Expression ambiguity leads to greater influence of predictive context during face emotion perception

Event Abstract Back to Event The spatiotemporal characteristics of the distributed network during emotional face perception Yu-Han Chen1*, Jürgen Dammers1, Frank Boers1, Susanne Leiberg2 and Klaus Mathiak1 1 University Hospital Aachen, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Germany 2 University of Zurich, Center for the Study of Social and Neural Systems, Switzerland The neural process of emotional face encoding is a complex interconnected network. This study applied MEG and Magnetic Field Tomography (MFT) to explore the dynamics of the neural network during emotional face perception. Thirteen subjects participated in the study. Emotional faces (disgust, happy, neutral) were randomly presented for 1000 ms and participants were asked to press a button whenever the facial expressions were the same as in the previous image (one-back task). Group statistics of MFT solutions from 0 to 600 ms post-stimulus were analyzed in SPM5 for 3 contrasts (disgust vs. happy, disgust vs. neutral, happy vs. neutral). Time courses of significant brain activations were extracted. For all contrasts, early activity started to emerge in caudal structures such as primary visual cortex (0-200ms), to fusiform area (FFA), insula, and supplemental motor area (SMA) (200-300 ms), and finally to more rostral areas such as inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) (300-600ms). Interestingly, increased FFA activation was only observed in emotional vs. non-emotional faces, but not between the emotional faces. The later responses (>300 ms) in prefrontal area were observed stronger in disgust than happy faces. The emotional modulation of brain activation in response to faces showed a sequential pattern from primary visual cortex, to tempo-parietal cortex, and connected to the frontal cortex across different latencies. Early activation in primary sensory cortices reflects the sensory encoding of faces, and the later activations in temporal and frontal area may reflect emotional classification. Our results demonstrate the temporal profile of different structures engaged in emotion face processes. Emotional valence or arousal may modulate face processing at all levels in a dynamic fashion. Conceivably only higher-order cortical areas such as medio-frontal structures are differentially influenced by the valence of emotion. Conference: Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism , Dubrovnik, Croatia, 28 Mar - 1 Apr, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Neurocognition and Functional Connectivity Citation: Chen Y, Dammers J, Boers F, Leiberg S and Mathiak K (2010). The spatiotemporal characteristics of the distributed network during emotional face perception. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Biomag 2010 - 17th International Conference on Biomagnetism . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.06.00320 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 06 Apr 2010; Published Online: 06 Apr 2010. * Correspondence: Yu-Han Chen, University Hospital Aachen, Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Aachen, Germany, yuhanmc@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Yu-Han Chen Jürgen Dammers Frank Boers Susanne Leiberg Klaus Mathiak Google Yu-Han Chen Jürgen Dammers Frank Boers Susanne Leiberg Klaus Mathiak Google Scholar Yu-Han Chen Jürgen Dammers Frank Boers Susanne Leiberg Klaus Mathiak PubMed Yu-Han Chen Jürgen Dammers Frank Boers Susanne Leiberg Klaus Mathiak Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Facial emotion perception is influenced by many factors (e.g. context, conceptual knowledge, facial motion), but how these factors jointly shape emotion perception remains unclear. The present study investigated how observer- and stimulus-based information interact to influence the perceived similarity of facial emotions. Participants categorised the emotion (Experiment 1) or assessed the intensity (Experiment 2) of two static or dynamic facial expressions before rating their similarity. The results showed that perceived similarity between facial expressions could be predicted by representational distances computed using stimulus properties, recognised emotions, or perceived intensity. Combining all three factors produced the best prediction performance, though the contribution of perceived intensity was more consistent for dynamic than static facial emotions. Moreover, the perception of static and dynamic facial emotions showed remarkable similarities and critical differences. All measures of similarity between facial expressions were highly correlated across dynamic and static conditions. However, dynamic facial emotions consistently elicited better categorisation performance and lower perceived intensity compared to static facial emotions. These results demonstrate novel differences in the processing of static and dynamic facial emotions and provide new insights into how perceived emotion and intensity join with stimulus properties to shape our perception of facial emotion.

Empirical evidence hasdemonstrated functional (mostly right-biased)brain asymmetry for emotion perception, whereas recent studies indicate that acute stress may modulate left and/or right hemisphere activation. However, it is still unknown whether emotion perception can be influenced by stress-induced hemispheric activation since behavioral studies report inconsistent or even contradictory results. We sought to reevaluate this gap. Eighty-eight healthy Caucasian university students participated in the study. In half of the randomly selected participants, acute psychological stress was induced by displaying a brief stressful movie clip (the stress condition), whereas the other half were shown a neutral movie clip (the non-stress condition). Prior to (the baseline) and following the movie clip display an emotion perception task was applied by presenting an emotional (happy, surprised, fearful, sad, angry, or disgusted) or neutral face to the left or right visual field. We found a more accurate perception of emotional and neutral faces presented to the LVF (the right hemisphere) in the baseline. However, we revealed that after watching a neutral movie clip, behavioral performance in emotional and neutral face perception accuracy became relatively equalized for both visual fields, whereas after watching a stressful movie clip, the RVF (the left hemisphere) even became dominant in emotional face perception. We propose a novel hemispheric functional-equivalence model: the brain is initially right-biased in emotional and neutral face perception by default; however, psychophysiological activation of a distributed brain-network due to watching neutral movie clips redistributes hemispheric performance toward relative equivalence. Moreover, even reversed hemispheric asymmetry may occur.

