Processing Of Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Empathy enhances decoding accuracy of human neurophysiological responses to emotional facial expressions of humans and dogs.

Despite the growing interest in the non-human animal emotionality, we currently know little about the human brain processing of non-conspecific emotional expressions. Here, we characterized the millisecond-scale temporal dynamics of human brain responses to conspecific human and non-conspecific canine emotional facial expressions. Our results revealed generally similar cortical responses to human and dog facial expressions in the occipital cortex during the first 500 ms, temporal cortex at 100-500 ms and parietal cortex at 150-350 ms from the stimulus onset. Responses to dog faces were pronounced at the latencies in temporal cortices corresponding to the time windows of early posterior negativity (EPN) and late posterior positivity (LPP), suggesting attentional engagement to emotionally salient stimuli. We also utilized support vector machine -based classifiers to discriminate between the brain responses to different images. The subject trait-level empathy correlated with the accuracy of classifying the brain responses of aggressive from happy dog faces, and happy from neutral human faces. This result likely reflects the attentional enhancement provoked by the subjective ecological salience of the stimuli.

"Hot" affect-related aspects in emotional information processing: The role of facial muscle responses in the direct and indirect processing of emotion categories.

The present study investigated the involvement of facial muscle responses in the indirect and direct processing of emotional facial expressions. Five discrete emotion categories were used, and we assessed both facial muscle and behavioral responses on a trial-by-trial basis. Experiment 1 tested facial muscle activation of clearly visible stimuli in an emotion categorization task. We observed emotion-specific facial muscle responses and corresponding behavioral categorization effects, providing evidence for the specificity of facial muscle activation. By contrast, under masked indirect presentation conditions in which emotional facial expressions were presented as primes in an emotion misattribution procedure, a specific pattern of emotion-congruent and cross-category behavioral misattributions was observed (in line with Rohr et al., 2015, 2018). Multilevel analyses in Study 2 suggest that an emotional reaction feeds into the behavioral decision, as indicated by differential activation of the frontalis lateralis in response to angry faces. Thus, the present study provides evidence that facial muscle responses contribute to behavioral decisions under masked indirect processing conditions. The different pattern of effects in both studies suggests that facial muscle responses index different processes, depending on the processing conditions: sensorimotor simulation in direct processing conditions and emotional reactions in masked indirect processing conditions. We discuss the implications for models that aim to account for facial muscle activity in response to emotional facial expressions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

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.

Facial mimicry interference reduces working memory accuracy for facial emotion expressions.

Facial mimicry, the tendency to imitate facial expressions of other individuals, has been shown to play a critical role in the processing of emotion expressions. At the same time, there is evidence suggesting that its role might change when the cognitive demands of the situation increase. In such situations, understanding another person is dependent on working memory. However, whether facial mimicry influences working memory representations for facial emotion expressions is not fully understood. In the present study, we experimentally interfered with facial mimicry by using established behavioral procedures, and investigated how this interference influenced working memory recall for facial emotion expressions. Healthy, young adults (N = 36) performed an emotion expression n-back paradigm with two levels of working memory load, low (1-back) and high (2-back), and three levels of mimicry interference: high, low, and no interference. Results showed that, after controlling for block order and individual differences in the perceived valence and arousal of the stimuli, the high level of mimicry interference impaired accuracy when working memory load was low (1-back) but, unexpectedly, not when load was high (2-back). Working memory load had a detrimental effect on performance in all three mimicry conditions. We conclude that facial mimicry might support working memory for emotion expressions when task load is low, but that the supporting effect possibly is reduced when the task becomes more cognitively challenging.

The utility of coping through emotional approach: A meta-analysis.

A systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to examine associations between attempts to cope with stressors through the two facets of emotional approach coping (EAC; i.e., processing and expressing stressor-related emotions) and indicators of physical and mental health. EBSCO databases including MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and Cochrane Collections were searched from inception to November 2022. In all, 86 studies were included in a meta-analytic evaluation using a random-effects model and meta-regression analysis. EAC was associated with better overall health (r = .05; p = .04; 95% confidence interval = [.003, .10]). Emotional expression (EE) and emotional processing (EP) also were positively associated with better overall health, although these relationships were not statistically significant. In meta-regressions examining specific health domains, EAC was linked to better health in biological/physiological, physical, and resilience-related psychological adjustment domains, as well as to worse outcomes in the risk-related psychological adjustment and mental/emotional distress domains. Results for EE and EP mirrored this pattern; however, only EP was associated with more engagement in health-promoting behaviors. Coping with stressors through emotional approach appears to be associated with better mental and physical health, with some observed differences for EE and EP. The literature on EAC and health is marked by heterogeneity across study methodologies and measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A Review of the Impact of Native Language on Emotional Aspects of Second Language Acquisition

