How does loneliness impact emotion perception? A systematic review

This study focuses on the effects of the perception of physical elements on the perception of emotions and communication with cartoons of people of different ages and cultures classified by nationality and age range. The objectives of this research were: 1) to analyze the physical characteristics that affect emotional perception and communication; 2) to analyze and compare the relationship between the physical elements of an image comprising cartoons, emotional perception, and communication. This was a quantitative and qualitative study with a population and sample of 300 volunteers from three nationalities and three age groups: Thai, Japanese, and American. The tools used in this study were questionnaires and interviews using a 5-level estimation scale. Data analysis utilized statistics for comparative analysis and determined the mean and standard deviation. The results showed that the emotional and sensory perception levels were very high, with a mean of 4.06 and standard deviations of 0.89. Emotional characteristics create emotional perception and strengthen emotional awareness, which are at a high level, with a mean of 3.95 and a standard deviation of 0.95. Characters and scenes create emotional perception; deformed character ratios create emotional and sensory perception; natural scenes generate emotional and sensory perception; 2D shapes can generate emotional and sensory perception; depth of field generates emotional and sensory perception; and light and shadow generate moderate emotional and sensory perception, with a mean of 3.80 and standard deviations of 0.97. The scene produced a low level of emotional and sensory perception, with a mean of 3.66 and standard deviations of 1.07. Large characters generate very little emotional perception, with a mean of 3.52 and a standard deviation of 1.04. However, the analysis also shows that a p<0.05 value is considered statistically significant. Similarly, the interviews showed that the artistic elements were at the highest level of perception generation, and they were also able to analyze and compare physical characteristics according to the set objectives.

Mechanisms and predictors for the successful treatment of anxiety and depression have been elusive, limiting the effectiveness of existing treatments and curtailing the development of new interventions. In this study, we evaluated the utility of three widely used neural probes of emotion (experience, regulation, and perception) in their ability to predict symptom improvement and correlate with symptom change following two first-line treatments-selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Fifty-five treatment-seeking adults with anxiety and/or depression were randomized to 12 weeks of SSRI or CBT treatment (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01903447). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine frontolimbic brain function during emotion experience, regulation, and perception, as probed by the Emotion Regulation Task (ERT; emotion experience and regulation) and emotional face assessment task (EFAT; emotion perception). Brain function was then related to anxiety and depression symptom change. Results showed that both SSRI and CBT treatments similarly attenuated insula and amygdala activity during emotion perception, and greater treatment-related decrease in insula and amygdala activity was correlated with greater reduction in anxiety symptoms. Both treatments also reduced amygdala activity during emotion experience but brain change did not correlate with symptom change. Lastly, greater pre-treatment insula and amygdala activity during emotion perception predicted greater anxiety and depression symptom improvement. Thus, limbic activity during emotion perception is reduced by both SSRI and CBT treatments, and predicts anxiety and depression symptom improvement. Critically, neural reactivity during emotion perception may be a non-treatment-specific mechanism for symptom improvement.

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.

Do members of different cultures express (or "encode") emotions in the same fashion? How well can members of distinct cultures recognize (or "decode") each other's emotion expressions? The question of cultural universality versus specificity in emotional expression has been a hot topic of debate for more than half a century, but, despite a sizeable amount of empirical research produced to date, no convincing answers have emerged. We suggest that this unsatisfactory state of affairs is due largely to a lack of concern with the precise mechanisms involved in emotion expression and perception, and propose to use a modified Brunswikian lens model as an appropriate framework for research in this area. On this basis we provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature and point to research paradigms that are likely to provide the evidence required to resolve the debate on universality vs. cultural specificity of emotional expression. Applying this fresh perspective, our analysis reveals that, given the paucity of pertinent data, no firm conclusions can be drawn on actual expression (encoding) patterns across cultures (although there appear to be more similarities than differences), but that there is compelling evidence for intercultural continuity in decoding, or recognition, ability. We also note a growing body of research on the notion of ingroup advantage due to expression "dialects," above and beyond the general encoding or decoding patterns. We furthermore suggest that these empirical patterns could be explained by both universality in the underlying mechanisms and cultural specificity in the input to, and the regulation of, these expression and perception mechanisms. Overall, more evidence is needed, both to further elucidate these mechanisms and to inventory the patterns of cultural effects. We strongly recommend using more solid conceptual and theoretical perspectives, as well as more ecologically valid approaches, in designing future studies in emotion expression and perception research.

