Ambiguous Expressions Research Articles

Ambiguous facial expression detection for Autism Screening using enhanced YOLOv7-tiny model

Ambiguous facial expression detection for Autism Screening using enhanced YOLOv7-tiny model

A single-session feedback training modifies interpretation bias in individuals with high social anxiety: A randomized controlled trial.

The ability to interpret facial expressions accurately is important to adaptive social functioning. Social anxiety disorder is associated with a biased interpretation of facial emotions. This study aimed to demonstrate the effects of feedback training on modifying interpretation bias in individuals with high social anxiety. A total of 451 university students were screened, and 69 participants with high social anxiety were randomly assigned to either a training (n = 37) or a control (n = 32) group. Participants completed pre-questionnaires on social anxiety and depression symptoms, then performed a single session of experiment, followed by post-questionnaires on social anxiety symptoms. In the experiment, participants viewed an ambiguous facial expression and rated the intensity on a continuous scale. The training group received feedback that presented their ratings alongside the actual intensity, allowing them to accurately assess their emotional perception bias through trial-by-trial feedback. The control group received no feedback. The training group showed a significant reduction in interpretation bias for happy and angry faces after the experiment, while the control group did not. However, although the training group's social anxiety symptoms decreased post-experiment, the difference was not statistically significant compared to the control group. These findings provide preliminary evidence that the feedback training targeting dimensional ratings of emotions may be a promising option for correcting interpretation bias in individuals with high social anxiety. Future research could implement multiple sessions of training to potentially reduce both interpretation bias and social anxiety symptoms and verify the long-term effects.

Perceptual sensitivity to labeling stereotyped emotion expressions: Associations with age and subclinical psychopathology symptoms from childhood through early adulthood.

This study investigates (a) age-related differences in how the intensity of stereotyped facial expressions influence the emotion label children, adolescents, and adults assign to that face and (b) how this perceptual sensitivity relates to subclinical symptoms of psychopathology. In 2015-2016, 184 participants aged 4-25 years viewed posed stereotypes of angry, fearful, sad, and happy expressions morphed with neutral expressions at 10%-90% intensity. Thin plate regression smoothing splines were used to chart nonlinear associations between age and the perceptual threshold participants needed to assign the emotion label expected based on cultural consensus. Results suggest that sensitivity to labeling stereotypical happy faces as "happy" peaked by age 4. Sensitivity to perceiving stereotypical angry faces as "angry" increased from ages 4 to 7 and then plateaued. In contrast, sensitivity to perceiving stereotypical fearful and sad faces demonstrated protracted development, not reaching a plateau until ages 15 and 16, respectively. Reduction in selecting the "I don't know" response was the primary driver of these age-related changes. Stereotyped fear expressions required the highest intensity to be labeled as such and showed the most marked change in perceptual threshold across development. Interestingly, lower intensity morphs of stereotypical fear faces were frequently labeled "sad." Furthermore, perceiving lower intensity fear morphs was associated with fewer internalizing and externalizing symptoms in participants aged 7-19. This study describes the development of perceptual sensitivity to labeling stereotypical expressions of emotion according to cultural consensus and shows that how people perceive and categorize ambiguous facial expressions is associated with vulnerability to psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Machine Translation-Friendly Language for Improved Machine Translation Output in Academic Writing

