Joshua Baker

We show that recognising emotional facial expressions isn’t just a job for our visual system. It’s an embodied process. When we ‘tune in’ to our own face, it can help reduce the visual effort needed to decode ambiguous expressions

Looking ‘under the hood’, this increased likelihood was predicted by the brain’s visual response (N170). When smiling muscles were stimulated, the N170 was reduced. The larger the reduction, the higher the chance of seeing happiness

Our new paper in Communications Psychology just dropped! We found that stimulating smiling muscles boosts happiness perception in ambiguous faces—and eases visual processing. ⚡🧠😊nature.com/articles/s4427… @sebkorb @TheRealDrNgo @ThemisEfth @MarcMehu @artelse @EssexPsychology

We propose that smiling creates a facial feedback context that colours neutral faces to be somewhat happier, making them less distinguishable from actual happy faces. Cool no!?

In sequences containing happy oddballs, derived power at 1.2 Hz and harmonics (representing neural sensitivity to the oddball stimuli) was significantly reduced when participants were smiling themselves. This was not the case for angry oddballs.

New paper just got accepted in Emotion🤓. It's called "Increasing perceived happiness in neutral faces by posing a smile: an EEG frequency-tagging study". Many thanks to my collaborators @sebkorb @svddonck @BartBoets. preprint: doi.org/10.31234/osf.i…

Some of our work has been mentioned in an article in Scientific American! We show that electrical stimulation of specific facial muscles can induce positive and negative mood changes. @sebkorb @ThemisEfth scientificamerican.com/article/forcin…

Had the most amazing time at the Redefining Emotional Expressions workshop in Erice with @sebkorb et. al. A few days of neuroscience in a medieval village atop a Sicilian mountain that overlooks vineyards and the pastel blues of the Mediterranean 🫠.

We hope that this paper and the provided materials will encourage scientists to use fNMES in their own studies! Thank you to everybody involved.

See github.com/ThemisEfth/fNM… for a detailed guide (including a video) on how to use a GUI developed by @ThemisEfth to control the module.

New paper just dropped 🧠 @sebkorb @ThemisEfth @MarcMehu @artelse

@PVrticka @DrCPW Unfortunately it is not.. although I am also presenting at BACN this year.. I guess I have to add it 🤷

@_Neurobaker @DrCPW Is it because it is an abstract for BACN (British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience) 😋?

Starting to get some slides together for a conference, used AI image gen with the prompt "EEG face oscillation muscle emotion perception feedback". It delivered this monstrosity.