This review explores how native language affects second language learners' abilities in processing emotional information, including the cognitive processing of emotional vocabulary, emotional expression and communication, and cross-cultural understanding of emotions. The research found that native language background plays a multi-dimensional role in this process, affecting not only the processing of emotional information within the language but also individuals' cross-cultural communication skills. Furthermore, this paper emphasizes the importance of focusing on emotional vocabulary teaching and the cultivation of emotional expression strategies in second language teaching, as well as directions for further research. By deeply understanding the impact of native language on emotional processing in a second language, practical guidance can be provided for cross-cultural education, promoting effective communication and understanding among people from different cultural backgrounds.

The effect of processing partial information in dynamic face perception

Face perception is a major topic in vision research. Most previous research has concentrated on (holistic) spatial representations of faces, often with static faces as stimuli. However, faces are highly dynamic stimuli containing important temporal information. How sensitive humans are regarding temporal information in dynamic faces is not well understood. Studies investigating temporal information in dynamic faces usually focus on the processing of emotional expressions. However, faces also contain relevant temporal information without any strong emotional expression. To investigate cues that modulate human sensitivity to temporal order, we utilized muted dynamic neutral face videos in two experiments. We varied the orientation of the faces (upright and inverted) and the presence/absence of eye blinks as partial dynamic cues. Participants viewed short, muted, monochromic videos of models vocalizing a widely known text (National Anthem). Videos were played either forward (in the correct temporal order) or backward. Participants were asked to determine the direction of the temporal order for each video, and (at the end of the experiment) whether they had understood the speech. We found that face orientation, and the presence/absence of an eye blink affected sensitivity, criterion (bias) and reaction time: Overall, sensitivity was higher for upright compared to inverted faces, and in the condition where an eye blink was present compared to the condition without an eye blink. Reaction times were mostly faster in the conditions with higher sensitivity. A bias to report inverted faces as ‘backward’ observed in Experiment I, where upright and inverted faces were presented randomly interleaved within each block, was absent when presenting upright and inverted faces in different blocks in Experiment II. Language comprehension results revealed that there was higher sensitivity when understanding the speech compared to not understanding the speech in both experiments. Taken together, our results showed higher sensitivity with upright compared to inverted faces, suggesting that the perception of dynamic, task-relevant information was superior with the canonical orientation of the faces. Furthermore, partial information coming from eye blinks, in addition to mouth movements, seemed to play a significant role in dynamic face perception, both when faces were presented upright and inverted. We suggest that studying the perception of facial dynamics beyond emotional expressions will help us to better understand the mechanisms underlying the temporal integration of facial information from different -partial and holistic- sources, and that our results show how different strategies, depending on the available information, are employed by human observers when judging the temporal order of faces.

Neural correlates of individual differences in multimodal emotion recognition ability

Studies have reported substantial variability in emotion recognition ability (ERA) – an important social skill – but possible neural underpinnings for such individual differences are not well understood. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study investigated neural responses during emotion recognition in young adults (N = 49) who were selected for inclusion based on their performance (high or low) during previous testing of ERA. Participants were asked to judge brief video recordings in a forced-choice emotion recognition task, wherein stimuli were presented in visual, auditory and multimodal (audiovisual) blocks. Emotion recognition rates during brain scanning confirmed that individuals with high (vs low) ERA received higher accuracy for all presentation blocks. fMRI-analyses focused on key regions of interest (ROIs) involved in the processing of multimodal emotion expressions, based on previous meta-analyses. In neural response to emotional stimuli contrasted with neutral stimuli, individuals with high (vs low) ERA showed higher activation in the following ROIs during the multimodal condition: right middle superior temporal gyrus (mSTG), right posterior superior temporal sulcus (PSTS), and right inferior frontal cortex (IFC). Overall, results suggest that individual variability in ERA may be reflected across several stages of decisional processing, including extraction (mSTG), integration (PSTS) and evaluation (IFC) of emotional information.

An ERP Study of Face Processing in Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and Socially Isolated Individuals from the Community.