A conceptual critique of brain lateralization models in emotional face perception: Toward a hemispheric functional-equivalence (HFE) model

There is a general consensus in the literature that schizophrenia causes difficulties with facial emotion perception and discrimination. Functional brain imaging studies have observed reduced limbic activity during facial emotion perception but few studies have examined the relation to flat affect severity. A total of 26 people with schizophrenia and 26 healthy controls took part in this event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Sad, happy and neutral faces were presented in a pseudo-random order and participants indicated the gender of the face presented. Manual segmentation of the amygdala was performed on a structural T1 image. Both the schizophrenia group and the healthy control group rated the emotional valence of facial expressions similarly. Both groups exhibited increased brain activity during the perception of emotional faces relative to neutral ones in multiple brain regions, including multiple prefrontal regions bilaterally, the right amygdala, right cingulate cortex and cuneus. Group comparisons, however, revealed increased activity in the healthy group in the anterior cingulate, right parahippocampal gyrus and multiple visual areas. In schizophrenia, the severity of flat affect correlated significantly with neural activity in several brain areas including the amygdala and parahippocampal region bilaterally. These results suggest that many of the brain regions involved in emotional face perception, including the amygdala, are equally recruited in both schizophrenia and controls, but flat affect can also moderate activity in some other brain regions, notably in the left amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus bilaterally. There were no significant group differences in the volume of the amygdala.

Adult attachment anxiety is associated with enhanced automatic neural response to positive facial expression

Background:Human navigation of social interactions relies on the processing of emotion on faces. This meta-analysis aimed to produce an updated brain atlas of emotional face processing from whole-brain studies based on a single emotional face–viewing paradigm (PROSPERO CRD42022251548).Methods:We conducted a systematic literature search of Embase, MEDLINE and PsycINFO from May 2008 to October 2021. We used seed-based d mapping with permutation of subject images to conduct a quantitative meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging contrasts between emotional (e.g., angry, happy) and neutral faces. We conducted agglomerative hierarchical clustering of meta-analytic map contrasts of emotional faces relative to neutral faces. We investigated lateralization of emotional face processing.Results:From 5549 studies identified, 55 data sets (1489 healthy participants) met our inclusion criteria. Relative to neutral faces, we found extensive activation clusters by fearful faces in the right inferior temporal gyrus, right fusiform area, left putamen and amygdala, right parahippocampalgyrus and cerebellum; we found smaller activation clusters by angry faces in the right cerebellum and right middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and by disgusted faces in the left MTG. Happy and sad faces did not reach statistical significance. Clustering analyses showed similar activation patterns of fearful and angry faces; activation patterns of happy and sad faces showed the least correlation with other emotional faces. Emotional face processing was predominantly left-lateralized in the amygdala and anterior insula, and right-lateralized in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.Limitations:Reliance on discretized effect sizes based on peak coordinate location instead of statistical brain maps, and the varying level of statistical threshold reporting from original studies, could lead to underdetection of smaller clusters of activation.Conclusion:Processing of emotional faces appeared to be oriented toward identifying threats on faces, from highest (i.e., angry or fearful faces) to lowest level (i.e., happy or sad faces), with a more complex lateralization pattern than previously theorized. Emotional faces may be processed in latent grouping but organized by threat content rather than emotional valence.

A growing body of research suggests that emotional chemosignals in others' body odor (BO), particularly those sampled during fearful states, enhance emotional face perception in conscious and preconscious stages. For instance, emotional faces access visual awareness faster when presented with others' fear BOs. However, the effect of these emotional signals in self-BO, that is, one's own BO, is still neglected in the literature. In the present work, we sought to determine whether emotional self-BOs modify the access to visual awareness of emotional faces. Thirty-eight women underwent a breaking-Continuous Flash Suppression task in which they were asked to detect fearful, happy, and neutral faces, as quickly and accurately as possible, while being exposed to their fear, happiness, and neutral self-BOs. Self-BOs were previously collected and later delivered via an olfactometer, using an event-related design. Results showed a main effect of emotional faces, with happy faces being detected significantly faster than fearful and neutral faces. However, our hypothesis that fear self-BOs would lead to faster emotional face detection was not confirmed, as no effect of emotional self-BOs was found-this was confirmed with Bayesian analysis. Although caution is warranted when interpreting these results, our findings suggest that emotional face perception is not modulated by emotional self-BOs, contrasting with the literature on others' BOs. Further research is needed to understand the role of self-BOs in visual processing and emotion perception.

