Wolfson Fellow

Dr Anthony Atkinson, B.Sc., M.Sc., D.Phil.

Researcher ID profile

Personal web page

Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 43234

Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 43234

Room number: L55

Member of the Centre for Vision and Visual Cognition

Member of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit

(email at a.p.atkinson@durham.ac.uk)

Biography

B.Sc. & M.Sc. (Psychology), University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
D.Phil. (Psychology), University of Oxford, England, 1993 - 1997.
Lecturer in Psychology, King Alfred's College Winchester (now University of Winchester), England, 1996 - 2003.

Indicators of Esteem

2012: Associate Editor for the journal Emotion Review: 2011-present.
2012: Consulting Editor, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance: January 2012-present.
2012: Review Editor for the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Science: 2012-present.
2011: International conference: Invited presentation - 1: Atkinson, A.P. & Smithson, H.E. Attending to, seeking out and fixating features within a face for emotion perception. Symposium on Advances in the study of facial expression of emotion: New challenges, at the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Research on Emotion, Kyoto, Japan, 26-29 July, 2011.
International conference: Invited presentation - 2: Asia-Pacific Conference on Vision, Incheon, Korea; 13-15 July 2012. A talk to be presented in the symposium 'The Brain in Action'.

Research Groups

Department of Psychology

Research Interests

Social cognitive neuroscience
The emotions
The perception of faces, emotions, and biological motion
The scientific study of consciousness
Conceptual issues in evolutionary & cognitive psychological explanation

Selected Publications

Books: sections

Atkinson, A.P. (2013). Bodily expressions of emotion: Visual cues and neural mechanisms. In The Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience. Armony, J. & Vuilleumier, P. New York: Cambridge University Press. 198-222.
Atkinson, A.P., Heberlein, A.S. & Adolphs, R. (2010). Are people special? A brain’s eye view. In The science of social vision. Adams, Jr., R.B., Ambady, N., Nakayama, K. & Shimojo, S. (Eds.) New York: Oxford University Press. 363-392.
Dittrich, W.H. & Atkinson, A.P. (2008). The perception of bodily expressions of emotion and the implications for computing. In Affective Computing: Focus on Emotion Expression, Synthesis and Recognition. Or, J. (Ed.) Vienna, Austria: I-Tech Education and Publishing. pp.157-184.
Atkinson, A.P. (2007). Face processing and empathy. In Empathy in mental illness. T.F.D. Farrow, & P.W.R.Woodruff (Eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 360-385.
Atkinson, A. P. & Adolphs, A. (2005). Visual emotion perception: Mechanisms and processes. In Emotion and consciousness. L.F. Barrett, P.M. Niedenthal & P. Winkielman (Eds.) New York: Guilford Press. pp. 150-182.
Atkinson, A. P. & Wheeler, M. (2003). Evolutionary psychology's grain problem and the cognitive neuroscience of reasoning. In Evolution and the psychology of thinking: The debate. D. Over (Ed.) Hove: Psychology Press. pp. 61-99.
Wheeler, M. & Atkinson, A. (2001). Domains, brains, and evolution. In Naturalism, evolution and mind. (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 49.). D.M. Walsh (Ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 239-266.

