Emotions & Empathy

Darwin (1872) wrote about our ability to identify emotions, which is essential to human communication and social navigation and, therefore, to survival in highly competitive environments. Humans are also able to detect very brief facial expressions of emotions in other people and infer they thoughts and experiences (i.e. mindreading). For examples of projects, see below.

Recreational drugs and emotion recognition

Drugs that affect the brain can influence how we perceive facial expressions of emotion. Stimulants and depressants appear to have different effects on the perception of different emotional states, but these effects have not been very well-characterised.

Effect of family factors in emotion recognition

There is evidence that children from large families develop better social skills compared to only children because they had to learn to interact more and share resources with other children. Is this true?