Recent Advances in Understanding Facial Expression Processing: New Methods, Measures and Models

Dear Colleagues,

The human face is arguably the most important visual stimulus we encounter on a daily basis. From each other's physiognomies we extract a wealth of socially vital information regarding identity, health, and attention, among much else. One of the most important types of information we garner from a face regards a person's emotional state. Researchers have been interested in gaining a scientific understanding of our ability to transmit emotional signals via facial muscle contractions since at least since Darwin. During the 20th century, the area of facial expression research has seen a number of important advances, including the proposal of the idea of universal expressions, the debate over face specialness, and the discovery of micro-expressions. More recent directions in facial expression research have been driven by social events, such as the need to wear face masks and communicate via video chat that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the emergence of generative AI applications that can quickly render convincing (if often imperfect) images of human faces based solely on short verbal descriptions. Similarly, the move towards a greater consideration of diversity, equity, and inclusion has fostered increasing attempts to explore facial expression processing in a way that takes into account differences in ethnicity, culture, and gender. Such new ideas and directions are emerging continually in the facial expression literature, and this Special Issue aims to bring attention to them. These novel concepts include advances in the methodologies, measures, and models we employ in our ongoing endeavor to better understand how we send and receive information about our internal emotional states via our faces.

Prof. Dr. Charles Collin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.