Journal papers: academic

Atkinson, A.P. & Smithson, H.E. (2013). Distinct contributions to facial emotion perception of foveated vs nonfoveated facial features. Emotion Review 5(1): 30-35.
Shafir, T., Taylor, S.F., Atkinson, A.P., Langenecker, S.A. & Zubieta, J-K. (2013). Emotion regulation through execution, observation, and imagery of emotional movements. Brain and Cognition
Thoresen, J.C., Vuong, Q.C. & Atkinson, A.P. (2012). First impressions: Gait cues drive reliable trait judgments. Cognition 124(3): 261-271.
Atkinson, A. P., Vuong, Q. C. & Smithson, H. E. (2012). Modulation of the face- and body-selective visual regions by the motion and emotion of point-light face and body stimuli. NeuroImage 59(2): 1700-1712.
Dzhelyova, M.P., Ellison, A. & Atkinson, A.P. (2011). Event-related repetitive TMS reveals distinct, critical roles for right OFA and bilateral posterior STS in judging the sex and trustworthiness of faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23(10): 2782-2796.
Atkinson, A.P. & Adolphs, R. (2011). The neuropsychology of face perception: Beyond simple dissociations and functional selectivity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366(1571): 1726-1738.
Philip, R.C.M., Whalley, H.C, Stanfield, A.C., Sprengelmeyer, R., Santos, I.M., Young, A.W., Atkinson, A.P., Calder, A.J., Johnstone, E.C., Lawrie, S.M. & Hall, J. (2010). Deficits in facial, body movement and vocal emotional processing in autism spectrum disorders. Psychological Medicine 40(11): 1919-1929.
Sprengelmeyer,, R., Atkinson, A.P., Sprengelmeyer, A., Mair-Walther, J., Jacobi, C., Wildemann, B., Dittrich, W.H. & Hacke, W. (2010). Disgust and fear recognition in paraneoplastic limbic encephalitis. Cortex 46(5): 650-657.
Peelen, M.V., Atkinson, A.P. & Vuilleumier, P. (2010). Supramodal representations of perceived emotions in the human brain. The Journal of Neuroscience 30(30): 10127-10134.
Atkinson, A.P. (2009). Impaired recognition of emotions from body movements is associated with elevated motion coherence thresholds in autism spectrum disorders. Neuropsychologia 47(13): 3023-3029.
Heberlein, A.S. & Atkinson, A.P. (2009). Neuroscientific evidence for simulation and shared substrates in emotion recognition: beyond faces. Emotion Review 1(2): 162-177.
Peelen, M. V., Atkinson, A.P., Andersson, F. & Vuilleumier, P. (2007). Emotional modulation of body-selective visual areas. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2(4): 274-283.
Atkinson, A.P., Tunstall, M.L. & Dittrich, W.H. (2007). Evidence for distinct contributions of form and motion information to the recognition of emotions from body gestures. Cognition 104(1): 59-72.
Atkinson, A.P., Heberlein, A.S. & Adolphs, R. (2007). Spared ability to recognise fear from static and moving whole-body cues following bilateral amygdala damage. Neuropsychologia 45(12): 2772-2782.
Atkinson, A. P., Tipples, J., Burt, D. M. & Young, A. W. (2005). Asymmetric interference between sex and emotion in face perception. Perception & Psychophysics 67(7): 1199-1213.
Atkinson, A.P. (2005). Staring at the back of someone's head is no signal, and a sense of being stared at is no sense. Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(6): 50-56.
Atkinson, A. P., Dittrich, W. H., Gemmell, A. J. & Young, A. W. (2004). Emotion perception from dynamic and static body expressions in point-light and full-light displays. Perception 33(6): 717-746.
Atkinson, A. P. & Wheeler, M. (2004). The grain of domains: The evolutionary-psychological case against domain-general cognition. Mind & Language 19(2): 147-176.
Tipples, J., Atkinson, A. P. & Young, A. W. (2002). The eyebrow frown: a salient social signal. Emotion 2(3): 288-296.
Atkinson, A. P., Thomas, M. S. C. & Cleeremans, A. (2000). Consciousness: mapping the theoretical landscape. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(10): 372-382.
Rhodes, G., Brake, S. & Atkinson, A. P. (1993). What's lost in inverted faces?. Cognition 47(1): 25-57.

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Grants Awarded

2008: EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS (£48123.00 from Arts and Humanities Research Council)
2004: NEUROPSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTION PERCEPTION (£3900.00 from Human Frontier Science Program)
2003: THE MCDONNELL PROJECT IN PHILOSOPHY (£7202.36 from James S. McDonnell Foundation)