Within the framework of interpersonal and cognitive theories of depression, we investigated whether the perception of facial emotions was associated with subsequent relapse into depression. The 23 inpatients with major depression who remitted (65 admitted patients) were studied at admission (T0), at discharge (T1), and 6 months thereafter to assess relapse. They judged schematic faces with respect to the expression of positive and negative emotions. Six patients (26.1%) relapsed. High levels of perception of negative emotions in faces, either assessed at T0 or at T1, were associated with relapse. Moreover, subjects saw more negative emotions in depressed than in remitted state. Significant results were confined to ambiguous faces, i.e., faces expressing equal amounts of positive and negative emotions. Our data support the hypothesis that a bias toward the perception of others' facial emotions as negative is an enduring vulnerability factor to depression relapse and depressed mood amplifies this negative bias in perception.

Emotion is a rapidly changing psychological and physical phenomenon. In daily life, people need to use the information of various sensory modalities (visual, auditory, etc.) to perceive non-verbal emotional information. Non-verbal emotion from faces and voices are often complex and varied. Previous studies have revealed that there are common and distinct neural networks underlying perception of human faces and voices. However, the neural mechanisms underlying visual and auditory emotional perception have not been well studied. Furthermore, despite researches on audiovisual integration of cross-modal emotional information, the multisensory cortex of the visual and auditory emotional information remains elusive. Therefore, it is necessary to study the similarities and differences between the neural mechanisms of emotion perception in visual and auditory modalities, and to explore the multiple sensory cortex of cross-modal emotion perception. The present fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) study adopted a 2*3 (stimulus presentation modality: Visual, auditory; emotional valence: Happy, sad, fear) event-related design to investigate the neural mechanisms of emotion perception in visual and auditory modalities. When the stimulus (an emotional face or voice) was visually or aurally presented, participants were required to make a gender judgement. The results showed that the activation intensity of emotional faces in V1−V4, bilateral fusiform gyrus and bilateral superior temporal sulcus (STS) was significantly higher than that of emotional voices. Conversely, the activation intensity of emotional voices in auditory cortex (AC) was significantly higher than that of emotional faces. The results from multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) showed that the activation patterns of the right STS could discriminate the perception of human faces with emotional valence (happy, sad and fear face), indicating that the rSTG plays important role in perception of faces with different emotional valence; the activation patterns of the right FFA were different for happy and sad faces, indicating that the rFFA is crucial for positive and negative emotional face perception. A voxel-based whole brain analysis was further performed to examine the cortical areas that modulated perception of emotional valence. The whole brain analysis showed that the main effects for emotional valence was significant in the left opercular part of inferior frontal gyrus, indicating that this region might be a multisensory cortex of visual-auditory emotional perception. In summary, our study provided important evidence for further understanding the processing of emotion perception in different modalities and multisensory cortex of cross-channel emotion perception.

IntroductionThe accurate perception of facial expressions plays a vital role in daily life, allowing us to select appropriate responses in social situations. Understanding the neuronal basis of altered emotional face processing in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) may lead to the appropriate choice of individual interventions to help patients maintain social functioning during depressive episodes. Inconsistencies in neuroimaging studies of emotional face processing are caused by heterogeneity in neurovegetative symptoms of depressive subtypes. The aim of this study was to investigate brain activation differences during implicit perception of faces with negative and positive emotions between healthy participants and patients with melancholic subtype of MDD. The neurobiological correlates of sex differences of MDD patients were also examined.MethodsThirty patients diagnosed with MDD and 21 healthy volunteers were studied using fMRI while performing an emotional face perception task.ResultsComparing general face activation irrespective of emotional content, the intensity of BOLD signal was significantly decreased in the left thalamus, right supramarginal gyrus, right and left superior frontal gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus, and left fusiform gyrus in patients with melancholic depression compared to healthy participants. We observed only limited mood-congruence in response to faces of differing emotional valence. Brain activation in the middle temporal gyrus was significantly increased in response to fearful faces in comparison to happy faces in MDD patients. Elevated activation was observed in the right cingulate for happy and fearful faces, in precuneus for happy faces, and left posterior cingulate cortex for all faces in depressed women compared to men. The Inventory for Depressive Symptomatology (IDS) score was inversely correlated with activation in the left subgenual gyrus/left rectal gyrus for sad, neutral, and fearful faces in women in the MDD group. Patients with melancholic features performed similarly to controls during implicit emotional processing but showed reduced activation.Discussion and conclusionThis finding suggests that melancholic patients compensate for reduced brain activation when interpreting emotional content in order to perform similarly to controls. Overall, frontal hypoactivation in response to implicit emotional stimuli appeared to be the most robust feature of melancholic depression.

