Decoding Emotions from Facial Expression: Recent Developments and Findings

While most research in the area of decoding emotions from facial expression has been devoted to the issue of whether emotions can be recognized from facial expression, whether some emotions are recognized better than others, and which factors foster or hamper decoding (cf. gender, cultural differences), less research has been devoted to the processes underlying decoding. Here, some aspects concerning this issue will be addressed, namely: can emotion decoding from facial expression better be understood as a bottom-up or a top-down process?; what role does imitation play in decoding emotions?; how stable or robust is emotion decoding, when stimuli are visually degraded?; what is the role of (situational) context information in decoding emotions? Data pertinent to these issues, mostly from the author's own studies, will be reported. Finally, topics for future research are addressed.