People with schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) have impairments in processing social information, including faces. The neural correlates of face processing are widely studied with the N170 ERP component. However, it is unclear whether N170 deficits reflect neural abnormalities associated with these clinical conditions or differences in social environments. The goal of this study was to determine whether N170 deficits would still be present in SCZ and BD when compared with socially isolated community members. Participants included 66 people with SCZ, 37 with BD, and 125 community members (76 "Community-Isolated"; 49 "Community-Connected"). Electroencephalography was recorded during a face processing task in which participants identified the gender of a face, the emotion of a face (angry, happy, neutral), or the number of stories in a building. We examined group differences in the N170 face effect (greater amplitudes for faces vs buildings) and the N170 emotion effect (greater amplitudes for emotional vs neutral expressions). Groups significantly differed in levels of social isolation (Community-Isolated > SCZ > BD = Community-Connected). SCZ participants had significantly reduced N170 amplitudes to faces compared with both community groups, which did not differ from each other. The BD group was intermediate and did not differ from any group. There were no significant group differences in the processing of specific emotional facial expressions. The N170 is abnormal in SCZ even when compared to socially isolated community members. Hence, the N170 seems to reflect a social processing impairment in SCZ that is separate from level of social isolation.

To see or not to see: the parallel processing of self-relevance and facial expressions

The self, like the concept of central "gravity", facilitates the processing of information that is directly relevant to the self. This phenomenon is known as the self-prioritization effect. However, it remains unclear whether the self-prioritization effect extends to the processing of emotional facial expressions. To fill this gap, we used a self-association paradigm to investigate the impact of self-relevance on the recognition of emotional facial expressions while controlling for confounding factors such as familiarity and overlearning. Using a large and diverse sample, we replicated the effect of self-relevance on face processing but found no evidence for a modulation of self-relevance on facial emotion recognition. We propose two potential theoretical explanations to account for these findings and emphasize that further research with different experimental designs and a multitasks measurement approach is needed to understand this mechanism fully. Overall, our study contributes to the literature on the parallel cognitive processing of self-relevance and facial emotion recognition, with implications for both social and cognitive psychology.

Mediating effect of amygdala activity on response to fear vs. happiness in youth with significant levels of irritability and disruptive mood and behavior disorders.

Irritability, characterized by a tendency to exhibit increased anger, is a common clinical problem in youth. Irritability is a significant clinical issue in youth with various psychiatric diagnoses, especially disruptive behavior, and mood disorders (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, and Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder). Although there have been previous studies focusing on functional alteration in the amygdala related to irritability, there is no comprehensive model between emotional, neuronal, and behavioral characteristics. Using an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) procedure, we investigated the relationships between behavioral irritability, selective impairments in processing facial emotions and the amygdala neural response in youth with increased irritability. Fifty-nine youth with disruptive mood and behavior disorder completed a facial expression processing task with an event-related fMRI paradigm. The severity of irritability was evaluated using the Affective Reactivity Index. In the result of behavioral data, irritability, and reaction time (RT) differences between interpreting negative (fear) and positive (happiness) facial expressions were positively correlated. In the fMRI result, youth showed higher activation in the right cingulate gyrus, bilateral cerebellum, right amygdala, right precuneus, right superior frontal gyrus, right middle occipital gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus, during the happiness condition vs. fear condition. No brain region exhibited greater activation in the fear than in the happiness conditions. In the result of the mediator analysis, increased irritability was associated with a longer RT toward positive vs. negative facial expressions. Irritability was also positively associated with the difference in amygdala blood oxygen level-dependent responses between the two emotional conditions (happiness > fear). This difference in amygdala activity mediated the interaction between irritability and the RT difference between negative and positive facial expressions. We suggest that impairment in the implicit processing of facial emotional expressions with different valences causes distinct patterns of amygdala response, which correlate with the level of irritability. These results broaden our understanding of the biological mechanism of irritability at the neural level and provide information for the future direction of the study.

Validation of the Edited Tromsø Infant Faces Database (E-TIF): A study on differences in the processing of children's emotional expressions

Images of emotional facial expressions are often used in emotion research, which has promoted the development of different databases. However, most of these standardized sets of images do not include images from infants under 2 years of age, which is relevant for psychology research, especially for perinatal psychology. The present study aims to validate the edited version of the Tromsø Infant Faces Database (E-TIF) in a large sample of participants. The original set of 119 pictures was edited. The pictures were cropped to remove nonrelevant information, fitted in an oval window, and converted to grayscale. Four hundred and eighty participants (72.9% women) took part in the study, rating the images on five dimensions: depicted emotion, clarity, intensity, valence, and genuineness. Valence scores were useful for discriminating between positive, negative, and neutral facial expressions. Results revealed that women were more accurate at recognizing emotions in children. Regarding parental status, parents, in comparison with nonparents, rated neutral expressions as more intense and genuine. They also rated sad, angry, disgusted, and fearful faces as less negative, and happy expressions as less positive. The editing and validation of the E-TIF database offers a useful tool for basic and experimental research in psychology.

