TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wendt, Julia
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
A1  - Junge, Martin
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Lischke, Alexander
T1  - Heartfelt memories
BT  - Cardiac vagal tone correlates with increased memory for untrustworthy faces
JF  - Emotion : a new journal from the American Psychological Association
N2  - During social interactions, we rapidly judge others’ trustworthiness on basis of their facial characteristics. Face-based trustworthiness judgments may not only affect our current but also our future interactions because we seem to be more inclined to remember untrustworthy than trustworthy faces. Memory formation of salient stimuli like untrustworthy faces may be modulated by the interplay between the autonomic and central nervous system, which can be indexed by changes in vagally mediated heart rate variability (HRV). To test this assumption, we investigated whether differences in HRV would be associated with differences in memory formation of untrustworthy faces in a sample of healthy participants (n = 34, all female). Untrustworthy faces were remembered more accurately than trustworthy faces, albeit only by participants with high and not low HRV. Across participants, increased memory accuracy for untrustworthy faces was associated with increased HRV. We discuss these findings in the context of neurobiological theories regarding the interplay between the autonomic and central nervous system during the regulation of autonomic, emotional and cognitive processes. (PsycInfo Database Record
KW  - trustworthiness
KW  - face memory
KW  - heart rate variability
KW  - amygdala
KW  - prefrontal cortex
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000396
SN  - 1528-3542
SN  - 1931-1516
VL  - 19
IS  - 1
SP  - 178
EP  - 182
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lischke, Alexander
A1  - Junge, Martin
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Enhanced processing of untrustworthiness in natural faces with neutral expressions
JF  - Emotion : a new journal from the American Psychological Association
N2  - During social interactions, individuals rapidly and automatically judge others’ trustworthiness on the basis of subtle facial cues. To investigate the behavioral and neural correlates of these judgments, we conducted 2 studies: 1 study for the construction and evaluation of a set of natural faces differing in trustworthiness (Study 1: n = 30) and another study for the investigation of event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to this set of natural faces (Study 2: n = 30). Participants of both studies provided highly reliable and nearly identical trustworthiness ratings for the selected faces, supporting the notion that the discrimination of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces depends on distinct facial cues. These cues appear to be processed in an automatic and bottom-up-driven fashion because the free viewing of these faces was sufficient to elicit trustworthiness-related differences in late positive potentials (LPPs) as indicated by larger amplitudes to untrustworthy as compared with trustworthy faces. Taken together, these findings suggest that natural faces contain distinct cues that are automatically and rapidly processed to facilitate the discrimination of untrustworthy and trustworthy faces across various contexts, presumably by enhancing the elaborative processing of untrustworthy as compared with trustworthy faces. (
KW  - face perception
KW  - emotion
KW  - trustworthiness
KW  - event-related potentials
KW  - amygdala
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000318
SN  - 1528-3542
SN  - 1931-1516
VL  - 18
IS  - 2
SP  - 181
EP  - 189
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  -