The Importance of Eyebrows in Emotion Expression

It may be easy to live your entire life without giving your eyebrows a second thought, but in reality, they’re an incredibly important social communication tool. As reported in the Independent, “Your eyebrows reflect your inner mental and emotional landscape with amazing speed and specificity. They are involved not just in emotional expression, but also…

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Can Smiling Improve Your Mood? Research Says Yes.

Emotions and Facial Expressions We all know that emotions give our lives meaning, and life without emotions is impossible to imagine. Emotions are a vestige of our evolutionary history and are primarily controlled by an archaic part of the brain. This is why Dr. Matsumoto describes emotions as immediate, involuntary, automatic, and unconscious reactions to…

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Does Music Elicit Universal Emotional Responses?

It’s no mystery that major and minor chords in western music makes us feel good. But could this be because of an evolutionary trait? Recent research led by Eline Adrianne Smit and colleagues from the MARCS Institute for Brain suggests this could be the case. Turn to any major pop radio station in the Western…

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Disgust and Fear Linked To More Acidity In Stomach

We’ve all experienced “gut feelings” but a new study out of Sapienza University supports the idea that these feelings could be tied to physiological changes. Researchers in Rome investigated how emotional states such as disgust and fear could affect acidity levels in the gut. The Methodology Giuseppina Porciello and her team asked 31 men whose…

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