Academic writing aims to disseminate scholarly knowledge to a target audience in concise language. During this process, translators sometimes translate academic texts into foreign languages, so that the output of scholarly research can be read by speakers of different languages. In such cases, translators are to translate the source text into the target language in a clear and comprehensible language. This paper discusses how the authors of scholarly texts can structure their writing properly, so that they can help translators compose clear and concise translation output. Although the knowledge and skills of the translator are a key consideration in ensuring the quality of translated texts, the source text itself is highly influential in the quality of the output. Furthermore, although they might partially differ from one language to another, academic writing has some well-established conventions. Therefore, translators might experience some problems when they translate scholarly texts. This study aims to pinpoint such issues and to offer viable strategies that could be used for solving them before the translation process. Commonly encountered problems that impair the quality of the translation output are as follows: wordiness, ambiguous expressions, failing to consider the discourse structure of the target language while organising the source text, using conjunctions carelessly, using the passive voice unnecessarily, using indirect language to express ideas, using synonymous words sequentially, typos, and other similar problems. Though experience in academic translation can help solve some of these issues, it might not be possible to produce good translation output if the source text is poorly written. Success in academic translation can be achieved through collaboration between the author of an academic text and its translator. For this reason, it is necessary to raise the awareness of writers and translators on this issue.

Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy.

Altered affective state recognition is assumed to be a root cause of aggressive behavior, a hallmark of psychopathologies such as psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. However, the two most influential models make markedly different predictions regarding the underlying mechanism. According to the integrated emotion system theory (IES), aggression reflects impaired processing of social distress cues such as fearful faces. In contrast, the hostile attribution bias (HAB) model explains aggression with a bias to interpret ambiguous expressions as angry. In a set of four experiments, we measured processing of fearful and angry facial expressions (compared to neutral and other expressions) in a sample of 65 male imprisoned violent offenders rated using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R, Hare, R. D. (1991). The psychopathy checklist-revised. Toronto, ON: Multi-Health Systems) and in 60 age-matched control participants. There was no evidence for a fear deficit in violent offenders or for an association of psychopathy or aggression with impaired processing of fearful faces. Similarly, there was no evidence for a perceptual bias for angry faces linked to psychopathy or aggression. However, using highly ambiguous stimuli and requiring explicit labeling of emotions, violent offenders showed a categorization bias for anger and this anger bias correlated with self-reported trait aggression (but not with psychopathy). These results add to a growing literature casting doubt on the notion that fear processing is impaired in aggressive individuals and in psychopathy and provide support for the idea that aggression is related to a hostile attribution bias that emerges from later cognitive, post-perceptual processing stages.

Relevance of pre-stimulus oscillatory activity for the perceived valence of emotional facial expressions

The interpretation of emotional facial expressions is crucial in everyday social interactions, and rapid processing of these expressions is necessary. Although extensive research has shed light on the mechanisms involved in facial expression processing, there is limited research on the potential role of the state of neural activity that directly precedes the occurrence of a face. Here, we investigated the potential modulatory role of pre-stimulus oscillatory activity in emotional facial expression processing. We tested emotional facial processing in two experiments, one utilizing artificial and the other natural facial expressions. The participants had to evaluate the emotional valence of the presented ambiguous facial expressions. In a univariate analysis, differences in the oscillation activity of the later rated valence of the faces were observed in both experiments, and these differences were observed even before the presentation of the facial expressions. Importantly, two different multivariate approaches directly supported the relevance of pre-stimulus oscillatory activity by exclusively using pre-stimulus oscillatory data to predict the perceived valence of the latter rated facial expression across the two experiments within as well as across subjects. The behavioral data shows the often observed negativity bias, i.e. ambiguous faces resulted in the tendency to rate them as negative. This negativity bias was related to neural activity modulations in the pre-stimulus period and also within post-stimulus processing related activity. These findings underscore the significance of pre-stimulus oscillatory activity in facial expression processing, indicating a functional role of ongoing neural states that affects the processing of facial expressions and constitute a basis for the well described negativity bias.

