Alcohol and Emotion Recognition

We all know that alcohol has profound neurological impacts, but what is its role in emotion recognition? According to a new study by Dr. Lauren Hoffman and a team of researchers, alcohol use can significantly impair our abilities to recognize crucial emotions in other people, especially anger. Dr. Hoffman found that recovering alcoholics, while generally…

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Income and Emotional Recognition

Would it surprise you that wealthier people are actually worse at reading emotions? A growing body of research is beginning to show that the less well off a person is the more they have learned to read other people’s emotional expressions. While it might seem counterintuitive, this skill connected with the increased practical necessity of…

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Reading Deceptive Eyes

Eyes are an incredibly important part of emotional recognition, but what role do they have in allowing us to detect deception? While conventional opinion tends to hold that failure to maintain eye contact is a tell-tale sign of deception, this is actually just a pervasive myth. However, because eyes are so important in reading emotions,…

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Anxiety and Ambiguity

Why does that person look so angry? You don’t have to have any sort of chronic anxiety to understand how easy it is to misunderstand other people’s facial expressions. We often interact with strangers, or even friends, and find ourselves unable to read their emotions, fearing that they are unhappy or angry. In fact, newly…

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