Affect Labeling Research Articles

Neural Correlates of Affect Processing and Aggression in Methamphetamine Dependence

Methamphetamine abuse is associated with high rates of aggression but few studies have addressed the contributing neurobiological factors. To quantify aggression, investigate function in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, and assess relationships between brain function and behavior in methamphetamine-dependent individuals. In a case-control study, aggression and brain activation were compared between methamphetamine-dependent and control participants. Participants were recruited from the general community to an academic research center. Thirty-nine methamphetamine-dependent volunteers (16 women) who were abstinent for 7 to 10 days and 37 drug-free control volunteers (18 women) participated in the study; subsets completed self-report and behavioral measures. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed on 25 methamphetamine-dependent and 23 control participants. We measured self-reported and perpetrated aggression and self-reported alexithymia. Brain activation was assessed using fMRI during visual processing of facial affect (affect matching) and symbolic processing (affect labeling), the latter representing an incidental form of emotion regulation. Methamphetamine-dependent participants self-reported more aggression and alexithymia than control participants and escalated perpetrated aggression more following provocation. Alexithymia scores correlated with measures of aggression. During affect matching, fMRI showed no differences between groups in amygdala activation but found lower activation in methamphetamine-dependent than control participants in the bilateral ventral inferior frontal gyrus. During affect labeling, participants recruited the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus and exhibited decreased amygdala activity, consistent with successful emotion regulation; there was no group difference in this effect. The magnitude of decrease in amygdala activity during affect labeling correlated inversely with self-reported aggression in control participants and perpetrated aggression in all participants. Ventral inferior frontal gyrus activation correlated inversely with alexithymia in control participants. Contrary to the hypotheses, methamphetamine-dependent individuals may successfully regulate emotions through incidental means (affect labeling). Instead, low ventral inferior frontal gyrus activity may contribute to heightened aggression by limiting emotional insight.

Misattribution of facial expressions of emotion in adolescents at increased risk of psychosis: the role of inhibitory control

By studying behavior, cognitive abilities and brain functioning in adolescents at high risk for psychosis, we can gain an insight into the vulnerability markers or protective factors in the development of psychotic symptoms. Although many high-risk studies have focused on impairments in neurocognitive functions, such as memory and attention, very few studies have investigated problems in processing social cues such as facial expressions as a possible vulnerability marker for psychosis. Thirty-six adolescents at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis and 21 non-clinical controls completed a face recognition test, a facial affect labeling test and an inhibitory control test. Schizotypal traits and schizophrenia symptoms were assessed using a schizotypy questionnaire and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). The UHR group showed impairments in labeling facial expressions of others, in addition to a spared ability to recognize facial identity. More specifically, the UHR group made more errors in labeling neutral expressions compared to the controls, and an analysis of error types indicated that neutral faces were misattributed as being angry. The degree of misattribution of neutral-as-angry faces correlated significantly with reduced inhibitory control. Our findings suggest that misattributing social cues might contribute to vulnerability for psychosis. This social cognitive deficit may be related to problems in inhibitory control, which potentially plays an important role in the selection of appropriate social meaning. These findings may have relevance for understanding the mechanisms underlying prodromal social dysfunction, which should be targeted in future remediation interventions.

Impaired facial affect labeling and discrimination in patients with deficit syndrome schizophrenia

Social and affective disturbances have long been thought to be core to schizophrenia. Deficits in accurately identifying and discriminating facial displays of emotion may be central components of the functional and social abnormalities seen in schizophrenia; however, their relationship with negative symptoms is less clear. The current study examined facial affect labeling and discrimination performance in a sample of 15 patients meeting criteria for deficit syndrome schizophrenia, 26 schizophrenia patients who do not meet criteria for the deficit syndrome, and 22 healthy controls. Results indicated that deficit schizophrenia patients displayed significantly greater facial affect labeling and discrimination difficulties than non-deficit patients and controls, as well as poorer performance on a basic visuoperceptual face processing task, suggesting that problems with facial affect processing may be mediated by a more general impairment in visuoperceptual processing. However, within this more generalized pattern of impairment, deficit syndrome patients were uniquely characterized by processing positive faces less accurately than negative faces. These findings suggest that abnormalities in processing facial emotion are associated with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, with a unique deficit in the processing of positive emotions that stand out in the broader context of generalized impairment.