Negative interpretation bias towards ambiguous facial expressions in individuals with high empathy

Negative interpretation bias towards ambiguous facial expressions in individuals with high empathy

Emotion AWARE: an artificial intelligence framework for adaptable, robust, explainable, and multi-granular emotion analysis

Emotions are fundamental to human behaviour. How we feel, individually and collectively, determines how humanity evolves and advances into our shared future. The rapid digitalisation of our personal, social and professional lives means we are frequently using digital media to express, understand and respond to emotions. Although recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are able to analyse sentiment and detect emotions, they are not effective at comprehending the complexity and ambiguity of digital emotion expressions in knowledge-focused activities of customers, people, and organizations. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel AI framework for the adaptable, robust, and explainable detection of multi-granular assembles of emotions. This framework consolidates lexicon generation and finetuned Large Language Model (LLM) approaches to formulate multi-granular assembles of two, eight and fourteen emotions. The framework is robust to ambiguous emotion expressions that are implied in conversation, adaptable to domain-specific emotion semantics, and the assembles are explainable using constituent terms and intensity. We conducted nine empirical studies using datasets representing diverse human emotion behaviours. The results of these studies comprehensively demonstrate and evaluate the core capabilities of the framework, and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in adaptable, robust, and explainable multi-granular emotion detection.

Dual-consistency constraints network for noisy facial expression recognition

Although existing facial expression recognition (FER) methods have achieved great success, their performance degrades significantly under noisy labels caused by low-quality images, ambiguous expressions, and subjective and incorrect labeling. Recent studies have shown that deep neural networks (DNNs) can easily overfit noisy labels, which poses a great challenge to FER task in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel Dual-consistency Constraints Network (DC-Net) to automatically suppress noisy samples during training. Specifically, we first propose a Class Activation Mapping (CAM) Attention Consistency (CAC), which makes the model focus on partially important feature information. As a result, we obtain more robust local feature representations and reduce excessive attention to noisy labels. Then, a Class Feature Consistency (CFC) is designed to encourage the model to focus on the global semantic information of the image. Finally, with the collaboration of the CAC and the CFC, DC-Net can learn robust local and global feature information to prevent the model from learning biased information with noisy labels. We conducted extensive experiments on three field datasets, including RAF-DB, AffectNet, and FERPlus2013. Experimental results show that DC-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art noisy labeling methods at different noise rates and generalizes well to other tasks with a large number of classes, such as CIFAR100 and Tiny- ImageNet.

The psychology of Mona Lisa’s smile

Mona Lisa’s ambiguous expression, oscillating between melancholy and contentment, has captivated viewers for centuries, prompting diverse explanations. This article proposes a novel interpretation grounded in the psychological theory of perceptual organisation. Central to the investigation is the “Ambiguity-Nuance”, a subtly shaded, blended region framing the upper part of the lips, hypothesised to influence perceived expression due to perceptual organization. Through carefully crafted artwork and systematic manipulations of Mona Lisa reproductions, experiments reveal how alterations in the perceptual relationships of the Ambiguity-Nuance yield significant shifts in perceived expression, explaining why Mona Lisa’s appearance changes and under which conditions she looks content versus melancholic based on perceptual organization. These findings underscore the pivotal role of psychological principles in shaping ambiguous expressions in the Mona Lisa, and extend to other Leonardo’s portraits, namely La Bella Principessa and Scapigliata. This study sheds light on the intersection of psychology and art, offering new perspectives on timeless masterpieces.

Emotional anticipation for dynamic emotional faces is not modulated by schizotypal traits: A Representational Momentum study.

Schizotypy, a personality structure that resembles schizophrenia symptoms, is often associated with abnormal facial emotion perception. Based on the prevailing sense of threat in psychotic experiences, and the immediate perceptual history of seeing others' facial expressions, individuals with high schizotypal traits may exhibit a heightened tendency to anticipate anger. To test this, we used insights from Representational Momentum (RM), a perceptual phenomenon in which the endpoint of a dynamic event is systematically displaced forward, into the immediate future. Angry-to-ambiguous and happy-to-ambiguous avatar faces were presented, each followed by a probe with the same (ambiguous) expression as the endpoint, or one slightly changed to express greater happiness/anger. Participants judged if the probe was "equal" to the endpoint and rated how confident they were. The sample was divided into high (N = 46) and low (N = 49) schizotypal traits using the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). First, a forward bias was found in happy-to-ambiguous faces, suggesting emotional anticipation solely for dynamic faces changing towards a potential threat (anger). This may reflect an adaptative mechanism, as it is safer to anticipate any hostility from a conspecific than the opposite. Second, contrary to our hypothesis, high schizotypal traits did not heighten RM for happy-to-ambiguous faces, nor did they lead to overconfidence in biased judgements. This may suggest a typical pattern of emotional anticipation in non-clinical schizotypy, but caution is needed due to the use of self-report questionnaires, university students, and a modest sample size. Future studies should also investigate if the same holds for clinical manifestations of schizophrenia.

