Emotion Perception Deficits Research Articles

Paranoia and emotion perception across the continuum

Persons with high levels of paranoid ideation may be more sensitive to emotional stimuli, particularly negative emotions, reflecting the operation of a paranoid schema. However, this finding has not been consistently supported and needs further study. This study examined the effect of paranoia, as measured on a continuum, on emotion perception. It was predicted that higher levels of paranoia would be associated with improved emotion perception scores with better recognition for negative emotions than positive. A four-group ANOVA design was used to compare participants with clinical and sub-clinical paranoia to reflect the continuum view of paranoia. A group with persecutory delusions (N=30) was compared with three sub-clinical groups (N=88) on two posed emotion perception tasks. The sub-clinical participants were divided into high, moderate, and low groups based on scores from the Paranoia Scale, a widely used measure of sub-clinical paranoia. Persons with persecutory delusions had lower overall emotion perception scores than all of the sub-clinical groups. For negative emotions, persons with persecutory delusions had lower identification scores than the moderate and low sub-clinical groups, but were no different than the high sub-clinical group. Anger was especially problematic for clinical participants. There were no differences for positive emotions. Instead of an enhanced sensitivity for the recognition of emotional states, higher levels of paranoia were linked to a performance deficit on emotion perception tasks. The deficits in emotion perception may reflect the increased skepticism and scrutiny associated with posed emotion tasks (Davis & Gibson, 2000). Research should begin to focus on the underlying mechanisms of emotion perception deficits in paranoia.

Effects of Antipsychotic Treatment on Emotion Perception Deficits in First-Episode Schizophrenia

The authors evaluated emotion perception in acutely ill patients experiencing a first episode of schizophrenia. They also investigated the effects of antipsychotic medication on emotion perception. Tests of the ability to perceive and discriminate emotional expressions from the Penn Computerized Neuropsychological Battery were given to 13 patients experiencing their first episode of schizophrenia. Patients were also assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. The patients were tested while they were unmedicated and again following clinical stabilization. Healthy individuals were evaluated over a similar time interval. Patients with first-episode schizophrenia demonstrated impairments in emotion perception before treatment and no significant improvement after treatment. Emotion perception deficits were correlated with negative symptoms after clinical stabilization. Deficits in emotion perception are present at illness onset in schizophrenia and show minimal response to effective antipsychotic treatment.

Are You Crying or Laughing? Emotion Recognition Deficits After Severe Traumatic Brain Injury

AbstractTo date there has been little research concerning the neuropsychological mechanisms of emotion perception deficits following traumatic brain injury (TBI), although such deficits are well documented. This paper considers two major issues. First, are emotion-processing deficits found regardless of the media of presentation? In a recent study examining this issue, adults with severe TBI were found to have particular problems identifying emotions from conversational tone, as well as difficulties when presented with still photographs and audiovisual dynamic displays (videoed vignettes). They were relatively normal when asked to classify emotions on the basis of moving visual displays without sound. This may reflect the fact that the parietal cortices, important for processing movement, are relatively unscathed in TBI. The second issue concerns whether emotion recognition is facilitated by empathic emotional responses and whether these are diminished in people with TBI. Evidence is presented for a relation between subjective reports of diminished emotional experience and emotion recognition accuracy. Finally, preliminary data suggests that people with TBI may fail to have empathic reactions when asked to passively view emotional expressions.

Face Emotion Perception and Executive Functioning Deficits in Depression

Frontal, limbic and temporal regions of the brain important in emotion perception and executive functioning also have been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of depression; yet, the relationships among these topics remain poorly understood. The present study evaluated emotion perception and executive functioning among 21 depressed women and 20 nondepressed women controls. Depressed women performed significantly worse than controls in emotion perception accuracy and in inhibitory control, an aspect of executive functioning, whereas the groups did not differ in other cognitive tests assessing memory, visual-spatial, motor, and attention skills. The findings suggest that emotion perception and executive functioning are disproportionately negatively affected relative to other cognitive functions, even in a high-functioning group of mildly depressed women. Measures of emotion perception and executive functioning may be of assistance in objectively measuring functional capability of the ventral and dorsal neural systems, respectively, as well as in the diagnosis of depression. We would like to thank Rachel Burns, Luis Casenas, Najat Hamid, Jessica Layne, Justin Miller, Rebecca Reiten and Megan Shaheen for their assistance in data collection and coding. We gratefully acknowledge the comments and suggestions for this manuscript by Dr. Angela Freymuth Caveney, Ph.D. This project was supported in large part by a Rachel Upjohn Clinical Scholars Award and through the assistance of the Neuropsychology Division

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

We examined whether facial emotion perception was compromised in adults with recent traumatic brain injury (TBI). Few studies have examined emotion perception in TBI; those that have, examined chronic patients only. Recent and chronic TBI populations differ according to degree of functional reorganization of the brain, use of compensatory strategies, and severity of cognitive impairments—any of which might differentially affect presentation of emotion perception deficits. A secondary aim of the study was to utilize the TBI population—in whom diffuse axonal injury (DAI) is a cardinal neurological feature—to examine the suggestion of Adolphs et al. [ Journal of Neuroscience 20(7) (2000) 2683] that damage to white matter tracts should give rise to emotion perception deficits. Methods: Thirty TBI participants and 30 age-matched controls were tested. A 2×3 mixed design was employed. The dependent variable was accuracy on neutral and emotional face perception tests. Results: (1) The TBI group performed significantly less accurately than the matched controls on the facial emotion perception tasks, whereas the groups performed equivalently on a non-emotional face perception control task. (2) A sub-group of TBI participants without evidence of focal injury to areas of the brain most commonly implicated in facial emotion perception was as impaired on the emotion perception tasks as a second sub-group who had sustained focal lesions to these areas. This suggests an alternative neurological mechanism for deficits in the first sub-group, such as DAI. Conclusions: Patients with recently acquired TBI are impaired in their ability to perceive emotions in faces. DAI alone may cause facial emotion perception deficits.

