We show that recognising emotional facial expressions isn’t just a job for our visual system. It’s an embodied process. When we ‘tune in’ to our own face, it can help reduce the visual effort needed to decode ambiguous expressions

Looking ‘under the hood’, this increased likelihood was predicted by the brain’s visual response (N170). When smiling muscles were stimulated, the N170 was reduced. The larger the reduction, the higher the chance of seeing happiness

At the behavioural level, we found that fNMES-induced smiling increased the likelihood of labelling neutral faces as happy, replicating what we found in a previous study (

We electrically stimulated smiling muscles using Facial Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (fNMES) whilst participants (N=52) viewed ambiguous facial expressions, which were then labelled as happy or sad

Our new paper in Communications Psychology just dropped! We found that stimulating smiling muscles boosts happiness perception in ambiguous faces—and eases visual processing. ⚡🧠😊@sebkorb @TheRealDrNgo @ThemisEfth @MarcMehu @artelse @EssexPsychology.

We propose that smiling creates a facial feedback context that colours neutral faces to be somewhat happier, making them less distinguishable from actual happy faces. Cool no!?.

In sequences containing happy oddballs, derived power at 1.2 Hz and harmonics (representing neural sensitivity to the oddball stimuli) was significantly reduced when participants were smiling themselves. This was not the case for angry oddballs.

Participants viewed fast sequences of neutral faces, with happy (or angry) 'oddball' faces embedded within said sequences at 1.2 Hz. Participants were asked to either hold a smile or a neutral expression whilst viewing.

We used a visual oddball frequency tagging paradigm to demonstrate that posing a smile reduces the visual system's ability to automatically differentiate between neutral and happy facial expressions.

New paper just got accepted in Emotion🤓. It's called "Increasing perceived happiness in neutral faces by posing a smile: an EEG frequency-tagging study". Many thanks to my collaborators @sebkorb @svddonck @BartBoets. preprint:

Some of our work has been mentioned in an article in Scientific American! We show that electrical stimulation of specific facial muscles can induce positive and negative mood changes. @sebkorb @ThemisEfth .

Had the most amazing time at the Redefining Emotional Expressions workshop in Erice with @sebkorb et. al. A few days of neuroscience in a medieval village atop a Sicilian mountain that overlooks vineyards and the pastel blues of the Mediterranean 🫠.

We hope that this paper and the provided materials will encourage scientists to use fNMES in their own studies! Thank you to everybody involved.

See for a detailed guide (including a video) on how to use a GUI developed by @ThemisEfth to control the module.

In addition, we detail a number of key fNMES parameters and some tips for combining fNMES with EEG and other physiological measures.

Many electrical stimulators require expensive control modules to operate in an experiment setting. Here, we provide for free, hardware schematics and computer code to develop a control module so as to precisely control the stimulation of facial muscles (fNMES) during experiments.

New paper just dropped 🧠 @sebkorb @ThemisEfth @MarcMehu @artelse

Starting to get some slides together for a conference, used AI image gen with the prompt "EEG face oscillation muscle emotion perception feedback". It delivered this monstrosity.

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