Deficits In Facial Affect Recognition Research Articles

Facial emotion recognition in Scottish prisoners

Background Studies of antisocial populations have found that they show deficits in recognition of facial affect. Such deficits are also found in other populations with clinical conditions such as autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder. Aims We aimed to investigate the hypothesis that facial affect recognition in the Scottish prison population would differ from matched controls. In addition, we aimed to investigate any relationship between facial affect recognition deficits and offence history. Methods A sample of serving convicted prisoners, drawn from a larger study, was assessed for ability to recognise facial affect. Other variables were also measured and a self-report offending history obtained. Results 127 prisoners were assessed in 11 prisons. Male prisoners were significantly worse than age, sex and IQ-matched controls at recognising negative facial emotions, specifically anger, fear, sadness and disgust. Within the sample of prisoners, deficits in fear recognition were associated with a history of previous prison sentences but not previous convictions. With respect to offending history, sex offenders were relatively better at recognising sadness and worse at recognising surprise than the other offenders. These relationships remain after controlling for IQ. Conclusions Scottish convicted prisoners show deficits in recognising negative facial emotions in a pattern consistent with other antisocial populations. We also demonstrated a relationship between particular patterns of deficit and types of offending history not previously described.

Liberal bias mediates emotion recognition deficits in frontal traumatic brain injury

It is well-known that patients having sustained frontal-lobe traumatic brain injury (TBI) are severely impaired on tests of emotion recognition. Indeed, these patients have significant difficulty recognizing facial expressions of emotion, and such deficits are often associated with decreased social functioning and poor quality of life. As of yet, no studies have examined the response patterns which underlie facial emotion recognition impairment in TBI and which may lend clarity to the interpretation of deficits. Therefore, the present study aimed to characterize response patterns in facial emotion recognition in 14 patients with frontal TBI compared to 22 matched control subjects, using a task which required participants to rate the intensity of each emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear) of a series of photographs of emotional and neutral faces. Results first confirmed the presence of facial emotion recognition impairment in TBI, and further revealed that patients displayed a liberal bias when rating facial expressions, leading them to associate intense ratings of incorrect emotional labels to sad, disgusted, surprised and fearful facial expressions. These findings are generally in line with prior studies which also report important facial affect recognition deficits in TBI patients, particularly for negative emotions.

Fear and Loathing in Psychopaths: a Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Facial Affect Recognition Deficit

Several studies have identified an association between psychopathy and deficits in facial affect recognition. Although this finding is widely seen as providing strong evidence for amygdala dysfunction in psychopaths, this interpretation is challenged by studies finding no recognition impairments. An alternative hypothesis predicts that recognition deficits are dynamic and are influenced by verbal processing demands. These competing hypotheses were tested via a meta-analysis of 22 investigations of psychopathy ( N = 1,387 participants) using the facial affect recognition paradigm. Results indicated that studies entailing a verbal response style found larger recognition deficits for emotions processed by the left amygdala. The findings of this review offer an alternative to currently popular theories of psychopathy and suggest that future research should consider response style when investigating facial affect recognition deficits in this population.

Neurophysiological Correlates of Impaired Facial Affect Recognition in Individuals at Risk for Schizophrenia

Impairments in facial affect recognition are well documented in individuals suffering from schizophrenia. The aim of the present study was to characterize potential impairments in affect recognition and their electrophysiological correlates in at-risk individuals. Such characterization should add to the question whether the neural processes underlying facial affect recognition deficits might be part of a basic neural dysfunction reflecting a vulnerability factor of schizophrenia. To test facial affect recognition, a digitized series of pictures of facial affect, previously used in related studies, was presented to 37 at-risk individuals and 32 healthy controls. Simultaneously, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate electrophysiological activity during the task. At-risk individuals showed significant impairments in facial affect recognition and reduced amplitudes in the ERP components P100, N170, and N250. Furthermore, prodromal signs in these individuals were associated with a poorer task performance and a diminished N250 amplitude. The findings suggest that impairments in facial affect recognition precede the onset of the initial psychotic episode. The impairments are associated with neurophysiological abnormalities similar to those observed in manifest schizophrenia and therefore may serve as indicators of vulnerability for developing schizophrenia.

