Investigating the Neural Basis of Flexible Emotion Perception

Project Narrative Accurate perception of others' emotion is critical for successful social interaction, yet it diminishes over the lifespan and is impaired across a wide range of disorders, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, autism, and schizophrenia. The proposed research seeks to test whether (a) context and expectations systematically bias the visual representation of a face’s emotion, which is driven by OFC‒FG interplay and depends on IFOF integrity; (b) this top-down modulation is automatic and does not reflect some form of post- perceptual response bias; and (c) this mechanism is shaped by inter-individual variability in emotion- conceptual knowledge, which provides a set of top-down expectations on the perception of facial emotion.