Faces are among the most important visual stimuli that humans perceive in everyday life. While extensive literature has examined emotional processing and social evaluations of faces, most studies have examined either topic using unimodal approaches. In this review, we promote the use of multimodal cognitive neuroscience approaches to study these processes, using two lines of research as examples: ambiguity in facial expressions of emotion and social trait judgment of faces. In the first set of studies, we identified an event‐related potential that signals emotion ambiguity using electroencephalography and we found convergent neural responses to emotion ambiguity using functional neuroimaging and single‐neuron recordings. In the second set of studies, we discuss how different neuroimaging and personality‐dimensional approaches together provide new insights into social trait judgments of faces. In both sets of studies, we provide an in‐depth comparison between neurotypicals and people with autism spectrum disorder. We offer a computational account for the behavioral and neural markers of the different facial processing between the two groups. Finally, we suggest new practices for studying the emotional processing and social evaluations of faces. All data discussed in the case studies of this review are publicly available.
Convergent processing of the world may be a factor that contributes to social connectedness. We use neuroimaging and network analysis to investigate the association between the social-network position (as measured by in-degree centrality) of first-year university students and their neural similarity while watching naturalistic audio-visual stimuli (specifically, videos). There were 119 students in the social-network study; 63 of them participated in the neuroimaging study. We show that more central individuals had similar neural responses to their peers and to each other in brain regions that are associated with high-level interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default mode network), whereas less-central individuals exhibited more variable responses. Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern, but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings show that neural processing of external stimuli is similar in highly-central individuals but is idiosyncratic in less-central individuals.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10363510
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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