Emotion in action: A study on the enactment effect on emotional action sentences.

While abundant literature suggests that both performing congruent actions and emotional stimuli can enhance memory, their combined impact on memory for action phrases remains underexplored. This study investigated the effects of enactment with emotionally charged stimuli on memory performance. Sixty participants encoded action sentences with negative, neutral, or positive emotional connotations using either enactment or verbal-reading methods.

Stimulus Inversion and Emotional Expressions Independently Affect Face and Body Perception: An ERP Study.

Faces and bodies provide critical cues for social interaction and communication. Their structural encoding depends on configural processing, as suggested by the detrimental effect of stimulus inversion for both faces (i.e.

The effect of negative emotion processing on spatial navigation: an experimental study using virtual reality.

Finding one's way in unfamiliar environments is an essential ability. When navigating, people are overwhelmed with an enormous amount of information. However, some information might be more relevant than others.

Effect of race on Gaze Cueing in adults with high and low autistic traits.

Background: Observing the direction of gaze of another person leads to shifting of attention in the same direction (gaze-cueing effect - GCE), a social-cognitive ability known as joint or social attention. Racial attitudes can influence the magnitude of GCE since it has been shown that White people showing a strong race ingroup preference follow the gaze only of White, and not Black, faces. Individuals with high autistic traits have difficulties in social-cognitive abilities that can disrupt the learning of socially shared racial attitudes.

Illumination and gaze effects on face evaluation: The Bi-AGI database.

Face evaluation and first impression generation can be affected by multiple face elements such as invariant facial features, gaze direction and environmental context; however, the composite modulation of eye gaze and illumination on faces of different gender and ages has not been previously investigated. We aimed at testing how these different facial and contextual features affect ratings of social attributes. Thus, we created and validated the Bi-AGI Database, a freely available new set of male and female face stimuli varying in age across lifespan from 18 to 87 years, gaze direction and illumination conditions.

Wearing the face mask affects our social attention over space.

Recent studies suggest that covering the face inhibits the recognition of identity and emotional expressions. However, it might also make the eyes more salient, since they are a reliable index to orient our social and spatial attention. This study investigates (1) whether the pervasive interaction with people with face masks fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic modulates the processing of spatial information essential to shift attention according to other's eye-gaze direction (i.

A rapid screening tool for anorectic/bulimic risk in online settings: a pilot-study on the DiCA33 validation in Italian young female students.

The early identification of anorexia (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) in the general population represents a crucial strategy to avoid their chronicization and clinical worsening. This pilot-study aims to test the validity of a new screening tool (DiCA33) dedicated AN/BN risk in online settings, based on the Italian version of EAT-26, a self-report questionnaire for measuring AN/BN symptoms. First analyses excluded the effect of demographic factors on results and suggested a limited explanation power of the mere total scores of DiCA33 for risk detection.

Recognizing emotions in bodies: Vagus nerve stimulation enhances recognition of anger while impairing sadness.

According to the Polyvagal theory, the vagus nerve is the key phylogenetic substrate that supports efficient emotion recognition for promoting safety and survival. Previous studies showed that the vagus nerve affects people's ability to recognize emotions based on eye regions and whole facial images, but not static bodies. The purpose of this study was to verify whether the previously suggested causal link between vagal activity and emotion recognition can be generalized to situations in which emotions must be inferred from images of whole moving bodies.

Difficulties in Recognising Dynamic but not Static Emotional Body Movements in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

In this study, we investigated whether the difficulties in body motion (BM) perception may led to deficit in emotion recognition in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To this aim, individuals with high-functioning ASD were asked to recognise fearful, happy, and neutral BM depicted as static images or dynamic point-light and full-light displays. Results showed slower response times in participants with ASD only in recognising dynamic stimuli, but no group differences in accuracy.

The interplay between gaze cueing and facial trait impressions.

The gaze cueing effect involves the rapid orientation of attention to follow the gaze direction of another person. Previous studies reported reciprocal influences between social variables and the gaze cueing effect, with modulation of gaze cueing by social features of face stimuli and modulation of the observer's social judgements from the validity of the gaze cues themselves. However, it remains unclear which social dimensions can affect-and be affected by-gaze cues.

Social categorization and joint attention: Interacting effects of age, sex, and social status.

In the present study, we examine how person categorization conveyed by the combination of multiple cues modulates joint attention. In three experiments, we tested the combinatory effect of age, sex, and social status on gaze-following behaviour and pro-social attitudes. In Experiments 1 and 2, young adults were required to perform an instructed saccade towards left or right targets while viewing a to-be-ignored distracting face (female or male) gazing left or right, that could belong to a young, middle-aged, or elderly adult of high or low social status.

Sleep quality among adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism spectrum disorder: which is the role of gender and chronotype?

Both Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) present increased prevalence rates of sleep difficulties, which persist into adulthood. However, it is still unclear whether in adults these disorders show specific sleep patterns and which role is played by comorbidities, circadian preferences and gender. This study aimed to describe and compare subjective measures of sleep in adults with ADHD and high-functioning ASD, in relation to the levels of anxiety and depression, chronotype and gender.