Effects of Age and Task Difficulty on Recognition of Facial Affect

Current evidence suggests that older adults are less accurate than young adults in their ability to identify facial expressions of emotion. In the present study, young and older adults' ability to correctly recognize facial affect representative of 6 different emotions (happiness, surprise, disgust, fear, anger, and sadness) was examined in 3 conditions varying in difficulty. Task difficulty was measured by varying the number of labels available in a forced choice recognition task to 2, 4, and 6. Results showed that age differences were present in the 2 more difficult conditions for fear and sadness. Older adults were impaired in recognizing facial expressions of surprise only in the 4-label condition. Current findings suggest that task difficulty moderates age differences in emotion labeling. The present study has contributed to previous research by illuminating the conditions under which age differences in the accuracy of labeling of facial affect are more likely to be observed.

Impaired Emotional Facial Expression Decoding in Alcoholism is Also Present for Emotional Prosody and Body Postures

Emotional facial expression (EFE) decoding impairment has been repeatedly reported in alcoholism (e.g. Philippot et al., 1999). Nevertheless, several questions are still under debate concerning this alteration, notably its generalization to other emotional stimuli and its variation according to the emotional valence of stimuli. Eighteen recently detoxified alcoholic subjects and 18 matched controls performed a decoding test consisting in emotional intensity ratings on various stimuli (faces, voices, body postures and written scenarios) depicting different emotions (anger, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness). Perceived threat and difficulty were also assessed for each stimulus. Alcoholic individuals had a preserved decoding performance for happiness stimuli, but alcoholism was associated with an underestimation of sadness and fear, and with a general overestimation of anger. More importantly, these decoding impairments were observed for faces, voices and postures but not for written scenarios. We observed for the first time a generalized emotional decoding impairment in alcoholism, as this impairment is present not only for faces but also for other visual (i.e. body postures) and auditory stimuli. Moreover, we report that this alteration (1) is mainly indexed by an overestimation of anger and (2) cannot be explained by an 'affect labelling' impairment, as the semantic comprehension of written emotional scenarios is preserved. Fundamental and clinical implications are discussed.

Psychobiology of Mindfulness

There is controversy about whether mindfulness-based approaches to psychotherapy represent a new wave of cognitive-behavioral therapy or a core process in all psychotherapies. One way of conceptualizing mindfulness is in terms of emotion regulation; mindfulness is a strategy aimed at opposing suppression and avoidance. Dispositional mindfulness has been associated with greater activation in prefrontal cortex and greater deactivation of amygdala during affect labeling. A number of rigorous studies of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression have been positive. However, much remains to be discovered about the underlying mechanisms of and clinical indications for mindfulness-based approaches.

Post-ictal hyperfamiliarity syndrome in focal epilepsy

The recognition of familiar faces entails sequential cognitive processing. Initial encoding of face-specific information is followed by semantic association with previously learned information, which results in a subjective feeling of familiarity. We describe here a 32-year-old woman who post-ictally developed a sense of familiarity for previously unknown people and faces in the context of bilateral temporal seizures. We postulate that the delusion resulted from modality-specific indiscriminate association of all face-specific information with the affective label of familiarity. During this delusion, the step of semantic association was not required to generate the feeling of familiarity, which resulted in every face being labeled as familiar.

The lasting effect of words on feelings: Words may facilitate exposure effects to threatening images.

Previous studies have shown that mere words, particularly affective words, can dampen emotional responses. However, the effect of affective labels on emotional responding in the long term is unknown. The authors examined whether repeated exposure to aversive images would lead to more reduction in autonomic reactivity a week later if the images were exposed with single-word labels than without labels. In Experiment 1, healthy individuals were exposed to pictures of disturbing scenes with or without labels on Day 1. On Day 8, the same pictures from the previous week were exposed, this time without labels. In Experiment 2, participants were spider fearful and were exposed to pictures of spiders. In both experiments, although repeated exposure to aversive images (without labels) led to long-term attenuation of autonomic reactivity, exposure plus affective labels, but not nonaffective labels, led to more attenuation than exposure alone. Thus, affective labels may help dampen emotional reactivity in both the short and long terms. Implications for exposure therapy and translational studies are discussed.

