Changes In Emotional Expression Research Articles

Decreased GAD2 in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a complex psychiatric disorder characterized by a range of symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, cognitive impairments, and changes in emotional expression. The etiology of schizophrenia is multifactorial, involving genetic, environmental, and neurobiological factors. Among the various hypotheses proposed to explain the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, the role of the glutamate neurotransmitter system, and specifically the glutamic acid decarboxylase 2 (GAD2) gene, has been a subject of research interest.

Mixed Method Evaluation of ACTS: Advancing Connection Through Storytelling-A Novel Approach to Improve Older Adult Engagement and Staff Interactions in Korean Nursing Homes.

A culture centered on relationships and communication is necessary to improve the quality of life of older adults living in nursing homes. To examine the effects of a storytelling program by examining the cognitive, emotional, and psychosocial changes in older adults in facilities and explore staff experience of changes in care. This mixed method study delivered a 6-week storytelling program based on relationship-centered care for residents of nursing homes (aged >65 years). Changes in emotional expression, depression, communication skills, social support, interpersonal relationships, nurse-patient interaction, and the person-centered environment as perceived by older adults were quantitatively analyzed using pre-intervention and post-intervention surveys. Qualitative data were collected through weekly stories created by residents, followed by focus group interviews with nursing home staff, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to enhance understanding of the program's outcomes. The 42 residents reported significant changes in their emotional expression, depression, communication skills, social support, interpersonal relationships, nurse-patient interaction, and person-centered environment scores after the 6-week intervention. Analysis of the residents' stories identified 5 themes. The staff focus group interviews identified 2 themes and 7 subthemes. Intervention group residents were more likely to initiate conversations, express themselves, carefully observe themselves and others, and actively participate in social activities. The storytelling program was useful in reducing older adults' negative emotions by allowing them to express their thoughts and feelings and improve their relationships, creating opportunities for social interaction. These effects could help foster relationship- and communication-centered facility cultures.

The Impact of Parkinson's Disease on Social Communication: An Exploratory Questionnaire Study.

Individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) often show breakdown in the production and interpretation of aspects of social communication. However, there is no current method of assessment for evaluating social communication dysfunction in individuals with PD. The aim of this study was to develop a self-report questionnaire for individuals with PD to identify their social communication skills, and further recognize the impact of PD on social communication. Fifty-one individuals with Parkinson's disease answered 28 survey questions. These questions pertained to emotional expression and perception, social communication, sarcasm/humor, and pragmatic skills. Exploratory factor analysis and reliability analysis were conducted to identify items loading onto the factors and to check the internal consistency of the items. Individuals with PD reported changes in emotional expression and perception, social communication, sarcasm and humor, and pragmatic skill domains post-PD diagnosis. No correlations were found between age or time since diagnosis and emotional expression, social communication, sarcasm, and humor. This study provides self-reported evidence that individuals with PD experience social communication challenges. Future research should further quantify these challenges, study their impact on daily communicative functioning, and use the results to develop social communication interventions that improve the quality of life for persons with PD.

Collective emotions during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the world's population to unprecedented health threats and changes to social life. High uncertainty about the novel disease and its social and economic consequences, together with increasingly stringent governmental measures against the spread of the virus, likely elicited strong emotional responses. We analyzed the digital traces of emotional expressions in tweets during 5 weeks after the start of outbreaks in 18 countries and six different languages. We observed an early strong upsurge of anxiety-related terms in all countries, which was related to the growth in cases and increases in the stringency of governmental measures. Anxiety expression gradually relaxed once stringent measures were in place, possibly indicating that people were reassured. Sadness terms rose and anger terms decreased with or after an increase in the stringency of measures and remained stable as long as measures were in place. Positive emotion words only decreased slightly and briefly in a few countries. Our results reveal some of the most enduring changes in emotional expression observed in long periods of social media data. Such sustained emotional expression could indicate that interactions between users led to the emergence of collective emotions. Words that frequently occurred in tweets suggest a shift in topics of conversation across all emotions, from political ones in 2019, to pandemic related issues during the outbreak, including everyday life changes, other people, and health. This kind of time-sensitive analyses of large-scale samples of emotional expression have the potential to inform risk communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Analysis of emotion regulation using posture, voice, and attention: A qualitative case study

