Emotionally Disguised Faces

Emotional and facial recognition may be even more closely linked than we thought. In past blogs, we have discussed how better understanding facial recognition may help us better understand emotional recognition, and we have also talked about how understanding emotions requires similar processes as those which identify faces. During that discussion, we explained how recognizing…

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Prenatal Facial Recognition

We already know that faces are incredibly central to human interaction, but facial recognition may also be fundamental to our brain’s development. Science has long demonstrated that even newborn infants have a strong preference for human faces over other stimuli. Now, a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles, may have found that…

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Cracking the Facial Recognition Code

How do our brains recognize faces? This is an incredibly complex question, because the process of facial recognition is an almost miraculously instantaneous one. As discussed in a previous blog, we don’t need to make a careful study of somebody’s face to recognize them. Instead, we just know who someone is, which is really amazing,…

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Anxiety and Ambiguity

Why does that person look so angry? You don’t have to have any sort of chronic anxiety to understand how easy it is to misunderstand other people’s facial expressions. We often interact with strangers, or even friends, and find ourselves unable to read their emotions, fearing that they are unhappy or angry. In fact, newly…

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