Automatic detection of learner’s affect from conversational cues

We explored the reliability of detecting a learner's affect from conversational features extracted from interactions with AutoTutor, an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that helps students learn by holding a conversation in natural language. Training data were collected in a learning session with AutoTutor, after which the affective states of the learner were rated by the learner, a peer, and two trained judges. Inter-rater reliability scores indicated that the classifications of the trained judges were more reliable than the novice judges. Seven data sets that temporally integrated the affective judgments with the dialogue features of each learner were constructed. The first four datasets corresponded to the judgments of the learner, a peer, and two trained judges, while the remaining three data sets combined judgments of two or more raters. Multiple regression analyses confirmed the hypothesis that dialogue features could significantly predict the affective states of boredom, confusion, flow, and frustration. Machine learning experiments indicated that standard classifiers were moderately successful in discriminating the affective states of boredom, confusion, flow, frustration, and neutral, yielding a peak accuracy of 42% with neutral (chance = 20%) and 54% without neutral (chance = 25%). Individual detections of boredom, confusion, flow, and frustration, when contrasted with neutral affect, had maximum accuracies of 69, 68, 71, and 78%, respectively (chance = 50%). The classifiers that operated on the emotion judgments of the trained judges and combined models outperformed those based on judgments of the novices (i.e., the self and peer). Follow-up classification analyses that assessed the degree to which machine-generated affect labels correlated with affect judgments provided by humans revealed that human-machine agreement was on par with novice judges (self and peer) but quantitatively lower than trained judges. We discuss the prospects of extending AutoTutor into an affect-sensing ITS.

Neural Correlates of Dispositional Mindfulness During Affect Labeling

Mindfulness is a process whereby one is aware and receptive to present moment experiences. Although mindfulness-enhancing interventions reduce pathological mental and physical health symptoms across a wide variety of conditions and diseases, the mechanisms underlying these effects remain unknown. Converging evidence from the mindfulness and neuroscience literature suggests that labeling affect may be one mechanism for these effects. Participants (n = 27) indicated trait levels of mindfulness and then completed an affect labeling task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The labeling task consisted of matching facial expressions to appropriate affect words (affect labeling) or to gender-appropriate names (gender labeling control task). After controlling for multiple individual difference measures, dispositional mindfulness was associated with greater widespread prefrontal cortical activation, and reduced bilateral amygdala activity during affect labeling, compared with the gender labeling control task. Further, strong negative associations were found between areas of prefrontal cortex and right amygdala responses in participants high in mindfulness but not in participants low in mindfulness. The present findings with a dispositional measure of mindfulness suggest one potential neurocognitive mechanism for understanding how mindfulness meditation interventions reduce negative affect and improve health outcomes, showing that mindfulness is associated with enhanced prefrontal cortical regulation of affect through labeling of negative affective stimuli.

Putting Feelings Into Words

Putting feelings into words (affect labeling) has long been thought to help manage negative emotional experiences; however, the mechanisms by which affect labeling produces this benefit remain largely unknown. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest a possible neurocognitive pathway for this process, but methodological limitations of previous studies have prevented strong inferences from being drawn. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of affect labeling was conducted to remedy these limitations. The results indicated that affect labeling, relative to other forms of encoding, diminished the response of the amygdala and other limbic regions to negative emotional images. Additionally, affect labeling produced increased activity in a single brain region, right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (RVLPFC). Finally, RVLPFC and amygdala activity during affect labeling were inversely correlated, a relationship that was mediated by activity in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). These results suggest that affect labeling may diminish emotional reactivity along a pathway from RVLPFC to MPFC to the amygdala.