북핵 위협에 따른 한반도 비핵화에서 북한 비핵화로 정책 변화 분석

The Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula came into effect on February 19, 1992, after South Korea and North Korea agreed on December 31, 1991. North Korea unilaterally broke and did not keep the joint declaration on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The Yoon Seok-yeol government emphasized that it would push for North Korea's denuclearization and bring about practical changes based on principles. North Korea's denuclearization can be said to be a clear expression of the fact that North Korea is the one who caused the nuclear problem and that North Korea must get rid of its nuclear weapons. North Korea's denuclearization is a concept that clearly indicates that North Korea is the entity that must fundamentally change its position in order to uphold Article 1 of the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. By using the somewhat ambiguous expression 'denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula', concerns about South Korea's response ability that could lead to a security vacuum have been dispelled and it has been made clear that North Korea must give up its nuclear weapons. The more North Korea pours money into nuclear weapons, the more dangerous it is for the human rights of the North Korean people. The cost of North Korea making nuclear weapons and testing missiles should be spent on improving food and human rights for North Korean people. South Korea must denuclearize North Korea so that its people can escape from hunger and lead North Korea down the path of reform and openness.

The Rhythm of Hidden Religious Heritage: Dhol Puja of India’s Hijra Community

This Context of Religious Research commentary describes why scholars should attend to the Hijras of India. The Hijras are a marginalized transgender community in India. Although having a long historical presence with sociocultural importance, this community was often stigmatized and discriminated against due to their ambiguous gender identity and expression. The commentary identifies the Dhol Puja as a traditional clandestine ritual of the Hijra community that reflects their unique identity and cultural, religious heritage. Based on prior ethnographic research and community study throughout various locales of India, this commentary provides insights into the symbolic meaning and significance of the Dhol Puja for the Hijra community. It asserts that their spiritual performance serves as a form of sacred ritual that is resisting adaptation to modern times, and which could be a revival or adaptation of an ancient tradition. Additionally, the spiritual performance continues to serve as a celebration of the unique identity and religious tradition of the Hijra community. Offering this context can cultivate greater recognition and understanding of the religious practices in promoting social inclusion of Hijra community in India.

Abnormal ambiguous facial expression recognition in Chinese patients with schizophrenia

BackgroundPatients with schizophrenia (SCZ) exhibit difficulties deficits in recognizing facial expressions with unambiguous valence. However, only a limited number of studies have examined how these patients fare in interpreting facial expressions with ambiguous valence (for example, surprise). Thus, we aimed to explore the influence of emotional background information on the recognition of ambiguous facial expressions in SCZ.MethodsA 3 (emotion: negative, neutral, and positive) × 2 (group: healthy controls and SCZ) experimental design was adopted in the present study. The experimental materials consisted of 36 images of negative emotions, 36 images of neutral emotions, 36 images of positive emotions, and 36 images of surprised facial expressions. In each trial, a briefly presented surprised face was preceded by an affective image. Participants (36 SCZ and 36 healthy controls (HC)) were required to rate their emotional experience induced by the surprised facial expressions. Participants’ emotional experience was measured using the 9-point rating scale. The experimental data have been analyzed by conducting analyses of variances (ANOVAs) and correlation analysis.ResultsFirst, the SCZ group reported a more positive emotional experience under the positive cued condition compared to the negative cued condition. Meanwhile, the HC group reported the strongest positive emotional experience in the positive cued condition, a moderate experience in the neutral cued condition, and the weakest in the negative cue condition. Second, the SCZ (vs. HC) group showed longer reaction times (RTs) for recognizing surprised facial expressions. The severity of schizophrenia symptoms in the SCZ group was negatively correlated with their rating scores for emotional experience under neutral and positive cued condition.ConclusionsRecognition of surprised facial expressions was influenced by background information in both SCZ and HC, and the negative symptoms in SCZ. The present study indicates that the role of background information should be fully considered when examining the ability of SCZ to recognize ambiguous facial expressions.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma arising in the pituitary gland: illustrative case.