Recognition of Natural Expressions of Emotion by CVA Patients with Damage to the Left or Right Hemisphere

AbstractThe present study investigated the ability of cerebrovascular accident (CVA) patients to perceive emotions portrayed by realistic stimuli. Statistical analyses demonstrated that CVA patients with damage to either the right or left cerebral hemisphere performed, on average, as well as controls did in perceiving emotions. However, a case study of one patient suggested that there may be a subset of CVA patients with right parieto-occipital damage who have deficits in the perception of negative emotions. The performance of this participant also indicated that deficits in emotion perception are ameliorated to some extent when patients are provided with realistic, complex stimuli that include a range of auditory and visual cues.

Visual scanpaths to positive and negative facial emotions in an outpatient schizophrenia sample

We used a psychophysiological marker of visual attention (visual scanpath) to investigate facial emotion processing in schizophrenia ( n=65) and healthy control ( n=61) groups. Visual scanpaths to ‘happy’, ‘sad’ and ‘neutral’ faces (two exposures each) were recorded using video-oculography. Emotion recognition accuracy was assessed under both ‘difficult’ (exposure 1) and ‘limited choice’ (exposure 2) conditions. Compared to controls, schizophrenia subjects showed ‘restricted’ scanning and reduced attention to salient facial features (eyes, nose, mouth), that was particularly apparent for happy and neutral faces; accuracy was correspondingly reduced for the ‘difficult’ condition. The schizophrenia deficit in positive emotion perception may reflect a failure to integrate salient features due to dysfunctions in local processing of detailed, relevant information (fewer fixations, less attention to facial features), and in the networks that synchronise local and global processing of biologically-relevant face stimuli (generally restricted scanning style).

Emotion recognition in schizophrenia: Further investigation of generalized versus specific deficit models.

In this study, the authors examined the nature of emotion perception in schizophrenia. Two samples of people with schizophrenia, one receiving acute care for a recent exacerbation of symptoms and the other receiving extended care, were compared with a nonclinical control group on emotion perception and general perception measures. The nonclinical control group obtained the highest scores on all of the study measures, and the acutely ill group obtained the lowest scores. Furthermore, the acutely ill sample had a specific deficit in emotion perception that remained present after controlling for performance on the general perception tasks. Conversely, the deficits in emotion discrimination in the extended-care sample reflected generalized poor performance. Differences in performance on the emotion identification task between the 2 clinical groups were reduced when controlling for active symptoms.

Perception of emotion and neurocognitive functioning in schizophrenia: what's the link?

In schizophrenia, relatively little is known about the association between deficits in emotion perception and basic neurocognitive functioning. The present study examined perception of emotion and a discrete set of neurocognitive functions in 28 treatment-resistant schizophrenic patients. Measures of emotion perception included a facial emotion identification test (still photographs presented on videotape), a voice emotion identification test (audiotape), and an affect perception test (brief interpersonal vignettes presented on videotape). Measures of neurocognitive functioning were selected based on hypothesized relationships to perception of emotion. These measures included: (a) Span of Apprehension task, a measure of early visual processing, visual scanning, and iconic read-out; (b) Degraded-Stimulus Continuous Performance Test, a measure of visual vigilance; and (c) Digit Span Distractibility Test, a measure of immediate or working memory. Among these measures, performance on the Span of Apprehension strongly correlated with performance on all three emotion perception tasks. The associations between perception of emotion and the other two measures were in the same direction, but were significantly smaller than those of the Span of Apprehension. These findings implicate the importance of early perceptual processing (i.e. visual scanning) in the ability of schizophrenic individuals to perceive emotion.

Social cognition skills among females with fragile X

Emotion perception and perspective-taking skills were examined among women with or without the fragile X gene. The performance of 56 control women was compared to the performance of 46 women who were carriers of the fragile X gene. Twenty-seven of the carrier women had 0-1% cytogenetic expression and did not appear affected by the gene, whereas the remaining 19 women had > or = 2% cytogenetic expression and did appear affected by the gene. The emotion perception task employed was one for which deficits have been reported among individuals with autism. The results show that performance on this emotion-perception test and the perspective-taking measure was significantly related to full-scale IQ scores, but not to fragile X group status when effects of IQ were removed. Thus the results do not support the hypothesis that perspective-taking or emotion perception deficits are a component of the fragile X phenotype in females and represent an important differentiation between fragile X and autism.

Are there Emotion Perception Deficits in Young Autistic Children?

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that young autistic children are selectively impaired on emotion perception tasks. Results supporting the hypothesis were found on two of the four measures when the controls used were matched on non-verbal mental age; performance on the other tasks was consistent with global deficits across affective and non-affective domains, rather than specific deficits in emotion perception. When the autistic group was compared with controls matched on verbal mental age, no group differences were found. These results suggest that emotion perception impairment is not likely to be the primary underlying deficit in autism. Additional areas for further investigation were suggested.