communication. Previous neuroimaging studies investigating facial expression processing have presented pre-recorded stimuli and lacked live face-to-face interaction. Our paradigm alternated between presentations of real-time model performance and pre-recorded videos of dynamic facial expressions to participants.

Enhanced emotional and motor responses to live versus videotaped dynamic facial expressions.

Facial expression is an integral aspect of non-verbal communication of affective information. Earlier psychological studies have reported that the presentation of prerecorded photographs or videos of emotional facial expressions automatically elicits divergent responses, such as emotions and facial mimicry. However, such highly controlled experimental procedures may lack the vividness of real-life social interactions.

Author Correction: Neurocognitive Signatures of Naturalistic Reading of Scientific Texts: A Fixation-Related fMRI Study.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Affective iconic words benefit from additional sound-meaning integration in the left amygdala.

Recent studies have shown that a similarity between sound and meaning of a word (i.e., iconicity) can help more readily access the meaning of that word, but the neural mechanisms underlying this beneficial role of iconicity in semantic processing remain largely unknown.

Neurocognitive Signatures of Naturalistic Reading of Scientific Texts: A Fixation-Related fMRI Study.

How do students gain scientific knowledge while reading expository text? This study examines the underlying neurocognitive basis of textual knowledge structure and individual readers' cognitive differences and reading habits, including the influence of text and reader characteristics, on outcomes of scientific text comprehension. By combining fixation-related fMRI and multiband data acquisition, the study is among the first to consider self-paced naturalistic reading inside the MRI scanner. Our results revealed the underlying neurocognitive patterns associated with information integration of different time scales during text reading, and significant individual differences due to the interaction between text characteristics (e.

Atypical Reward-Driven Modulation of Mimicry-Related Neural Activity in Autism.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by deficits in social functioning and difficulties in forming social bonds. According to the social motivation theory of ASD, people with ASD fail to attend social stimuli because they do not experience them as rewarding, resulting in deficits in social cognition. In neurotypical (NT) individuals, more rewarding faces have been shown to elicit greater spontaneous facial mimicry.

Idiomatic expressions evoke stronger emotional responses in the brain than literal sentences.

Recent neuroscientific research shows that metaphors engage readers at the emotional level more strongly than literal expressions. What still remains unclear is what makes metaphors more engaging, and whether this generalises to all figurative expressions, no matter how conventionalised they are. This fMRI study aimed to investigate whether idiomatic expressions - the least creative part of figurative language - indeed trigger a higher affective resonance than literal expressions, and to explore possible interactions between activation in emotion-relevant neural structures and regions associated with figurative language processing.

The Sound of Words Evokes Affective Brain Responses.

The long history of poetry and the arts, as well as recent empirical results suggest that the way a word sounds (e.g., soft vs.

Thinking about others and the future: Neural correlates of perspective taking relate to preferences for delayed rewards.

We infer the thoughts and feelings of others by taking their perspectives. Similar processes could be used to understand how we will be affected by future events, by allowing us to take the perspective of our future self. In this paper, we test this idea using a previously presented framework for guiding predictions.

How mimicry influences the neural correlates of reward: An fMRI study.

Mimicry has been suggested to function as a "social glue", a key mechanism that helps to build social rapport. It leads to increased feeling of closeness toward the mimicker as well as greater liking, suggesting close bidirectional links with reward. In recent work using eye-gaze tracking, we have demonstrated that the reward value of being mimicked, measured using a preferential looking paradigm, is directly proportional to trait empathy (Neufeld and Chakrabarti, 2016).

Reduced reward-related neural response to mimicry in individuals with autism.

Mimicry is a facilitator of social bonds in humans, from infancy. This facilitation is made possible through changing the reward value of social stimuli; for example, we like and affiliate more with people who mimic us. Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are marked by difficulties in forming social bonds.

The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter--an fMRI study.

Previous studies suggested that the emotional connotation of single words automatically recruits attention. We investigated the potential of words to induce emotional engagement when reading texts. In an fMRI experiment, we presented 120 text passages from the Harry Potter book series.

The magical activation of left amygdala when reading Harry Potter: an fMRI study on how descriptions of supra-natural events entertain and enchant.

Literature containing supra-natural, or magical events has enchanted generations of readers. When reading narratives describing such events, readers mentally simulate a text world different from the real one. The corresponding violation of world-knowledge during this simulation likely increases cognitive processing demands for ongoing discourse integration, catches readers' attention, and might thus contribute to the pleasure and deep emotional experience associated with ludic immersive reading.

Can Harry Potter still put a spell on us in a second language? An fMRI study on reading emotion-laden literature in late bilinguals.

In this fMRI study we contrasted emotional responses to literary reading in late bilinguals' first or second language. German participants with adequate English proficiency in their second language (L2) English read short text passages from Harry Potter books characterized by a "negative" or "positive" versus "neutral" emotional valence manipulation. Previous studies have suggested that given sufficient L2 proficiency, neural substrates involved in L1 versus L2 do not differ (Fabbro, 2001).

Fiction feelings in Harry Potter: haemodynamic response in the mid-cingulate cortex correlates with immersive reading experience.

Immersion in reading, described as a feeling of 'getting lost in a book', is a ubiquitous phenomenon widely appreciated by readers. However, it has been largely ignored in cognitive neuroscience. According to the fiction feeling hypothesis, narratives with emotional contents invite readers more to be empathic with the protagonists and thus engage the affective empathy network of the brain, the anterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex, than do stories with neutral contents.