Individual differences in attachment orientations may influence how we process emotionally significant stimuli. As one of the most important sources of emotional information are facial expressions, we examined whether there is an association between adult attachment styles (i.e., scores on the ECR questionnaire, which measures the avoidance and anxiety dimensions of attachment), facial emotion perception and face memory in a neurotypical sample. Trait and state anxiety were also measured as covariates. Eye-tracking was used during the emotion decision task (happy vs. sad faces) and the subsequent facial recognition task; the length of fixations to different face regions was measured as the dependent variable. Linear mixed models suggested that differences during emotion perception may result from longer fixations in individuals with insecure (anxious or avoidant) attachment orientations. This effect was also influenced by individual state and trait anxiety measures. Eye movements during the recognition memory task, however, were not related to either of the attachment dimensions; only trait anxiety had a significant effect on the length of fixations in this condition. The results of our research may contribute to a more accurate understanding of facial emotion perception in the light of attachment styles, and their interaction with anxiety characteristics.

Appropriate processing of others’ facial emotions is a fundamental ability of primates in social situations. Several moods and anxiety disorders such as depression cause a negative bias in the perception of facial emotions. Depressive patients show abnormalities of activity and gray matter volume in the perigenual portion of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and an increase of activation in the amygdala. However, it is not known whether neurons in the ACC have a function in the processing of facial emotions. Furthermore, detecting predators quickly and taking avoidance behavior are important functions in a matter of life and death for wild monkeys. the existence of predators in their vicinity is life-and-death information for monkeys. In the present study, we recorded the activity of single neurons from the monkey ACC and examined the responsiveness of the ACC neurons to various visual stimuli including monkey faces, snakes, foods, and artificial objects. About one-fourth of the recorded neurons showed a significant change in activity in response to the stimuli. The ACC neurons exhibited high selectivity to certain stimuli, and more neurons exhibited the maximal response to monkey faces and snakes than to foods and objects. The responses to monkey faces and snakes were faster and stronger compared to those to foods and objects. Almost all of the neurons that responded to video stimuli responded strongly to negative facial stimuli, threats, and scream. Most of the responsive neurons were located in the cingulate gyrus or the ventral bank of the cingulate sulcus just above or anterior to the genu of the corpus callosum, that is, the perigenual portion of the ACC, which has a strong mutual connection with the amygdala. These results suggest that the perigenual portion of the ACC in addition to the amygdala processes emotional information, especially negative life-and-death information such as conspecifics’ faces and snakes.

This study investigated the role of attentional resources in processing emotional faces in working memory (WM). Participants memorised two face arrays with the same emotion but different identities and were required to judge whether the test face had the same identity as one of the previous faces. Concurrently during encoding and maintenance, a sequence of high- or low-pitched tones (high load) or white noise bursts (low load) was presented, and participants were required to count how many low-tones were heard. Experiments 1 and 2 used an emotional and neutral test face, respectively. The results revealed a significant WM impairment for sad and angry faces in the high-load versus low-load condition but not for happy faces. In Experiment 1, participants remembered happy faces better than other emotional faces. In contrast, Experiment 2 showed that performance was poorer for happy than sad faces but not for angry faces. This evidence suggests that depleting attentional resources has less impact on WM for happy faces than other emotional faces, but also that differential effects on WM for emotional faces depend on the presence or absence of emotion in the probe face at retrieval.

Processing of emotional facial expressions is of great importance in interpersonal relationships. Aberrant engagement with facial expressions, particularly an engagement with sad faces, loss of engagement with happy faces, and enhanced memory of sadness has been found in depression. Since most studies used adult faces, we here examined if such biases also occur in processing of infant faces in those with depression or depressive symptoms. In study 1, we recruited 25 inpatient women with major depression and 25 matched controls. In study 2, we extracted a sample of expecting parents from the NorBaby study, where 29 reported elevated levels of depressive symptoms, and 29 were matched controls. In both studies, we assessed attentional bias with a dot-probe task using happy, sad and neutral infant faces, and facial memory bias with a recognition task using happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprised, disgusted and neutral infant and adult faces. Participants also completed the Ruminative Responses Scale and Becks Depression Inventory-II. In study 1, we found no group difference in either attention to or memory accuracy for emotional infant faces. Neither attention nor recognition was associated with rumination. In study 2, we found that the group with depressive symptoms disengaged more slowly than healthy controls from sad infant faces, and this was related to rumination. The results place emphasis on the importance of emotional self-relevant material when examining cognitive processing in depression. Together, these studies demonstrate that a mood-congruent attentional bias to infant faces is present in expecting parents with depressive symptoms, but not in inpatients with Major Depression Disorder who do not have younger children.