Reduced somatosensory processing of emotional expressions in autism spectrum disorder

Reduced somatosensory processing of emotional expressions in autism spectrum disorder

Parents' emotion socialization behaviors in response to preschool-aged children's justified and unjustified negative emotions.

Parental socialization of children's negative emotions is believed to contribute to children's emotional development, with supportive, process-oriented responses (e.g., explicit acknowledgment of emotional expression and emotion processing) providing opportunities for children to experience and develop adaptive emotion regulation strategies for negative emotions. On the other hand, non-supportive, outcome-oriented responses (e.g., minimizing or punishing children for negative emotional expressions) tend to undermine such opportunities. Less clear, however, is the degree to which parents' own emotional and cognitive processes influence their emotion socialization behaviors. In particular, the perceived justifiability of children's negative emotions may be an important factor for parents' socialization behaviors as parents may only attend to emotional displays that they feel are reasonable. Using a sample of 234 mothers and fathers (parents of 146 unique preschool aged children), we examined the degree to which parents reported: (1) feeling specific emotions as a function of whether they viewed children's negative emotional expressions; (2) engaging in emotion socialization behaviors as a function of whether they viewed children's negative emotions. Last, we examined whether parents' reported emotions were related to their behaviors. For caregivers' emotions and behaviors, we examined whether patterns differed as a function of whether the children's emotions were perceived as justified or unjustified. Parents were more likely to report feeling emotions such as anger and frustration when they viewed children's negative emotions as unjustified relative to justified, and for these unjustified negative emotions, anger and frustration were related to more outcome-oriented behaviors. Emotions such as sadness and guilt, however, were related to more process-oriented behaviors, regardless of whether parents felt children's negative emotions were justified or unjustified. Findings highlight the interrelatedness of emotional and cognitive processes within the parenting context and their potential influence on emotion socialization behaviors.

Analysis of attentional biases in anxiety using 24 facial priming sequences.

The processing of emotional facial expressions helps people to adjust to the physical and social environment. Furthermore, mental disorders such as anxiety have been linked to attentional biases in the processing of this type of information. Nevertheless, there are still contradictory results that might be due to the methodology used and to individual differences in the manifestation of anxiety. Our research goal was to use 24 facial priming sequences to analyse attentional biases in the detection of facial expressions of fear, considering the levels and the ways in which individuals express anxiety. With higher levels of cognitive anxiety and general trait anxiety, those sequences that began in the upper half (vs. lower half) elicited a speedier response in the detection of fear. The results are discussed within the context of other techniques and disorders that prompt a deficit in the processing of facial information.

Event-Related Potentials Index Prediction Error Signalling During Perceptual Processing of Emotional Facial Expressions

Humans use socially relevant stimuli to guide perceptual processing of the surrounding environment, with emotional stimuli receiving preferential attention due to their social importance. Predictive coding theory asserts this cognitive process occurs efficiently by combining predictions about what is to be perceived with incoming sensory information, generating prediction errors that are then used to update future predictions. Recent evidence has identified differing neural activity that demonstrates how spatial and feature-based attention may interact with prediction, yet how emotion-guided attention may influence this relationship remains unknown. In the present study, participants viewed a display of two faces in which attention, prediction, and emotion were manipulated, and responded to a face expressing a specific emotion (anger or happiness). The N170 was found to be enhanced by unpredictable as opposed to predictable stimuli, indicating that it indexes general prediction error signalling processes. The N300 amplitudes were also enhanced by unpredictable stimuli, but they were also affected by the attentional status of angry but not happy faces, suggesting that there are differences in prediction error processes indexed by the N170 and N300. Overall, the findings suggest that the N170 and N300 both index violations of expectation for spatial manipulations of stimuli in accordance with prediction error responding processes.

Seven-months-old infants show increased arousal to static emotion body expressions: Evidence from pupil dilation.