The authors describe a 60-year-old female who underwent a correlative examination for an accidental scalp injury, revealing a sellar mass, which was surgically excised and pathologically confirmed to be a non-Hodgkin's small B-cell lymphoma. These findings in combination with the immunophenotype led to a final diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia/small lymphocytic lymphoma. Previous studies have shown that hematological solid tumors occurring in the pituitary gland are extremely rare, and there are only approximately three other cases of living patients with similarities to this case, all of which had ambiguous expression of subsequent hematological treatment. In this case, the authors used an endoscopic approach to completely excise the tumor. Follow-up of the patient was continued after surgery, and the patient is currently receiving standardized treatment with zanubrutinib. This patient did not have any previous history of tumor, had a good postoperative recovery with a normal quality of life, and still receives hormone replacement and zanubrutinib on a standardized basis. This is a complete case that has not been previously reported and reveals the diagnostic and therapeutic process of rare diseases in the sellar area.

Zygomaticus activation through facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES) induces happiness perception in ambiguous facial expressions and affects neural correlates of face processing.

The role of facial feedback in facial emotion recognition remains controversial, partly due to limitations of the existing methods to manipulate the activation of facial muscles, such as voluntary posing of facial expressions or holding a pen in the mouth. These procedures are indeed limited in their control over which muscles are (de)activated when and to what degree. To overcome these limitations and investigate in a more controlled way if facial emotion recognition is modulated by one's facial muscle activity, we used computer-controlled facial neuromuscular electrical stimulation (fNMES). In a pre-registered EEG experiment, ambiguous facial expressions were categorised as happy or sad by 47 participants. In half of the trials, weak smiling was induced through fNMES delivered to the bilateral Zygomaticus Major muscle for 500 ms. The likelihood of categorising ambiguous facial expressions as happy was significantly increased with fNMES, as shown with frequentist and Bayesian linear mixed models. Further, fNMES resulted in a reduction of P1, N170 and LPP amplitudes. These findings suggest that fNMES-induced facial feedback can bias facial emotion recognition and modulate the neural correlates of face processing. We conclude that fNMES has potential as a tool for studying the effects of facial feedback.

Classification of Diagnostic Certainty in Radiology Reports with Deep Learning.

A radiology report is prepared for communicating clinical information about observed abnormal structures and clinically important findings with referring clinicians. However, such observations and findings are often accompanied by ambiguous expressions, which can prevent clinicians from accurately interpreting the content of reports. To systematically assess the degree of diagnostic certainty for each observation and finding in a report, we defined an ordinal scale comprising five classes: definite, likely, may represent, unlikely, and denial. Furthermore, we applied a deep learning classification model to determine its applicability to in-house radiology reports. We trained and evaluated the model using 540 in-house chest computed tomography reports. The deep learning model achieved a micro F1-score of 97.61%, which indicated that our ordinal scale was suitable for measuring the diagnostic certainty of observations and findings in a report.

