Smelling Feelings?

If something smells awful, it’s because it’s disgusting, right? Maybe, but the truth is a little bit more complicated. A recent study found that our immediate olfactory reactions to stimuli are heavily influenced by the emotional reactions of other people. This suggests that when we smell something bad, we may be picking up on people’s…

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How to Tell if Someone Is Lying to You

How can we learn how to spot deception? It is a sad truth that lying is incredibly pervasive in our interactions with fellow humans. While people lie for a multitude of reasons, we are also quite bad at lie detection, creating a pretty bleak predicament for those of us who value honesty. In a recent…

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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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