The ability to detect and regulate emotions is an important aspect of emotional intelligence that can benefit individuals in their personal well-being and social interactions (Mayer, Caruso, Salovey, 2016). This study examined emotion regulation (ER) in medical students as they practiced learning how best to communicate undesired news to patients in an international technology-rich learning environment (TRLE; Lajoie et al., 2012). Gross’ (2015) process model of ER served as the theoretical model that guided the analysis of regulatory strategies, in a case study (Yin, 2011) of four medical students. A qualitative approach was used to determine how multichannels of emotion representation (vocal characteristics, motor expressions, attention tendencies) indicate instances of conscious or unconscious ER. Analyses revealed four major findings as evidences of ER: (a) dissociation between emotion channels (e.g. a calm face accompanied by a nervous voice); (b) sudden changes in emotion expression without external triggers (e.g. from smile to a rapidly serious face); (c) unexpected emotions (e.g. smiling when expected to demonstrate empathy); and, (d) use of multiple emotion channels to demonstrate emotion regulatory responses. The findings demonstrate the power of multimodal emotion analysis towards accurate detection of ER, and how it may inform the relationship between experienced and expressed emotions. Multimodal ER detection approaches, as illustrated in this study, may have important implications for assisting learners in face to face and computer-supported collaborative settings in becoming more conscious of their ER, helping them regulate undesired self and peer emotions in challenging learning situations.

A Study on a Speech Emotion Recognition System with Effective Acoustic Features Using Deep Learning Algorithms

The goal of the human interface is to recognize the user’s emotional state precisely. In the speech emotion recognition study, the most important issue is the effective parallel use of the extraction of proper speech features and an appropriate classification engine. Well defined speech databases are also needed to accurately recognize and analyze emotions from speech signals. In this work, we constructed a Korean emotional speech database for speech emotion analysis and proposed a feature combination that can improve emotion recognition performance using a recurrent neural network model. To investigate the acoustic features, which can reflect distinct momentary changes in emotional expression, we extracted F0, Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients, spectral features, harmonic features, and others. Statistical analysis was performed to select an optimal combination of acoustic features that affect the emotion from speech. We used a recurrent neural network model to classify emotions from speech. The results show the proposed system has more accurate performance than previous studies.

Self-esteem predicts sensitivity to dynamic changes in emotional expression

Previous studies found that people with low self-esteem (SE) exhibit heightened sensitivity and reactivity to facial expressions displaying rejection compared with people with high SE. The present study focuses more on dynamic rather than static expressions. Using a face morph task, in which a neutral expression gradually morphs into a full-intensity angry, disgusted, fearful, or happy expression, this study examined whether SE influences sensitivity to dynamic changes in emotional expression. After controlling for depression and anxiety among 160 college students, participants with low SE recognized angry and disgusted expressions at lower degrees of emotional intensity than participants with high SE. However, recognition of fearful and happy expressions was not found to be related to SE. These findings suggest a specific rejection sensitivity in the identification of subtle emotional expressions in people with low SE.

Сензитивность в восприятии эмоций у лиц с различной склонностью к подавлению эмоциональной экспрессии (на выборке сотрудников МВД)

The article examines emotion sensitivity in policemen and its relationships with emotion suppression. It was hypothesized that individuals with high emotion suppression were less efficient in recognizing others’ negative emotions. Forty-nine policemen from the Arkhangelsk region of Russia aged from 22 to 50 took part in the study. Emotion sensitivity was measured presenting faces with dynamic changes in emotional expression from neutral to the one of four emotion categories, namely happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Emotion suppression was measured with Gross’ Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ). Happiness was recognized faster and more accurately compared to negative emotions. Among negative emotions, the least intensity was needed for the recognition of fear, more intensity for the recognition of sadness, and even more for anger. Fear was recognized more accurately compared to anger; there was no difference in the accuracy of the recognition of fear and sadness. Individuals high in expressive suppression recognized happiness faster and mistook sadness for anger more often. The results are discussed in the context of the specific features of policemen professional activity.

Emotional understanding predicts facial recognition in 3-to 5-year-old children

ABSTRACTTo investigate 3- to 5-year-old children’s difficulty with facial recognition across a change in facial expression, children were assessed for emotional understanding and facial recognition. The emotional understanding task tested for recognition of emotional expressions, and children’s understanding of the external causes of emotions, how emotions pertain to desires, and understanding that emotions may arise from false beliefs. Facial recognition across changes in emotional expression was tested by showing children an image of adult target face (either happy or sad) and then showing two neutral faces (one familiar and one novel) to test recognition. Children’s emotional understanding increased with age; however, emotional understanding but not age predicted facial recognition performance. Overall, these findings provide a more holistic view of the contributing factors to children’s facial recognition abilities across a change in emotional expression by suggesting that conceptual understanding of emotions impacts recognition.

