Optimizing future well-being with artificial intelligence: self-organizing maps (SOMs) for the identification of islands of emotional stability.

In this article, we present a deep learning model of human psychology that can predict one's current age and future well-being. We used the model to demonstrate that one's baseline well-being is not the determining factor of future well-being, as posited by hedonic treadmill theory. Further, we have created a 2D map of human psychotypes and identified the regions that are most vulnerable to depression.

A Novel Test of the Duchenne Marker: Smiles After Botulinum Toxin Treatment for Crow's Feet Wrinkles.

Smiles that vary in muscular configuration also vary in how they are perceived. Previous research suggests that "Duchenne smiles," indicated by the combined actions of the orbicularis oculi (cheek raiser) and the zygomaticus major muscles (lip corner puller), signal enjoyment. This research has compared perceptions of Duchenne smiles with non-Duchenne smiles among individuals voluntarily innervating or inhibiting the orbicularis oculi muscle.

Zen and the Art of Living Mindfully: The Health-Enhancing Potential of Zen Aesthetics.

Amidst the burgeoning enthusiasm for mindfulness in the West, there is a concern that the largely secular 'de-contextualized' way in which it is being harnessed is denuding it of its potential to improve health and well-being. As such, efforts are underway to 're-contextualize' mindfulness, explicitly drawing on the wider framework of Buddhist ideas and practices in which it was initially developed. This paper aims to contribute to this, doing so by focusing on Zen Buddhism, and in particular on Zen aesthetic principles.

Cosmetics as a feature of the extended human phenotype: modulation of the perception of biologically important facial signals.

Research on the perception of faces has focused on the size, shape, and configuration of inherited features or the biological phenotype, and largely ignored the effects of adornment, or the extended phenotype. Research on the evolution of signaling has shown that animals frequently alter visual features, including color cues, to attract, intimidate or protect themselves from conspecifics. Humans engage in conscious manipulation of visual signals using cultural tools in real time rather than genetic changes over evolutionary time.

Facial attractiveness ratings and perfectionism in body dysmorphic disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) suffer from a preoccupation about imagined or slight appearance flaws. We evaluated facial physical attractiveness ratings and perfectionistic thinking among individuals with BDD (n=19), individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; n=21), and mentally healthy control participants (n=21). We presented participants with photographs displaying faces varying in facial attractiveness (attractive, average, unattractive) and asked them to rate them in terms of their physical attractiveness.

Emotion recognition bias for contempt and anger in body dysmorphic disorder.

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) patients are preoccupied with imagined defects or flaws in appearance (e.g., size or shape of nose).

Emotion recognition deficits in body dysmorphic disorder.

Patients with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) are characterized by excessive concerns about imagined defects in their appearance, most commonly, facial features. In this study, we investigated (1) the ability to identify facial expressions of emotion, and (2) to discriminate single facial features in BDD patients, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients, and in healthy control participants. Specifically, their ability for general facial feature discrimination was assessed using the Short Form of the Benton Facial Recognition Test (Benton AL, Hamsher KdeS, Varney NR, Spreen O.

Beautiful faces have variable reward value: fMRI and behavioral evidence.

The brain circuitry processing rewarding and aversive stimuli is hypothesized to be at the core of motivated behavior. In this study, discrete categories of beautiful faces are shown to have differing reward values and to differentially activate reward circuitry in human subjects. In particular, young heterosexual males rate pictures of beautiful males and females as attractive, but exert effort via a keypress procedure only to view pictures of attractive females.

Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain was used to study whether the amygdala is activated in response to emotional stimuli, even in the absence of explicit knowledge that such stimuli were presented. Pictures of human faces bearing fearful or happy expressions were presented to 10 normal, healthy subjects by using a backward masking procedure that resulted in 8 of 10 subjects reporting that they had not seen these facial expressions. The backward masking procedure consisted of 33 msec presentations of fearful or happy facial expressions, their offset coincident with the onset of 167 msec presentations of neutral facial expressions.

Facial expression megamix: tests of dimensional and category accounts of emotion recognition.

We report four experiments investigating the perception of photographic quality continua of interpolated ('morphed') facial expressions derived from prototypes of the 6 emotions in the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger). In Experiment 1, morphed images made from all possible pairwise combinations of expressions were presented in random order; subjects identified these as belonging to distinct expression categories corresponding to the prototypes at each end of the relevant continuum. This result was replicated in Experiment 2, which also included morphs made from a prototype with a neutral expression, and allowed 'neutral' as a response category.

Response and habituation of the human amygdala during visual processing of facial expression.

We measured amygdala activity in human volunteers during rapid visual presentations of fearful, happy, and neutral faces using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The first experiment involved a fixed order of conditions both within and across runs, while the second one used a fully counterbalanced order in addition to a low level baseline of simple visual stimuli. In both experiments, the amygdala was preferentially activated in response to fearful versus neutral faces.

Categorical perception of facial expressions.

People universally recognize facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and perhaps, surprise, suggesting a perceptual mechanism tuned to the facial configuration displaying each emotion. Sets of drawings were generated by computer, each consisting of a series of faces differing by constant physical amounts, running from one emotional expression to another (or from one emotional expression to a neutral face). Subjects discriminated pairs of faces, then, in a separate task, categorized the emotion displayed by each.

Can we lose memories of faces? Content specificity and awareness in a prosopagnosic.

Prosopagnosia is a neurological syndrome in which patients cannot recognize faces. Kecently it has been shown that some prosopagnosics give evidence of "covert" recognition: they show greater autonomic responses to familiar faces than to unfamiliar ones, and respond differently to familiar faces in learning and interference tasks. Although some patients do not show covert recognition, this has usually been attributed to an "apperceptive" deficit that impairs perceptual analysis of the input.

Perceptual and conceptual organization of facial emotions: hemispheric differences.

Patients with lesions to either the right or left hemisphere and control subjects were asked to judge the similarity of pairs of photographs of a person displaying different emotions, and of pairs of emotion words. The results were submitted to a multidimensional scaling analysis. Right-hemisphere-damaged subjects were found to be more impaired at perceiving facial emotions than were left-hemisphere-damaged subjects or controls, and this impairment was not confined to the perception of a subset of facial emotions nor to judging emotional valence (Pleasantness versus Unpleasantness).

Selective attention to facial identity and facial emotion.

Patients with lesions to either the right or left hemisphere and control subjects were asked to discriminate photographs of faces and then to sort these photographs according to the identity of the face or the emotion displayed. Whether identity and emotion were correlated, independent, or constant was varied across trials. Patients with right hemisphere damage were significantly impaired at discriminating both identity and expression, and at selectively attending to either sort of facial information.