Erika L Rosenberg

University of California, Davis | UCD · UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain

Internal states may be conveyed to others nonverbally through facial expression. We investigated the existence of a particular facial cue that may be effectively used by women to indicate interest in a man. Across six studies, men generally recognized a female facial expression as representing flirting. Flirtatious expressions receiving low recogni...

Meditation practices purportedly help people develop focused and sustained attention, cultivate feelings of compassionate concern for self and others, and strengthen motivation to help others who are in need. We examined the impact of 3 months of intensive meditative training on emotional responses to scenes of human suffering. Sixty participants w...

The dynamics of psychological processes, as they unfold within individuals over time, are fundamental to understanding behavioral, emotional, and cognitive development. The incorporation of multiple methods of measurement and observational time scales can greatly enhance knowledge of these dynamics. However, as researchers examine increasingly comp...

Objective: Cognitive perseverations that include worry and rumination over past or future events may prolong cortisol release, which in turn may contribute to predisease pathways and adversely affect physical health. Meditation training may increase self-reported mindfulness, which has been linked to reductions in cognitive perseverations. However...

The capacity to focus one's attention for an extended period of time can be increased through training in contemplative practices. However, the cognitive processes engaged during meditation that support trait changes in cognition are not well characterized. We conducted a longitudinal wait-list controlled study of intensive meditation training. Ret...

Psychosocial interventions often aim to alleviate negative emotional states. However, there is growing interest in cultivating positive emotional states and qualities. One particular target is compassion, but it is not yet clear whether compassion can be trained. A community sample of 100 adults were randomly assigned to a 9-week compassion cultiva...

Objective: Mindfulness-based meditation training can increase self-reported mindfulness and affect cortisol secretion. However, there are no reports linking these two variables directly. We examined whether they were related during concentrative meditation training. Methods: We measured self-reported mindfulness and cortisol near the beginning and...

With increasing age, working memory capacity decreases and the diurnal slope of serum dehydroepiandosterone (DHEA) flattens. Several studies suggest that cognitive performance may be related to DHEA, independent of age. However, results are mixed. Further, there are no reports relating working memory capacity with the diurnal slope of DHEA. A recen...

This book presents previously published articles on spontaneous facial expression in a single volume. It also contains short essays that offer the reader a glimpse of the researchers' current thinking on the issues addressed in their articles. It specifically focuses on the research involving measurement of the face itself. The book is divided into...

Contemplative practices are believed to alleviate psychological problems, cultivate prosocial behavior and promote self-awareness. In addition, psychological science has developed tools and models for understanding the mind and promoting well-being. Additional effort is needed to combine frameworks and techniques from these traditions to improve em...

We examined the impact of training-induced improvements in self-regulation, operationalized in terms of response inhibition, on longitudinal changes in self-reported adaptive socioemotional functioning. Data were collected from participants undergoing 3 months of intensive meditation training in an isolated retreat setting (Retreat 1) and a wait-li...

Background: Meditation training can increase mindfulness and alter the experience of negative emotion. Sadness can increase cortisol release. We examined whether self-reported mindfulness buffered separation-related sadness-induced cortisol release and affected the cortisol awakening response. Methods: 59 participants completed a 3-month meditation...

Background: Telomerase activity is a predictor of long-term cellular viability, which decreases with chronic psychological distress (Epel et al., 2004). Buddhist traditions claim that meditation decreases psychological distress and promotes well-being (e.g., Dalai Lama and Cutler, 2009). Therefore, we investigated the effects of a 3-month meditati...

The ability to focus one's attention underlies success in many everyday tasks, but voluntary attention cannot be sustained for extended periods of time. In the laboratory, sustained-attention failure is manifest as a decline in perceptual sensitivity with increasing time on task, known as the vigilance decrement. We investigated improvements in sus...

In order to assess the extent of coherence in emotional response systems, we examined the relationship between facial expression and self-report of emotion at multiple points in time during an affective episode. We showed subjects brief films that were selected for their ability to elicit disgust and fear, and we asked them to report on their emoti...

The authors examined whether facial expressions of emotion would predict changes in heart function. One hundred fifteen male patients with coronary artery disease underwent the Type A Structured Interview, during which time measures of transient myocardial ischemia (wall motion abnormality and left ventricular ejection fraction) were obtained. Faci...

Emotional processes influence a wide range of mental and physical systems, which makes them difficult to understand from a single perspective. In this special issue of the Review of General Psychology, contributing authors present 4 articles that draw from several areas within psychology in the service of understanding a topic relevant to emotion....

This article presents a framework for the organization of affective processes, including the affective traits, moods, and emotions. Section 1 introduces the levels-of-analysis approach, defines the three levels of affect, presents criteria for ordering these levels hierarchically in terms of simple and complex temporally driven processes, and exami...

Emotional processes influence a wide range of mental and physical systems, which makes them difficult to understand from a single perspective. In this special issue of the Review of General Psychology, contributing authors present 4 articles that draw from several areas within psychology in the service of understanding a topic relevant to emotion....

This study describes the affective component of hostility as measured by the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (Ho; W. Cook & D. Medley, 1954) by examining the relationship between facial expressions of emotion and Ho scores in 116 male coronary heart disease patients. Patients underwent the videotaped Type A Structured Interview, from which facial expre...

Facial expressions convey a vast amount of information, but only recently have investigators begun to explore the precise details of what expressions are telling us about internal states, social behavior, and psychopathology. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which is a tool for comprehensively measuring facial expressions, plays a central ro...

Facial expressions convey a vast amount of information, but only recently have investigators begun to explore the precise details of what expressions are telling us about internal states, social behavior, and psychopathology. The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which is a tool for comprehensively measuring facial expressions, plays a central ro...

While we have known for centuries that facial expressions can reveal what people are thinking and feeling, it is only recently that the face has been studied scientifically for what it can tell us about internal states, social behavior, and psychopathology. Today's widely available, sophisticated measuring systems have allowed us to conduct a wealt...

In two studies, subjects judged a set of facial expressions of emotion by either providing labels of their own choice to describe the stimuli (free-choice condition), choosing a label from a list of emotion words, or choosing a story from a list of emotion stories (fixed-choice conditions). In the free-choice condition, levels of agreement between...

This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of selected interior work-station orientational cuing upon the ability to align a target image with local vertical in the frontal plane. Angular error from gravitational vertical in an alignment task was measured for 20 observers viewing through two window shapes (square, round), two initial orientati...

An exploration of the issues which surround some of the elements of the Human Productivity Program is given. Five general topics were discussed: (1) crew safety, (2) internal contamination, (3) the definition of the Human Productivity Program, (4) aspects of architecture that affect productivity, and (5) the role of mock-ups in the Human Productivi...

In this chapter I explain how the cultivation of mindfulness may serve as an antidote to consumerism. This argument hinges on two key points. First, advertisers and corporations capitalize on powerful psychological processes to strengthen automaticity in consumer behavior. Mindfulness may enhance one's awareness of potentially accessible cognitive-...