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Flushed with Emotion
22 April 2018

Flushed with Emotion

Have you ever felt your face flush with embarrassment, or prickle with anger? Just as we recognise these feelings rising, it seems other people do too. Participants in a recent study were often able to spot emotions in strangers’ faces, from changes in blood flow around their cheeks, chin, nose, and eyebrows. The woman in this picture is making happy or angry expressions, but only in the left of each pair is she also producing the distinctive blood patterns associated with the true emotion (her happy cheeks in the top left, for example). While these patterns are universal across age, gender or race, we have different patterns for related emotions, such as 'angry' and 'disgusted' or 'happy' and 'happily disgusted' (respectively from the left in the maps bottom row). It's possible that these subtleties may be missed by some sufferers of expressive agnosia, leading to confusion in reading emotion.

Written by John Ankers

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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