Memory updating through aging: different patterns for socially meaningful (and not) stimuli.

Background: Updating is a crucial function responsible of working memory integrity, allowing relevant information to be active and inhibiting irrelevant one; updating has been studied mainly with verbal stimuli, less with faces, stimuli with high adaptive value and social meaning.

Aim: Our aim was to test age-related differences in updating for different stimuli in three different age groups: young adults (range 20-30 years), young-old (range 60-75 years) and older-old participants (range 77-87 years).

Methods: To this end, we administered control measures (i.

Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation modulates attentional resource deployment towards social cues.

Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) has been shown to promote inferences of emotional states based on eye-related information provided by facial expressions of emotions. Eye gaze direction can influence the allocation of attentional sources when processing facial emotional stimuli. Here we sought for further evidence indicating whether tVNS effects would be specific to emotional expressions or to gaze - both socially relevant stimuli - and whether they reflect the enhancement of attention.

"Motion or Emotion? Recognition of Emotional Bodily Expressions in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder With and Without Intellectual Disability".

The recognition of emotional body movement (BM) is impaired in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder ASD, yet it is not clear whether the difficulty is related to the encoding of body motion, emotions, or both. Besides, BM recognition has been traditionally studied using point-light displays stimuli (PLDs) and is still underexplored in individuals with ASD and intellectual disability (ID). In the present study, we investigated the recognition of happy, fearful, and neutral BM in children with ASD with and without ID.

Theta- and Gamma-Band Activity Discriminates Face, Body and Object Perception.

Face and body perception is mediated by configural mechanisms, which allow the perception of these stimuli as a whole, rather than the sum of individual parts. Indirect measures of configural processing in visual cognition are the face and body inversion effects (FIE and BIE), which refer to the drop in performance when these stimuli are perceived upside-down. Albeit FIE and BIE have been well characterized at the behavioral level, much still needs to be understood in terms of the neurophysiological correlates of these effects.

Turning Away From Averted Gazes: The Effect of Social Exclusion on Gaze Cueing.

Past studies showed increased sensitivity to other people's gaze after social exclusion. In the present research, across two studies, we tested whether social exclusion could affect the basic cognitive phenomenon of gaze-cueing effect, namely, the tendency to redirect visual attention to the same location that other people are looking at. To this purpose, participants were socially excluded or included using the manipulation.

FEF Excitability in Attentional Bias: A TMS-EEG Study.

The role of distinct cortical regions in guiding social orienting needs further investigation. Our aim was to explore the contribution of the frontal eye field (FEF) in early orienting of attention towards stimuli with social value. We used a TMS-EEG approach to investigate event related potentials (ERPs; no-TMS block) and TMS evoked potentials (TEPs; TMS block) during the cueing phase of a modified version of the dot-probe task, comparing competing (face vs.

Can Monetary Reward Modulate Social Attention?

Selective visual attention is a primary cognitive function, which allows the selection of the most relevant stimuli in the environment by prioritizing their processing. Several studies showed that this process can be influenced by both social signals, such as gaze direction (i.e.

Context Modulates Congruency Effects in Selective Attention to Social Cues.

Head and gaze directions are used during social interactions as essential cues to infer where someone attends. When head and gaze are oriented toward opposite directions, we need to extract socially meaningful information despite stimulus conflict. Recently, a cognitive and neural mechanism for filtering-out conflicting stimuli has been identified while performing non-social attention tasks.

How social exclusion modulates social information processing: A behavioural dissociation between facial expressions and gaze direction.

Social exclusion is a painful experience that is felt as a threat to the human need to belong and can lead to increased aggressive and anti-social behaviours, and results in emotional and cognitive numbness. Excluded individuals also seem to show an automatic tuning to positivity: they tend to increase their selective attention towards social acceptance signals. Despite these effects known in the literature, the consequences of social exclusion on social information processing still need to be explored in depth.

Trial-by-trial modulations in the orienting of attention elicited by gaze and arrow cues.

Recent findings suggested that the orienting of attention towards gazed at locations (i.e., the gaze cueing effect) could result from the conflict emerging in incongruent trials between the spatial information conveyed by gaze direction and the target spatial position.

Attention to detail in Italian parents of women with anorexia nervosa: a comparative study.

Aim: Anorexia nervosa (AN) and autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) may share traits such as mental rigidity and attention to detail, some of which might be familial. We aimed to investigate the distribution of autistic traits among parents of daughters suffering from eating disorders (anorexia or bulimia nervosa), comparing them with control parents.

Methods: As a whole, 40 parents of women with eating disorders (60% AN, 40% BN) and 33 control parents were recruited and accepted an examination through the administration of the autism spectrum quotient (AQ).

Gaze and Arrows: The Effect of Element Orientation on Apparent Motion is Modulated by Attention.

In two experiments we investigated whether stimuli that elicit automatic orienting of attention (i.e., arrow or averted gaze) could drive apparent motion perception in one of two possible directions, modulating the effect of a low-level property (the orientation of elements along the motion direction).