Exploring the nature of facial affect processing deficits in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia has been associated with deficits in facial affect processing, especially negative emotions. However, the exact nature of the deficit remains unclear. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether schizophrenia patients have problems in automatic allocation of attention as well as in controlled evaluation of facial affect. Thirty-seven patients with schizophrenia were compared with 41 control subjects on incidental facial affect processing (gender decision of faces with a fearful, angry, happy, disgusted, and neutral expression) and degraded facial affect labeling (labeling of fearful, angry, happy, and neutral faces). The groups were matched on estimates of verbal and performance intelligence (National Adult Reading Test; Raven's Matrices), general face recognition ability (Benton Face Recognition), and other demographic variables. The results showed that patients with schizophrenia as well as control subjects demonstrate the normal threat-related interference during incidental facial affect processing. Conversely, on controlled evaluation patients were specifically worse in the labeling of fearful faces. In particular, patients with high levels of negative symptoms may be characterized by deficits in labeling fear. We suggest that patients with schizophrenia show no evidence of deficits in the automatic allocation of attention resources to fearful (threat-indicating) faces, but have a deficit in the controlled processing of facial emotions that may be specific for fearful faces.

Altered Pain Processing in Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic and debilitating anxiety disorder. Several brain areas related to pain processing are implicated in PTSD. To our knowledge, no functional imaging study has discussed whether patients with PTSD experience and process pain in a different way than control subjects. To examine neural correlates of pain processing in patients with PTSD. The experimental procedure consisted of psychophysical assessment and neuroimaging with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Two conditions were assessed during functional magnetic resonance imaging in both experimental groups, one condition with administration of a fixed temperature of 43 degrees C (fixed-temperature condition) and the other condition with an individual temperature for each subject but with a similar affective label equaling 40% of the subjective pain intensity (individual temperature condition). Academic outpatient unit in a department of military psychiatry in collaboration with an imaging center at a psychiatric hospital. Twelve male veterans with PTSD and 12 male veterans without PTSD were recruited and matched for age, region of deployment, and year of deployment. Changes in functional magnetic resonance imaging blood oxygenation level-dependent response to heat stimuli, reflecting increased and decreased activity of brain areas involved in pain processing. Patients with PTSD rated temperatures in the fixed-temperature assessment as less painful compared with controls. In the fixed-temperature condition, patients with PTSD revealed increased activation in the left hippocampus and decreased activation in the bilateral ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the right amygdala. In the individual temperature condition, patients with PTSD showed increased activation in the right putamen and bilateral insula, as well as decreased activity in the right precentral gyrus and the right amygdala. These data provide evidence for reduced pain sensitivity in PTSD. The witnessed neural activation pattern is proposed to be related to altered pain processing in patients with PTSD.

Verbal Marking of Affect by Children with Asperger Syndrome and High Functioning Autism during Spontaneous Interactions with Family Members

Verbal marking of affect by older children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and high functioning autism (HFA) during spontaneous interactions is described. Discourse analysis of AS and HFA and typically developing children included frequency of affective utterances, affective initiations, affective labels and affective explanations, attribution of affective responses to self and others, and positive and negative markers of affect. Findings indicate that children with AS and HFA engaged in a higher proportion of affect marking and provided a higher proportion of affective explanations than typically developing children, yet were less likely to initiate affect marking sequences or talk about the affective responses of others. No significant differences were found between groups in terms of the marking of positive and negative affect.

Extracting moods from pictures and sounds: towards truly personalized TV

This paper considers how we feel about the content we see or hear. As opposed to the cognitive content information composed of the facts about the genre, temporal content structures and spatiotemporal content elements, we are interested in obtaining the information about the feelings, emotions, and moods evoked by a speech, audio, or video clip. We refer to the latter as the affective content, and to the terms such as happy or exciting as the affective labels of an audiovisual signal. In the first part of the paper, we explore the possibilities for representing and modeling the affective content of an audiovisual signal to effectively bridge the affective gap. Without loosing generality, we refer to this signal simply as video, which we see as an image sequence with an accompanying soundtrack. Then, we show the high potential of the affective video content analysis for enhancing the content recommendation functionalities of the future PVRs and VOD systems. We conclude this paper by outlining some interesting research challenges in the field

Cognitive abilities, androgen levels, and body mass index in 5-year-old children

This study explores the potential relationship between a series of cognitive abilities and testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), androstenedione, and body mass index (BMI) measurements in 5-year-old children. 60 boys and 69 girls were administered a test (K-BIT) which provided measurements of fluid intelligence (Matrices subtest), crystallized intelligence (Vocabulary subtest), and IQ composite (the combination of the two subtests); a sub-sample of 48 boys and 61 girls was also subjected to diverse tests related to theory of mind (affective labeling, appearance–reality distinction, display rules, and false belief). Testosterone, DHEA, and androstenedione levels were measured using an enzyme immunoassay technique in saliva samples. An analysis of variance failed to reveal any significant differences between boys and girls in any of the cognitive abilities assessed. The correlation analysis revealed a positive relationship between fluid intelligence and testosterone levels in boys, a negative relationship between crystallized intelligence and androstenedione levels in girls, and between affective labeling and androstenedione levels in boys. A multiple regression analysis indicated that androstenedione and BMI were the best predictors for some of the cognitive abilities assessed.