Facial Affect Recognition in Anorexia Nervosa: Is Obsessionality a Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

Socio-emotional difficulties are thought to be important maintaining factors of eating disorders. Several studies point to deficits in facial affect recognition in anorexia nervosa (AN). However, the majority of these studies fail to control for comorbidity and its effect on emotional processing. This study aims to explore how patients with AN recognize happiness and sadness in human faces, controlling for different comorbidities, namely anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Thirty patients with AN, and 40 healthy participants completed a facial emotion recognition task. This task measured discrimination accuracy, response bias and response time towards sad and happy faces presented at different durations (500 ms, 2000 ms). The associations between facial affect recognition and clinical symptoms and intelligence quotient were explored. Regression analysis showed that discrimination accuracy of sad faces presented for 500 ms was significantly associated with AN diagnosis, body mass index, and Obsessive-compulsive symptoms. However, the level of Obsessive-compulsive symptoms was the strongest predictor of a poor discrimination of briefly presented sad faces. Our results support previous studies that report emotional processing deficits in AN with obsessionality playing a pivotal role in this deficit.

Facial Affect Recognition Deficit as a Marker of Genetic Vulnerability to Schizophrenia

The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility that affect recognition impairments are associated with genetic liability to schizophrenia. In a group of 55 unaffected relatives of schizophrenia patients (parents and siblings) we examined the capacity to detect facially expressed emotions and its relationship to schizotypal personality, neurocognitive functioning, and the subject's actual emotional state. The relatives were compared with 103 schizophrenia patients and 99 healthy subjects without any family history of psychoses. Emotional stimuli were nine black-and-white photos of actors, who portrayed six basic emotions as well as interest, contempt, and shame. The results evidenced the affect recognition deficit in relatives, though milder than that in patients themselves. No correlation between the deficit and schizotypal personality measured with SPQ was detected in the group of relatives. Neither cognitive functioning, including attention, verbal memory and linguistic ability, nor actual emotional states accounted for their affect recognition impairments. The results suggest that the facial affect recognition deficit in schizophrenia may be related to genetic predisposition to the disorder and may serve as an endophenotype in molecular-genetic studies.

Elementary neurocognitive function, facial affect recognition and social-skills in schizophrenia

Social-skill deficits are pervasive in schizophrenia and negatively impact many key aspects of functioning. Prior studies have found that measures of elementary neurocognition and social cognition are related to social-skills. In the present study we selected a range of neurocognitive measures and examined their relationship with identification of happy and sad faces and performance-based social-skills. Fifty-three patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder participated. Results revealed that: 1) visual vigilance, problem-solving and affect recognition were related to social-skill; 2) links between problem-solving and social-skill, but not visual vigilance and social-skill, remained significant when estimates of verbal intelligence were controlled; 3) affect recognition deficits explained unique variance in social-skill after neurocognitive variables were controlled; and 4) affect recognition deficits partially mediated the relationship of visual vigilance and social-skill. These results support the conclusion that facial affect recognition deficits are a crucial domain of impairment in schizophrenia that both contribute unique variance to social-skill deficits and may also mediate the relationship between some aspects of neurocognition and social-skill. These findings may help guide the development and refinement of cognitive and social-cognitive remediation methods for social-skill impairment.

Evidence for deficits in facial affect recognition and theory of mind in multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a white matter disease associated with neurocognitive difficulties. More recently the potential for white matter pathology to also disrupt important aspects of emotion understanding has been recognized. However, no study to date has assessed whether capacity for facial affect recognition and theory of mind (ToM) is disrupted in MS, or whether any observed deficits are related to more general cognitive impairment. In the present study MS participants (n = 27) and nonclinical controls (n = 30) were administered measures of facial affect recognition, ToM, and cognitive functioning. MS participants were significantly impaired on the ToM task, and also presented with specific deficits decoding facial emotions of anger and fear. Performance on the measures of facial affect recognition and ToM were related to general cognitive functioning, and in particular, measures sensitive to executive dysfunction and information processing speed. These data highlight the need for future research to more fully delineate the extent and implications of emotion understanding difficulties in this population.

Affect recognition as an independent social function determinant in schizophrenia

Introduction Facial affect recognition deficits may represent specific deficits and contribute to social dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia. Whether their impacts on social dysfunction are independent to those caused by deficits in basic neurocognition and clinical symptoms needs to be further delineated. Method Association patterns between affect recognition and basic neurocognitive abilities in 40 acute and 33 stable patients with schizophrenia were compared to explore whether their interrelationships changed across clinical stages. The independent contribution of affect recognition deficits to social dysfunction was explored by multivariate models controlling for general intellectual ability, basic neurocognition, and clinical symptoms. Results Affect recognition deficits were associated with social role performances, self-care, and contributed independently to global social functioning in stable patients but not in acute patients. Conversely, affect recognition deficits were associated with impaired basic neurocognitions in acute patients but not in stable patients. Conclusion In stabilized community patients with schizophrenia, affect recognition deficits were relatively independent to basic neurocognition and had significant social functional consequences.

