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  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wirkner, Janine
A1  - Ventura-Bort, Carlos
A1  - Schulz, Paul
A1  - Hamm, Alfons O.
A1  - Weymar, Mathias
T1  - Event-related potentials of emotional and neutral memories
BT  - the role of encoding position and delayed testing
JF  - Psychophysiology : journal of the Society for Psychophysiological Research
N2  - Previous research found that memory is not only better for emotional information but also for neutral information that has been encoded in the context of an emotional event. In the present ERP study, we investigated two factors that may influence memory for neutral and emotional items: temporal proximity between emotional and neutral items during encoding, and retention interval (immediate vs. delayed). Forty-nine female participants incidentally encoded 36 unpleasant and 108 neutral pictures (36 neutral pictures preceded an unpleasant picture, 36 followed an unpleasant picture, and 36 neutral pictures were preceded and followed by neutral pictures) and participated in a recognition memory task either immediately (N=24) or 1 week (N=25) after encoding. Results showed better memory for emotional pictures relative to neutral pictures. In accordance, enhanced centroparietal old/new differences (500-900 ms) during recognition were observed for unpleasant compared to neutral pictures, most pronounced for the 1-week interval. Picture position effects, however, were only subtle. During encoding, late positive potentials for neutral pictures were slightly lower for neutral pictures following unpleasant ones, but only at trend level. To summarize, we could replicate and extend previous ERP findings showing that emotionally arousing events are better recollected than neutral events, particularly when memory is tested after longer retention intervals. Picture position during encoding, however, had only small effects on elaborative processing and no effects on memory retrieval.
KW  - attention
KW  - emotion
KW  - ERPs
KW  - memory
KW  - old
KW  - new effect
KW  - serial position effect
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13069
SN  - 0048-5772
SN  - 1469-8986
VL  - 55
IS  - 7
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  -