AffectiveFaces Project

How does the brain process affective information from facial expressions? How do these abilities develop since childhood?

This project was led by Dr. Fernando Ferreira-Santos, and was funded by the BIAL Foundation (242/2014)

Project summary

Perceiving human faces and facial expressions is something we do every day and that plays an integral role in understanding and acting towards others. This ability is so important that there are specialized neural circuits and regions in our brains to do this, and several disciplines conduct research on this topic: from Psychology to Neurobiology and Computational Neuroscience.
The goal of this project was to contribute to this field by exploring which factors are involved in brain responses to facial expressions of emotion and how these change across development. To do so, we have studied the brain responses of children, adolescents, and adults using electroencephalography (EEG).
Many studies have looked at brain responses to facial expressions of different emotional categories (like happiness or fear), but we also focused on other affective properties of these expressions namely, valence and arousal and found these are important for understanding neural responses to facial expressions (see Publications).
We have also developed the Porto Affective Faces Set (PAFS), a novel set of facial stimuli that includes displays of basic emotions but also of other facial signals. It will be available for use in scientific research soon.

Project team