Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Eeg Measures Of Facial Expression Recognition, Madeleine Werhane

Summer Research

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of the human mirror neuron system (hMNS) in the accurate identification of emotional facial expressions. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to record Mu wave activity while participants preformed a series of video-matching tasks, in which they discriminated between facial stimuli by either emotional expression or model identity. A polygon-matching task was used as a baseline measure for mirror neuron activity. Mu Suppression Indices were calculated and compared between the identity-matching and emotion-matching conditions. Mu suppression was significantly increased in the emotion-matching condition, suggesting that the mirror neuron system is engaged to …