Preverbal infants tune manual choices on subliminal affective information

Human behaviour is often shaped by unconscious emotional cues. From early on, infants are able to process emotional signals even if presented subliminally; however, whether subliminal emotional expressions are capable to affect infants' behaviour remains unknown. The current study aimed to fill this gap, recording 8-10-month-old infants' looking time and manual choice toward two objects previously associated to subliminal emotional faces. Results demonstrated that infants' manual choice, but not looking time, was guided by the previously presented subliminal emotional signal, as infants preferred to choose the object associated to the happy face. Overall, our findings show that preverbal infants tune their behaviour based on affective information, which drives them towards or away from previous encounters, even outside conscious awareness.

Positive Classification Advantage of Categorizing Emotional Faces in Patients With Major Depressive Disorder

This study investigated whether patients with MDD (major depressive disorder) have deficits in emotional face classification as well as the perceptual mechanism. We found that, compared with the control group, MDD patients exhibited slower speed and lower accuracy in emotional face classification. In normal controls, happy faces were classified faster than sad faces, i.e., positive classification advantage (PCA), which disappeared under the inverted condition. MDD patients showed PCA similar to the control group, although the inversion effects of happy and sad faces were more evident. These data suggest that the dysfunction of categorizing emotional faces in MDD patients could be due to general impairment in decoding facial expressions, reflecting the more common perceptual motion defects in face expression classification.