Using sentiment analysis to detect affect in children’s and adolescents’ poetry

Sentiment analysis is a computational method that automatically analyzes the valence of massive quantities of text. Basic sentiment analysis involves extracting and counting emotionally-laden keywords from passages of text (e.g., hate, love, happy, sad). This study describes using sentiment analysis to explore changes in emotion expression in a developmental context. A sample of n = 8,688 poems published online by children and adolescents from Grade 4 to Grade 12 was analyzed. Sentiment analysis coded words as positive or negative and these were averaged within each poem to obtain its relative percentage of positive and negative sentiment. Polynomial regressions explored linear and nonlinear trends in sentiment scores by grade. Among the results, negative sentiment demonstrated an upward curvilinear trend, increasing sharply from Grade 6 to Grade 11 and then decreasing afterward. Positive sentiment demonstrated a sinusoidal pattern throughout development. Overall, these findings are consistent with previous research on the progressions of emotion expression in childhood and adolescence. Despite some limitations, sentiment analysis presents an opportunity for researchers in developmental psychology to explore basic questions in emotional development using large quantities of data.

Person perception from changing emotional expressions: primacy, recency, or averaging effect?

ABSTRACTDynamic changes in emotional expressions are a valuable source of information in social interactions. As the expressive behaviour of a person changes, the inferences drawn from the behaviour may also change. Here, we test the possibility that dynamic changes in emotional expressions affect person perception in terms of stable trait attributions. Across three experiments, we examined perceivers’ inferences about others’ personality traits from changing emotional expressions. Expressions changed from one emotion (“start emotion”) to another emotion (“end emotion”), allowing us to disentangle potential primacy, recency, and averaging effects. Drawing on three influential models of person perception, we examined perceptions of dominance and affiliation (Experiment 1a), competence and warmth (Experiment 1b), and dominance and trustworthiness (Experiment 2). A strong recency effect was consistently found across all trait judgments, that is, the end emotion of dynamic expressions had a strong impact on trait ratings. Evidence for a primacy effect was also observed (i.e. the information of start emotions was integrated), but less pronounced, and only for trait ratings relating to affiliation, warmth, and trustworthiness. Taken together, these findings suggest that, when making trait judgements about others, observers weigh the most recently displayed emotion in dynamic expressions more heavily than the preceding emotion.

Salience network response to changes in emotional expressions of others is heightened during early adolescence: relevance for social functioning.

Adolescence is a unique developmental period when the salience of social and emotional information becomes particularly pronounced. Although this increased sensitivity to social and emotional information has frequently been considered with respect to risk behaviors and psychopathology, evidence suggests that increased adolescent sensitivity to social and emotional cues may confer advantages. For example, greater sensitivity to shifts in the emotions of others is likely to promote flexible and adaptive social behavior. In this study, a sample of 54 children and adolescents (age 8-19 years) performed a delayed match-to-sample task for emotional faces while undergoing fMRI scanning. Recruitment of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula when the emotion of the probe face did not match the emotion held in memory followed a quadratic developmental pattern that peaked during early adolescence. These findings indicate meaningful developmental variation in the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to changes in the emotional expressions. Across all participants, greater activation of this network for changes in emotional expression was associated with less social anxiety and fewer social problems. These results suggest that the heightened salience of social and emotional information during adolescence may confer important advantages for social behavior, providing sensitivity to others' emotions that facilitates flexible social responding.

Variation in normal mood state influences sensitivity to dynamic changes in emotional expression.

Normal social functioning depends on the ability to efficiently and accurately detect when someone's facial expression changes to convey positive or negative emotion. While observer mood state has been shown to influence emotion recognition, how variations in normal mood might influence sensitivity to the dynamic emergence of expressions has not yet been addressed. To investigate this, we modified an existing face-morphing paradigm in which a central face gradually changes from neutral to expressive (angry, sad, happy, surprised). Our sample comprised healthy young adults, and current mood state was measured using the PANAS-X. Participants pressed a key as soon as they (1) noticed a physical change in expression (perceptual sensitivity-novel task element), and (2) could clearly conceptualize which expression was emerging (conceptual sensitivity). A final unspeeded response required participants to explicitly label the expression as a measure of recognition accuracy. We measured the percentage morph (expression intensity) at which a perceptual and conceptual change was detected, where greater intensity equates to poorer sensitivity. Increased positive mood reduced perceptual and conceptual sensitivity to angry and sad expressions only (a mood incongruency effect). Of particular interest, increased negative mood decreased conceptual sensitivity for all expressions, but had limited impact on perceptual sensitivity. Thus, heightened negative mood is particularly detrimental for effectively decoding someone else's mood change. This may reflect greater introspection and consumption of attentional resources directed toward the negative self, leaving fewer resources to process emotional signals conveyed by others. This could have important consequences for human social interaction.

