Emotion processing is a crucial skill for adaptive social behavior, which requires the ability to consciously interpret, and possibly label, other individuals’ emotions. However, emotional signals can also implicitly drive human behavior without reaching a full cognitive awareness.

Over the past decades, the Explicit and Implicit aspects of emotion processing have been thoroughly investigated by the Psychology and Neuroscience research fields. Yet, the relationship between conscious and non-conscious emotion processing in healthy and pathological populations remains unclear as for the possibility that implicit and explicit emotion processing depends on partially independent cortical and subcortical neural pathways. Moreover, although the domain of facial expressions has been extensively investigated, other sensory inputs as body emotional postures or auditory signals have been less used in experimental studies.

This Research Topic aims to collect manuscripts addressing the following key questions:

- Which are the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms characterizing conscious and unconscious emotion processing?
- Which are the neural networks involved in explicit and implicit emotion processing?
- Which is the nature of deficits in patients with emotional impairments caused by brain lesions or other neuropsychiatric conditions?
- Do mechanisms of explicit and implicit emotion processing share the same features for different modalities and input materials?
- Are emotional signals contagious and which impact do they exert in communicative functions?
- What is the added value and what can we learn by cross-species comparison in the understanding of emotions?

We encourage researchers to submit experimental reports on behavioral, neuroimaging or neuromodulation studies, performed both on healthy and pathological populations. Reviews and theoretical commentaries are also welcome.

Keywords: Emotions, conscious perception, implicit processing, subliminal emotions, emotion recognition

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.