Effects of emotion and identity on facial affect processing in schizophrenia

We used facial affect labeling and matching tasks to study effects of (1) emotion and (2) identity on facial affect processing in patients with remitted schizophrenia ( n=30) compared with healthy controls ( n=30). The patients (1) had a specific deficit for labeling facial affects of sadness and anger but not happiness, disgust and fear; they (2) performed as well as controls in matching facial affects in one face but were impaired in matching facial affects in two different faces. The patients' impairment in facial affect processing may be emotion-specific. The effects of identity on facial affect processing are discussed in the light of several hypotheses (a deficit of context processing, a global–local processing impairment or a selective attention deficit), and may be related to frontal, prefrontal or amygdala dysfunctions.

Effects of Training and Melodic Features on Mode Perception

The two modes most widely used in Western music today convey opposite moods——a distinction that nonmusicians and even young children are able to make. However, the current studies provide evidence that, despite a strong link between mode and affect, mode perception is problematic. Nonmusicians found mode discrimination to be harder than discrimination of other melodic features, and they were not able to accurately classify major and minor melodies with these labels. Although nonmusicians were able to classify major and minor melodies using affective labels, they performed at chance in mode discrimination. Training, in the form of short lessons given to nonmusicians and the natural musical experience of musicians, improved performance, but not to ceiling levels. Tunes with high note density were classified as major, and tunes with low note density as minor, even though these features were actually unrelated in the experimental material. Although these findings provide support for the importance of mode in the perception of emotion, they clearly indicate that these mode perceptions are inaccurate, even in trained individuals, without the assistance of affective labeling.

Facial affect recognition deficits in bipolar disorder.

Patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder (BPD), by definition, have problems with emotional regulation. However, it remains uncertain whether these patients are also deficient at processing other people's emotions, particularly while manic. The present study examined the ability of 25 manic bipolar patients and 25 healthy participants on tasks of facial recognition and facial affect recognition at three different presentation durations: 500 ms, 750 ms, and 1000 ms. The groups did not differ in terms of age, education, sex, ethnicity, or estimated IQ. The groups did not differ significantly on either a novel computerized facial recognition task or the Benton Facial Recognition Test. In contrast, the bipolar group performed significantly more poorly than did the comparison group on a novel facial affect labeling task. Although the patient group had slower reaction times on all 3 computerized tasks, the presentation duration did not have an effect on performance in the patients. This study suggests that patients with bipolar disorder are able to recognize faces, but have difficulty processing facial affective cues.

Impairment in basal limbic function in schizophrenia during affect recognition

Patients with schizophrenia routinely fail to perform affect recognition tasks as accurately as healthy controls. The investigation of performance-related changes in cerebral activation in healthy subjects may facilitate the understanding of adaptation processes to different levels of difficulty and help to interpret the activation changes found in schizophrenic patients. Nine first hospitalized partly remitted schizophrenic patients and 10 healthy controls participated in an fMRI study with a facial affect discrimination and labeling task. Seven of the 10 healthy subjects were reexamined with changed stimulus conditions adapted according to the mean accuracy scores detected in schizophrenic patients. Controls showed a significantly increased activation of the right gyrus frontalis medialis with rising task difficulty during both tasks. The schizophrenic patients demonstrated a significantly decreased activation of the anterior cingulate during facial affect discrimination and of the amygdala–hippocampal complex bilaterally during facial affect labeling. In addition, an increased activation of the gyrus frontalis medialis bilaterally became apparent in the schizophrenic patients. It is suggested that the latter may reflect a compensatory effort for deficits in more basal limbic functions.