Investigating Perceived Emotional Correlates of Rhythmic Density in Algorithmic Music Composition

Affective algorithmic composition is a growing field that combines perceptually motivated affective computing strategies with novel music generation. This article presents work toward the development of one application. The long-term goal is to develop a responsive and adaptive system for inducing affect that is both controlled and validated by biophysical measures. Literature documenting perceptual responses to music identifies a variety of musical features and possible affective correlations, but perceptual evaluations of these musical features for the purposes of inclusion in a music generation system are not readily available. A discrete feature, rhythmic density (a function of note duration in each musical bar, regardless of tempo), was selected because it was shown to be well-correlated with affective responses in existing literature. A prototype system was then designed to produce controlled degrees of variation in rhythmic density via a transformative algorithm. A two-stage perceptual evaluation of a stimulus set created by this prototype was then undertaken. First, listener responses from a pairwise scaling experiment were analyzed via Multidimensional Scaling Analysis (MDS). The statistical best-fit solution was rotated such that stimuli with the largest range of variation were placed across the horizontal plane in two dimensions. In this orientation, stimuli with deliberate variation in rhythmic density appeared farther from the source material used to generate them than from stimuli generated by random permutation. Second, the same stimulus set was then evaluated according to the order suggested in the rotated two-dimensional solution in a verbal elicitation experiment. A Verbal Protocol Analysis (VPA) found that listener perception of the stimulus set varied in at least two commonly understood emotional descriptors, which might be considered affective correlates of rhythmic density. Thus, these results further corroborate previous studies wherein musical parameters are monitored for changes in emotional expression and that some similarly parameterized control of perceived emotional content in an affective algorithmic composition system can be achieved and provide a methodology for evaluating and including further possible musical features in such a system. Some suggestions regarding the test procedure and analysis techniques are also documented here.

The role of expression and race in weapons identification.

Emotional expressions can signal intentions and so possess the power to moderate social inferences. Here, we test whether stereotypes implicitly elicited by a stigmatized racial outgroup member are moderated by facial expression. Participants classified pictures of guns and tools that were primed with pictures of Black and White male faces posing angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Across the 3 measures examined--response latencies, error rates, and automatic processing, facial expression modulated implicit stereotyping (Study 1, n = 71; Study 2, n = 166). A Black angry prime elicited implicit stereotyping, while a Black happy prime diminished implicit stereotyping. Responding after neutral primes varied as a function of the expression context. When viewed alongside more threatening expressions (Study 1), neutral Black targets no longer elicited implicit stereotyping, but when viewed alongside more threatening expressions (Study 2), neutral Black targets primed crime and danger-relevant stereotypes. These results demonstrate that an individual can activate different associations based on changes in emotional expression and that a feature present in many everyday encounters (a smile) attenuates implicit racial stereotyping.

Mudanças percebidas por familiares de crianças/adolescentes em sofrimento mental que participam de grupos operativos

An exploratory descriptive study of qualitative approach with the objective to identify the changes perceived by family members of children and adolescents in psychic suffering who participated in operational groups. The data were collected using semi-structured interviews conducted with eight family members and then submitted to thematic analysis, generating three categories: a) change in emotional expression, b) change in self-perception and c) learning techniques for dealing with psychic suffering. The results demonstrated that the groups provide an opportunity for tension relief, function as spaces for clarification and listening and sharing concerns, improve family interactions, stimulate self-care, and teach members how to use social interaction techniques. We conclude that the benefits perceived by family members participating in groups demonstrate the possibility of facilitating operational groups based on Pichon Riviere’s theory. To this effect, nursing professionals must receive qualified training in order to comprehend, apprehend and make use of this technology. doi: 10.5216/ree.v16i3.21777.

Comparison of Verbal and Emotional Responses of Elderly People with Mild/Moderate Dementia and Those with Severe Dementia in Responses to Seal Robot, PARO.