Perception and recognition of emotions are fundamental prerequisites of human life. Patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) may have emotional and behavioral impairments that might influence socially desirable interactions. We aimed to investigate perception and recognition of emotions in patients with JME by means of neuropsychological tests and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Sixty-five patients with JME (median age = 27 years, interquartile range [IQR] = 23-34) were prospectively recruited at the Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler University Hospital, Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria. Patients were compared to 68 healthy controls (median age = 24 years, IQR = 21-31), matched for sex, age, and education. All study participants underwent the Networks of Emotion Processing test battery (NEmo), an fMRI paradigm of "dynamic fearful faces," a structured interview for psychiatric and personality disorders, and comprehensive neuropsychological testing. JME patients versus healthy controls demonstrated significant deficits in emotion recognition in facial and verbal tasks of all emotions, especially fear. fMRI revealed decreased amygdala activation in JME patients as compared to healthy controls. Patients were at a higher risk of experiencing psychiatric disorders as compared to healthy controls. Cognitive evaluation revealed impaired attentional and executive functioning, namely psychomotor speed, tonic alertness, divided attention, mental flexibility, and inhibition of automated reactions. Duration of epilepsy correlated negatively with parallel prosodic and facial emotion recognition in NEmo. Deficits in emotion recognition were not associated with psychiatric comorbidities, impaired attention and executive functions, types of seizures, and treatment. This prospective study demonstrated that as compared to healthy subjects, patients with JME had significant deficits in recognition and perception of emotions as shown by neuropsychological tests and fMRI. The results of this study may have importance for psychological/psychotherapeutic interventions in the management of patients with JME.

The study examined the correlation between autistic traits, perception of body emotion from dynamic point-light displays, and perception of dynamic facial expression in adults. A sample of 172 adults from Georgia completed an online survey. The results revealed a correlation between autistic traits and perception of facial anger emotion and in identifying anger and happiness of body emotions. The difficulty perceiving the emotion of anger is generalized in both modalities, facial and body movements. Our results indicate that the perception of emotions in faces and the perception of emotions in the movement are not the same factors concerning autistic traits and autistic traits are associated with difficulty perceiving negative emotions in healthy people.

This study examined the consciousness of husbands and wives on babies` cries and its factors which have impacts on their emotional perceptions. For this study, infants` cries were recorded with the participation of 136 pregnant women and 76 husbands, and they conducted self-evaluations regarding their emotional perceptions and personal characteristics. The stimulus used to exhibit the cries of infants were from eighteen recorded cry sample under three situations (hunger, pain, and mother`s absence) with six healthy infants (three male and three female) who are over six months. Also, this study dealt with the relationship between emotional assessment and the personal characteristics of mothers and fathers. As a result, the experience of child-rearing has a positive influence on the emotional cry perceptions of husbands and wives, and there was no sex difference in their emotional cry perceptions. A change of recognition, being parents, has impacts on emotional cry perceptions, but the major factors increasing these impacts depend on the physiological changes of pregnant women and their personal characteristics.

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.

Recent research shows that sensitivity to interoceptive sensitivity is associated with a more granular experience of emotions. These studies suggest that individuals sensitive to their interoceptive signals can better perceive somatic physiological changes as compared to their counterparts. Therefore, they discriminate among a wide and subtle range of emotions. Further, the perception of others' emotions could be based on our own emotional experiences. However, whether interoceptive sensitivity is related to the perception of others' emotions remains unclear. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between interoceptive sensitivity and emotional perception. Considering the model that emotion perception comprises two processes, categorization of facial expressions and approach-avoidance responses, this study examined both categorizations of facial expressions and approach-avoidance responses. The results showed no relationship between interoceptive sensitivity and the perception of emotion, which suggests that interoceptive sensitivity is related to the experience of emotion but does not affect the granularity of emotional perception. Future studies should diversely and empirically examine the role of the body in emotional perception from the perspective of interoceptive sensitivity.