Facial emotion recognition in intellectual disabilities

Interpreting facial emotion is a requisite skill that enables us to navigate our social environment. Autism spectrum disorder is characterized by shortcomings in socio-cognitive abilities in general, and in emotion recognition in particular, and much has been written on this subject. Less research, however, has been conducted on individuals with intellectual disabilities. This review discusses recent emotion recognition research in this population. Facial emotion recognition research in individuals with intellectual disabilities can be divided into two broad categories: studies on the causes of emotion recognition deficits (i.e. primary deficits or secondary phenomena) and studies on the effects of emotion recognition deficits (behavioral implications). Recent research on causes has not yet produced definitive conclusions and current research on specific effects has been limited to aggression and self-reported anger. Some evidence exists that individuals with intellectual disability of heterogeneous etiology (excluding autism) have facial affect recognition deficits that cannot be fully accounted for by cognitive-intellectual abilities. In addition, cognitive processing strategies and genetic syndrome-specific differences in facial affect recognition have been discovered but further research is needed. We found no evidence that emotion recognition deficits contribute to the emergence of later antisocial behavior.

Facial affect recognition in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis

Facial affect discrimination and identification were assessed in 86 clinical high-risk individuals and compared with 50 individuals with first-episode psychosis, 53 with multi-episode schizophrenia and 55 non-psychiatric controls. On the identification task the non-psychiatric controls performed significantly better than all other groups, and on discrimination significantly better than both patient groups. Deficits in facial affect recognition appear to be present before the onset of psychosis and may be a vulnerability marker.

Deficits in facial affect recognition in unaffected siblings of Xhosa schizophrenia patients: Evidence for a neurocognitive endophenotype

The present study in an African Xhosa sample examined whether familial vulnerability to schizophrenia is associated with deficits in facial affect recognition. Healthy comparison subjects, unaffected siblings of schizophrenia patients, and schizophrenia patients were tested with a task requiring rapid recognition of matched positive (happy), negative (angry), and neutral facial expressions. Siblings and patients demonstrated impaired recognition of negative relative to positive facial expressions whereas comparison subjects recognized negative and positive expressions at an equal level of accuracy. These results suggest that deficits in the processing negative affect from social cues are transmitted in families and may represent a heritable endophenotype of schizophrenia.

Fearful Faces in Schizophrenia

Although schizophrenia has often been associated with deficits in facial affect recognition, it is debated whether the recognition of specific emotions is affected and if these facial affect-processing deficits are related to symptomatology or other patient characteristics. The purpose of the present study was to explore whether particular patient characteristics are associated with the recognition of specific facial expressions in patients with schizophrenia. Sixty-four patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia were assessed with a computerized test of degraded facial affect recognition. Linear regression analysis showed that, in particular, negative symptoms and male sex were associated with worse recognition of fearful faces. Furthermore, diagnosis of nonparanoid schizophrenia and later age of onset were associated with worse recognition of neutral faces. Findings are explained in the light of a neuroanatomical dysfunction accounting for both negative symptoms, such as reduced emotional expression and social-emotional dysfunction, for which men seem more vulnerable than women.

Facial affect recognition and schizotypy

AbstractAim: Deficits in facial affect recognition are well documented in schizophrenia, and have been associated with reduced social functioning and interpersonal difficulties. The aim of the present study was to test the possibility that facial affect recognition deficits represent an endophenotypic marker of schizophrenia liability by testing this capacity in individuals with the predisposition to symptoms of schizophrenia.Methods: Eight hundred and forty‐three psychologically healthy participants completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire of which 28 scoring in the upper 15% (high‐schizotypy group) and 28 scoring in the lower 15% (low‐schizotypy group) completed measures of facial affect identification, facial affect discrimination, facial identity recognition, and a measure of negative affect.Results: After controlling for group differences in negative affect and facial identity recognition, negative (but not positive or disorganized) aspects of schizotypy were found to be significantly associated with reduced facial affect discrimination and facial affect recognition accuracy, and in particular, difficulties with the identification of negative emotions.Conclusions: These results provide limited support for the potential trait status of facial affect recognition deficits in schizophrenia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and suggest that these deficits may be particularly associated with the predisposition to negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Recognition of facial affect in psychopathic offenders.

The authors examined the reliability of facial affect processing deficits found in psychopathic individuals (R. Blair et al., 2004) and whether they could be modified by attentional set. One hundred eleven offenders, classified using the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (R. Hare, 2003) and Welsh Anxiety Scale (G. Welsh, 1956), performed a facial affect recognition task under 2 conditions. On the basis of research linking psychopathy, amygdala dysfunction, and deficits in facial affect recognition, the authors predicted that psychopathic offenders would display performance deficits when required to identify the emotional expression of particular faces. In addition, given evidence linking the affective processing deficits in psychopathy to focus of attention, the authors predicted that any deficits in facial affect processing would disappear when participants could anticipate which affective cues would be relevant on a given trial. Contrary to expectation, psychopathic offenders performed as well as controls in both conditions. The authors conclude that the conditions that reveal affective deficits in psychopathic individuals require further specification.