Introduction: The differences in verbal and emotional responses to a baby seal robot, PARO, of elderly people with dementia residing at an elderly nursing care facility were analyzed. There were two groups of elderly people: one was with mild/moderate dementia (M-group) that consisted with 19 elderly residents in the general ward, and the other was with severe dementia (S-group) that consisted with 11 elderly residents in the dementia ward.Method: Each elderly resident in both groups interacted with either PARO or a control (stuffed lion toy: Lion) brought by a staff at each resident’s private room. Their responses were recorded on video. Behavioral analysis of the initial 6 min of the interaction was conducted using a time sampling method.Results: In both groups, subjects talked more frequently to PARO than to Lion, showed more positive changes in emotional expression with PARO than with Lion, and laughed more frequently with PARO than with Lion. Subjects in M-group even showed more negative emotional expressions with Lion than with PARO. Furthermore, subjects in S-group showed neutral expression more frequently with Lion than with PARO, suggesting more active interaction with PARO. For subjects in M-group, frequencies of touching and stroking, frequencies of talking to staff member, and frequencies of talking initiated by staff member were significantly higher with Lion than with PARO.Conclusion: The elderly people both with mild/moderate dementia and with severe dementia showed greater interest in PARO than in Lion. The results suggest that introducing PARO may increase willingness of the staff members to communicate and work with elderly people with dementia, especially those with mild/moderate dementia who express their demand of communication more than those with severe dementia.

P815: Automatic detection of change in emotional expression: comparison of different vMMNs

P815: Automatic detection of change in emotional expression: comparison of different vMMNs

1773 – Alexythymia and narratives in the psychotherapy of eating disorders. Correlations between psychometric scales and the narrative indices of the referential process

This study presents the first results of a project on alexythymia and emotional connections in a sample of 8 patients with EDs. The project aims to evaluate changes in emotional expressions through the language used, by means of the Italian measure of the referential process. Changes in the alexithymic condition will be examined through the outcome and qualitative analysis of the psychotherapeutic process. 25 verbatim transcribed psychotherapeutic sessions were analyzed and correlated with TAS20, EDI-2, PBI, BUT, SWAP200, and between these and the narrative indices of the IDAAP. The relation between TAS20 and PBI supports a link between alexythymia and parenting styles: neglect and overprotection seem to contribute to difficulties in forming emotional connections. The positive correlation found between the TAS20 and some EDI2 subscales indicates a tendency to express misunderstood stimuli by means of the body. A positive correlation between MHIWRAD2 and TAS20 may suggest strong phases of emotional activation due to emotional dysregulation. The analysis of the significant correlations between the PBI and the RA measures indicate that parenting styles are related to language. A positive correlation between the IWRAD indices and maternal overprotectiveness was found: maternal overprotectiveness may be associated to strong emotional activation which is in turn characterized by emotional dysregulation. The associations between the narrative indices and the high functioning measure of the SWAP200 suggest that the reflexive components is related to high functioning; emotional dysregulation, as expressed by the variability in RA peaks, seems to be connected to low functioning.

VMMN for schematic faces: automatic detection of change in emotional expression

Our brain is able to automatically detect changes in sensory stimulation, including in vision. A large variety of changes of features in stimulation elicit a deviance-reflecting event-related potential (ERP) component known as the mismatch negativity (MMN). The present study has three main goals: (1) to register vMMN using a rapidly presented stream of schematic faces (neutral, happy, and angry; adapted from Öhman etal., 2001); (2) to compare elicited vMMNs to angry and happy schematic faces in two different paradigms, in a traditional oddball design with frequent standard and rare target and deviant stimuli (12.5% each) and in an version of an optimal multi-feature paradigm with several deviant stimuli (altogether 37.5%) in the stimulus block; (3) to compare vMMNs to subjective ratings of valence, arousal and attention capture for happy and angry schematic faces, i.e., to estimate the effect of affective value of stimuli on their automatic detection. Eleven observers (19–32 years, six women) took part in both experiments, an oddball and optimum paradigm. Stimuli were rapidly presented schematic faces and an object with face-features that served as the target stimulus to be detected by a button-press. Results show that a vMMN-type response at posterior sites was equally elicited in both experiments. Post-experimental reports confirmed that the angry face attracted more automatic attention than the happy face but the difference did not emerge directly at the ERP level. Thus, when interested in studying change detection in facial expressions we encourage the use of the optimum (multi-feature) design in order to save time and other experimental resources.