Facial Expression Processing of Children Orphaned by Parental HIV/AIDS: A Cross-Sectional ERP Study with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

Qi Zhao,Huang Gu,Hui He,Junfeng Zhao,Xiaoming Li,Peilian Chi

doi:10.3390/ijerph18199995

Abstract

Existing behavioral studies have suggested that individuals with early life stress usually show abnormal emotional processing. However, limited event-related brain potentials (ERPs) evidence was available to explore the emotional processes in children orphaned by parental HIV/AIDS (“AIDS orphans”). The current study aims to investigate whether there are behavioral and neurological obstacles in the recognition of emotional faces in AIDS orphans and also to further explore the processing stage at which the difference in facial emotion recognition exists. A total of 81 AIDS orphans and 60 non-orphan children were recruited through the local communities and school systems in Henan, China. Participants completed a computer version of the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task while recording ERPs. Behavioral results showed that orphans displayed higher response accuracy and shorter reaction time than the control (ps < 0.05). As for the ERPs analysis, the attenuated amplitude of N170 (i.e., an early component sensitive to facial configuration) was observed in AIDS orphans compared to the non-orphan control with happy and neutral faces; P300 (i.e., an endogenous component for affective valence evaluation in emotional processing) also showed significant differences in parietal lobe between groups, the non-orphan control group produced larger P300 amplitudes than orphans (p < 0.05). The results suggested that compared to the control group, AIDS orphans showed impaired facial emotion recognition ability with reduced brain activation.

Highlights

Children orphaned by parental Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)(“AIDS orphans”) are defined as children under 18 years of age who have lost one or both of their parents to HIV (The human immunodeficiency viruses) infection [1]
The present study further explored that whether the two groups differentiated in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) components that sensitive to the emotional faces processing stage (i.e., N170 for the early phase of perception and attention processing, N300 and P300 in late-stage for affective valence and stimulus evaluation) in the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm
The results showed that there was a significant difference across the three facial emotions in the orphan group (F2, 158 = 5.448, p = 0.016, η2 = 0.065), while no significant difference was found in the control group

Summary

Introduction

Children orphaned by parental Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)(“AIDS orphans”) are defined as children under 18 years of age who have lost one or both of their parents to HIV (The human immunodeficiency viruses) infection [1]. As established in the literature over the past decade, these AIDS orphans were exposed to numerous challenges, such as parental death, poverty, disrupted school attendance, and stigma [2,3,4,5,6]. All of these early life stress events have long-lasting effects on cognitive function and emotional response [7,8]. Life stress refers to children’s exposure to one or more events in childhood, which exceeds their coping ability and leads to long-term mental health and development problems.

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