Increased medial temporal lobe activation during the passive viewing of emotional and neutral facial expressions in schizophrenia

Introduction Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in facial affect and facial identity recognition and exhibit structural and neurophysiological abnormalities in brain regions known to mediate these processes. Functional neuroimaging studies of neural responses to emotional facial expressions in schizophrenia have reported both increases and decreases in medial temporal lobe (MTL) activity in schizophrenia. Some of this variability may be related to the tasks performed and the baseline conditions used. Here we tested whether MTL responses to human faces in schizophrenia are abnormal when unconstrained by a cognitive task and measured relative to a low-level baseline (fixation) condition. Methods 15 patients with schizophrenia and 16 healthy control subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while passively viewing human faces displaying fearful, happy, and neutral emotional expressions. Results Relative to control subjects, the patients demonstrated (1) significantly greater activation of the left hippocampus while viewing all three facial expressions and (2) increased right amygdala activation during the initial presentation of fearful and neutral facial expressions. Conclusions In schizophrenia, hippocampal and amygdala activity is elevated during the passive viewing of human faces.

Emotional information processing in violent patients with schizophrenia: Association with psychopathy and symptomatology

Schizophrenia and psychopathy have been independently shown to be associated with deficits in the recognition of facial expressions. These disorders are highly co-morbid in forensic settings, and both are associated with aggressive behaviour. This study examines the relative contribution of psychopathic traits and psychotic symptoms to reported deficits in facial affect recognition in forensic patients with schizophrenia. Fifty-four male patients with schizophrenia were recruited from medium and high security hospitals. Participants were categorised into groups with high (HP), medium (MP) and low (LP) scores on the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version and based on symptomatology assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. Participants completed an animated facial affect recognition task assessing accuracy across the six basic emotions over high and low intensities. The HP group was found to have impaired recognition of sadness at low intensity compared with the LP group. In the overall sample, facial affect recognition for negatively valenced emotions was not related to positive or negative symptom scores. However, recognition accuracy for disgust was found to be negatively related to the severity of cognitive symptoms. Patients with high psychopathy scores and schizophrenia showed similar deficits in emotional information processing to those reported in the literature in non-psychotic psychopathic samples.

Sensory Contributions to Impaired Prosodic Processing in Schizophrenia

Deficits in affect recognition are prominent features of schizophrenia. Within the auditory domain, patients show difficulty in interpreting vocal emotional cues based on intonation (prosody). The relationship of these symptoms to deficits in basic sensory processing has not been previously evaluated. Forty-three patients and 34 healthy comparison subjects were tested on two affective prosody measures: voice emotion identification and voice emotion discrimination. Basic auditory sensory processing was measured using a tone-matching paradigm and the Distorted Tunes Test (DTT). A subset of subjects was also tested on facial affect identification and discrimination tasks. Patients showed significantly impaired performance on all emotion processing tasks. Within the patient group, a principal components analysis demonstrated significant intercorrelations between basic pitch perception and affective prosodic performance. In contrast, facial affect recognition deficits represented a distinct second component. Prosodic affect measures correlated significantly with severity of negative symptoms and impaired global outcome. These results demonstrate significant relationships between basic auditory processing deficits and impaired receptive prosody in schizophrenia. The separate loading of auditory and visual affective recognition measures suggests that within-modality factors may be more significant than cross-modality factors in the etiology of affect recognition deficits in schizophrenia.

Differential impairments of facial affect recognition in schizophrenia subtypes and major depression

The goal of this study was to assess facial affect recognition abilities in subjects with various schizophrenia subtypes and subjects with major depression. A total of six disorganized, 21 paranoid and 18 residual subjects with schizophrenia (DSM-IV criteria) were compared with 21 subjects with major depression (DSM-IV criteria) and 30 matched healthy control subjects. Two experimental tasks requiring the sorting and rating of emotional facial expressions were applied. Disorganized and paranoid subjects showed strong impairments in the sorting of emotional facial expressions. Depressive subjects displayed only minor deficits, and residual subjects were unimpaired. Subjects with disorganized schizophrenia rated emotional facial expressions as more aroused, and depressive subjects rated them as less aroused, than the other study groups. Our study demonstrates strong deficits in facial affect recognition in subjects with schizophrenia and pronounced disorganized or psychotic symptoms. Deficits in facial affect recognition are specific to schizophrenia. They may be considered as a state marker of schizophrenia.

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.