Suicide-related cognitions and emotional bias performance in a community sample

BackgroundSuicide is theorized to be connected to social interactions and feelings of belongingness. Those with suicide-related cognitions (SRCs) demonstrate attentional bias toward negative or suicide-related words, which can lead to increased feelings of rejection or alienation. As social interactions employ both verbal and nonverbal cues, there exists a gap in understanding how perception of emotional expressions can contribute to the development or exacerbation of suicidal ideation. MethodsThe current sample (N = 114, 60.5 % female, 74.6 % white) completed the Suicide Cognitions Scale-Revised (SCS-R) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) to assess SRCs and depression severity. The Emotional Bias Task (EBT) was used to assess emotional response latency. ResultsMultiple regression analyses on EBT results showed that endorsement of SRCs and depression severity were not associated with any particular emotional response bias. However, presence of SRCs showed an association with longer latencies to identify ambiguous emotional expressions, even when controlling for depressive symptoms and age LimitationsMeasures were self-completed online. Relative homogeneity of the sample and cross-sectional design limits interpretation of the results. ConclusionsThose with more severe SRCs take longer to recognize positive, nonverbal cues. Irregular processing of positive emotional stimuli combined with bias toward negative verbal cues could worsen feelings of rejection or alienation in social interactions, therefore increasing risk of developing SI. This suggests that interventions focusing on allocation of attentional resources to process positive social cues may be beneficial for those with SRCs to reduce severity and risk of suicide.

Individual differences in the evaluation of ambiguous visual and auditory threat-related expressions.

This study investigated the neural correlates of the judgement of auditory and visual ambiguous threat-related information, and the influence of state anxiety on this process. Healthy subjects were scanned using a fast, high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) multiband sequence while they performed a two-alternative forced-choice emotion judgement task on faces and vocal utterances conveying explicit anger or fear, as well as ambiguous ones. Critically, the latter was specific to each subject, obtained through a morphing procedure and selected prior to scanning following a perceptual decision-making task. Behavioural results confirmed a greater task-difficulty for subject-specific ambiguous stimuli and also revealed a judgement bias for visual fear, and, to a lesser extent, for auditory anger. Imaging results showed increased activity in regions of the salience and frontoparietal control networks (FPCNs) and deactivation in areas of the default mode network for ambiguous, relative to explicit, expressions. In contrast, the right amygdala (AMG) responded more strongly to explicit stimuli. Interestingly, its response to the same ambiguous stimulus depended on the subjective judgement of the expression. Finally, we found that behavioural and neural differences between ambiguous and explicit expressions decreased as a function of state anxiety scores. Taken together, our results show that behavioural and brain responses to emotional expressions are determined not only by emotional clarity but also modality and the subjects' subjective perception of the emotion expressed, and that some of these responses are modulated by state anxiety levels.

Emotional Context Effects on the Rating of Ambiguous Facial Expressions in Depression and Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Objective To investigate the influence of visual contextual information on emotion recognition of ambiguous facial expressions in depression and schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Method: Ambiguous facial expressions and emotional contexts representing anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise were validated in a pre-test with healthy independent raters. Afterwards, 20 healthy participants (8 women, 12 men; mean age 24.35 ± 2.85 years), 20 participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (9 women, 11 men; mean age 40.25 ± 11.68 years) and 19 participants with depression (11 women, 8 men; mean age 43.74 ± 12.65 years) rated the emotional content of nine different faces in seven different emotion-suggesting contexts. The proportions of context-congruent answers and differences between emotion ratings in each context were analysed using non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis and explorative, paired Wilcoxon tests. Correlational analyses explored the influence of clinical symptoms assessed by clinician-administered scales. Results: The overall proportion of context-congruent answers did not differ between participants with depression and schizophrenia spectrum disorders compared to healthy participants. Participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders were more susceptible to anger-suggesting contexts and participants with depression were more susceptible to fear-suggesting contexts. Differences in emotion recognition were associated with the severity of depressive, but not psychotic, symptoms. Conclusion: Despite increased susceptibility to anger-suggesting cues in schizophrenia and to fear-suggesting cues in depression, visual contextual influence remains largely consistent with healthy participants. Preserved emotional responsiveness suggests an efficacy of emotion training but emphasizes the need for additional research focusing on other factors contributing to social interaction deficits.