Considering the mixed nature of reports of flexibility difficulties in autism, we hypothesized that a task that more closely resembles the challenges faced in real life would help to assess these difficulties. Autistic and typically developing adults performed an online Emotional Shifting Task, involving non-explicit unpredictable shifts of…

This study examined how music major and non-music major participants' performances and emotional expressions differed when exposed to background music of varying tempi while completing a reading comprehension task. Two questions were addressed: (1) What effect does background music of varying tempi have on the performance of music and non-music…

Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the "Wild Things Are" was investigated as a means of emotion recognition in preschool children. Sixty-six children and 60 adults participated in two tasks. The first was a book task, requiring identification of emotions in three target pictures, in three conditions. The visual condition presented the…

This study measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test competing hypotheses regarding the effects of anger and race on early visual processing (N1, P2, and N2) and error recognition (ERN and Pe) during a sequentially primed weapon identification task. The first hypothesis was that anger would impair weapon identification in a biased…

According to the seductive details (SD) effect, interesting, but irrelevant information in learning materials reduces learning outcomes. Basic research suggests that subjects in positive mood are more distractible by task-irrelevant stimuli than subjects in negative mood. Hence, mood could moderate the SD effect. We tested this assumption by…

Early facial emotion recognition is hypothesized to be critical to later social functioning. However, relatively little is known about the typical intensity thresholds for recognizing facial emotions in preschoolers, between 2 and 4 years of age. This study employed a behavioral sorting task to examine the recognition of happy, fearful, and angry…

This research examined an important applied question: whether viewing ambient green (relative to red) on the wall of a workspace would facilitate creativity. A methodologically sound experiment revealed no influence of green on creativity. Care must be taken when interpreting a null result, but these data do not provide support for the presence of…

Typically developing adults with low and high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores made rapid social evaluations of neutral faces when these were primed by briefly presented emotional faces. High AQ participants rated neutral faces as more threatening than low AQ participants, regardless of the prime condition. Both groups rated target neutral…

Perceptual narrowing occurs in human infants for other-race faces. A paired-comparison task measuring infant looking time was used to investigate the hypothesis that adding emotional expressiveness to other-race faces would help infants break through narrowing and reinstate other-race face recognition. Experiment 1 demonstrated narrowing for White…

Emotional expressions have been proposed to be important for regulating social interaction as they can serve as cues for behavioral intentions. The issue has been mainly addressed analyzing the effects of facial emotional expressions in cooperation behavior, but there are contradictory results regarding the impact of emotional expressions on that…

Infants' visual preference for infant-directed (ID) faces over adult-directed (AD) faces was examined in two experiments that introduced controls for emotion. Infants' eye movements were recorded as they viewed a series of side-by-side dynamic faces. When emotion was held constant, 6-month-old infants showed no preference for ID faces over AD…

People seem to differ in their conditionability, that is, the ease by which fear associations (neutral stimulus-unconditioned stimulus [CS-US] contingencies) are learned. Recently, the level of trait worry has been proposed as a predictor of heightened conditionability. The current research aimed to (a) further investigate this influence of…

In order to determine the processing stage that is responsible for the effect of mood states on the breadth of attentional focus, we recorded event-related potentials from 18 students who performed a flanker task involving adjacent letters. To induce a specific mood state, positive, neutral, or negative affective pictures were presented repeatedly…

Background: Offspring of depressed parents are at greatly increased risk for mood disorders. Among potential mechanisms of risk, recent studies have focused on information processing anomalies, such as attention and memory biases, in the offspring of depressed parents. In this study we examined another information processing domain, perceptual…

Facial expression recognition was investigated in 20 males with high functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS), compared to typically developing individuals matched for chronological age (TD CA group) and verbal and non-verbal ability (TD V/NV group). This was the first study to employ a visual search, "face in the crowd" paradigm with a…