Why do our eyes widen when afraid and narrow to slits when disgusted? Research findings by Cornell neuroscientist Adam Anderson suggest that human facial expressions arose from universal, adaptive reactions to environmental stimuli and not originally as social communication signals, lending support to Charles Darwin’s 19th-century theories on the evolution of emotion. Anderson is an…
Read MoreManipulating Emotions – The Effects of Social Media
Forbes: Entrepreneur delves into what really motivates people in this day and age! How can people, companies, and groups spur us into action? There are plenty of options: advertising, marketing, and of course the ever popular and influential social media. It has been revealed long ago that influencing one’s emotions can in turn affect their…
Read MoreFirst Impressions
We’ve always been told “Don’t judge a book by its cover“, but in fact research shows that, that is exactly what our brains are programmed to do. LiveScience comments on new findings that identify which facial features influence how others first perceive a person. Are you perceived as trustworthy, attractive, dominant? Scientists purport that these judgments are…
Read MoreReading Our Brain’s Emotional Code
“We discovered that fine-grained patterns of neural activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with emotional processing, act as a neural code which captures an individual’s subjective feeling,” purported Adam Anderson, associate professor of human development in Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology and senior author of the study, “Population coding…
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