Deficits in facial emotion perception in adults with recent traumatic brain injury

This study aimed to discover predictors of subjective and objective difficulty in emotion perception from dynamic facial expressions. We used a multidimensional emotion perception framework, in which observers rated the perceived emotion along a number of dimensions instead of choosing from traditionally-used discrete categories of emotions. Data were collected online from 441 participants who rated facial expression stimuli in a novel paradigm designed to separately measure subjective (self-reported) and objective (deviation from the population consensus) difficulty. We targeted person-specific (sex and age of observers and actors) and stimulus-specific (valence and arousal values) predictors of those difficulty scores. Our findings suggest that increasing age of actors makes emotion perception more difficult for observers, and that perception difficulty is underestimated by men in comparison to women, and by younger and older adults in comparison to middle-aged adults. The results also yielded an increase in the objective difficulty measure for female observers and female actors. Stimulus-specific factors–valence and arousal–exhibited quadratic relationships with subjective and objective difficulties: Very positive and very negative stimuli were linked to reduced subjective and objective difficulty, whereas stimuli of very low and high arousal were linked to decreased subjective but increased objective difficulty. Exploratory analyses revealed low relevance of person-specific variables for the prediction of difficulty but highlighted the importance of valence in emotion perception, in line with functional accounts of emotions. Our findings highlight the need to complement traditional emotion recognition paradigms with novel designs, like the one presented here, to grasp the “big picture” of human emotion perception.

Facial emotion perception plays a key role in interpersonal communication and is a precursor for a variety of socio-cognitive abilities. One brain region thought to support emotion perception is the inferior frontal cortex (IFC). The current study aimed to examine whether modulating neural activity in the IFC using high frequency transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) could enhance emotion perception abilities. In Experiment 1, participants received either tRNS to IFC or sham stimulation prior to completing facial emotion and identity perception tasks. Those receiving tRNS significantly outperformed those receiving sham stimulation on facial emotion, but not identity, perception tasks. In Experiment 2, we examined whether baseline performance interacted with the effects of stimulation. Participants completed a facial emotion and identity discrimination task prior to and following tRNS to either IFC or an active control region (area V5/MT). Baseline performance was a significant predictor of emotion discrimination performance change following tRNS to IFC. This effect was not observed for tRNS targeted at V5/MT or for identity discrimination. Overall, the findings implicate the IFC in emotion processing and demonstrate that tRNS may be a useful tool to modulate emotion perception when accounting for individual differences in factors such as baseline task performance.

Objective To investigate whether modulating the activation of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex(DLPFC) by transcranial direct current stimulation(tDCS) can influence emotional perception. Methods Seventy-eight undergraduates were randomly divided into four groups by simple random sampling method.TDCS (1.5 mA) noninvasive technique was used to test group 1 (n=23) for 3 minutes to intervene in DLPFC, group 2 (n=17) for 15 minutes to intervene in DLPFC, group 3 (n=20) for 3 minutes to intervene in primary visual cortex, and group 4 (n=18) for non-emotional picture test.The data were analyzed with repeated measurement variance analysis. Results (1) The interaction between short-term(3 min) stimulation of tDCS and facial expression was statistically significant (F(1, 22)=7.448, P=0.012). There was significant difference in positive face perception (before: 70.58%, period: 74.75%, P=0.036) and no significant difference in negative face perception (before: 70.58%, period: 70.73%, P=0.569). (2) There was no significant difference in the correlation between prolonged tDCS stimulation(15 min) and face expression recognition (F(1, 16)=1.621, P=0.221). (3) The primary visual cortex was not affected by anodal tDCS (F(1, 19) 0.05). (4) There was no significant difference in the interaction between tDCS and facial expression (F(1, 17)=2.566, P=0.128) when visual stimulus was changed to non-expressive faces. Conclusions By applying tDCS technique, the present findings suggest that modulating DLPFC can influence emotional face perception, and support the valence-specific lateralization of emotional perception. Key words: Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; Transcranial direct current stimulation, anode; Emotional perception; Face detection

Purpose: This study aimed to identify the age-related differences in the perception of emotion in speech, focusing on the effects of semantics and prosody.Methods: Thirty-two young adults and 32 elderly adults participated in this study. We implemented the test for rating of emotions in speech. The participants were presented with spoken sentences, which consisted of four emotional categories (anger, sadness, happiness, and neutral) in terms of prosody and semantics. In the general rating tasks, the participants were asked to listen to the sentences and rated the degree of the speaker’s emotions. In the attention rating tasks, the participants were asked to focus on only one cue (prosody and semantics) and to rate how much they agree with the speaker’s emotion.Results: The young group scored significantly higher than the elderly group on the general rating tasks and attention rating tasks. The elderly group scored higher on the semantic tasks than on the prosodic tasks, while the young group scored similarly on the semantic and prosodic tasks.Conclusion: The elderly adults have lower abilities to perceive emotion in speech than the young adults. They have difficulty in using the prosodic cues of emotional speech. In addition, the elderly adults try to use the semantic cues of emotional speech in order to compensate for their poor abilities to process the prosodic cues.

Perception of happy and sad facial expressions in chronic schizophrenia: Evidence for two evaluative systems