Human body postures provide perceptual cues that can be used to discriminate and recognize emotions. It was previously found that 7-months-olds' fixation patterns discriminated fear from other emotion body expressions but it is not clear whether they also process the emotional content of those expressions. The emotional content of visual stimuli can increase arousal level resulting in pupil dilations. To provide evidence that infants also process the emotional content of expressions, we analyzed variations in pupil in response to emotion stimuli. Forty-eight 7-months-old infants viewed adult body postures expressing anger, fear, happiness and neutral expressions, while their pupil size was measured. There was a significant emotion effect between 1040 and 1640ms after image onset, when fear elicited larger pupil dilations than neutral expressions. A similar trend was found for anger expressions. Our results suggest that infants have increased arousal to negative-valence body expressions. Thus, in combination with previous fixation results, the pupil data show that infants as young as 7-months can perceptually discriminate static body expressions and process the emotional content of those expressions. The results extend information about infant processing of emotion expressions conveyed through other means (e.g., faces).

Emotional intelligence and emotion information processing: Proof of concept of a test measuring accuracy in discriminating emotions.

Emotion information processing (EIP) has been recently introduced as a new component of emotional intelligence. We present a task aiming at measuring a type of emotion information processing related to fine-grained discrimination of emotional expressions. We modified an existing task presenting morphed faces created from a blend of two prototypical emotional expressions. Participants' (N = 154) ability-EI, in particular emotion recognition, understanding and management, as well as intelligence were evaluated. Results show that all facets of EI independently predicted accuracy in the discrimination task and that emotion recognition was the strongest predictor. When controlling for emotion recognition level, we found that emotion understanding still predicted accuracy for less difficult stimuli. Results support the idea that individuals high in EI have higher emotion processing skills at the emotion perception stage of information processing and suggest that the task employed in the current study might measure more spontaneous processing of emotional expressions. Implications regarding the use of the current task as a new measure of the EIP component are discussed.

DISTORTED FACE PERCEPTION:AN ERP STUDY OF EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION PROCESSING

Background. Reading the emotional cues from the faces of people around us is considered to be the crucial element of successful social interaction. However, at the moment there is no single point of view on the basic principles of the organization of neuromechanisms corresponding to face perception, which determines the relevance of this work. Therefore, we focused primarily on the effective neuronal networks formed during the processing of emotional visual stimuli – human faces, in their natural form and under the conditions of configurational changes‘ introduction. Current study aimed at highlighting more subtle elements of face perception and decoding mechanisms. Methods. For the purpose of the study, blurred facial expressions were presented amongst the natural face images of different emotional valence. During the exposition, the electroencephalogram was recorded, which then formed the basis for eventrelated potentials' grand average calculation. Further analysis involved comparing the grand average ERP curves recorded from the precentral cortical regions in two gender-based groups. The findings showed that female participants were more engaged in detecting and deciphering emotional expressions even from the minute hints included in the blurred photos. On the other hand, the male group also showed more significant decoding and recall processes, when presented with blurred neutral stimuli. Results. The findings showed that female participants were more engaged in detecting and deciphering emotional expressions even from the minute hints included in the blurred photos. On the other hand, the male group also showed more significant decoding and recall processes, when presented with blurred neutral stimuli. Conclusions. These results are consistent with current evidence on the emotional sensitivity hypothesis and genderspecific variations in face perception strategies, which reveal that men and women appear to perceive neutral faces with varying degrees of accuracy, and women are more likely to perform better when processing emotional expressions.

ДИНАМІКА ЕЕГ ПІД ЧАС СПРИЙНЯТТЯ ЕМОЦІЙНИХ ВИРАЗІВ ОБЛИЧ ЗА РІЗНОГО ЧАСУ ДЕМОНСТРАЦІЇ: ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ ПОТЕНЦІАЛІВ, ПОВ'ЯЗАНИХ ІЗ ПОДІЯМИ

The face is one of the most significant elements of non-verbal communication, which allows humans to quickly get various types of information about a specific person. Therefore, understanding facial expressions is crucial for normal social interaction, as it lets us determine the emotional states and intentions of other people. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the time factor on the happy and fearful facial expression processing, reflected in the structure and components of event-related potentials (ERPs). Accordingly, two parallel examinations were conducted with stimulus presentation periods of 500 ms and 100 ms. For the obtained data, two separate analyses (for happy and fearful faces) of the averaged ERP curves corresponding to different stimulus exposure periods were executed. The initial stages of processing (EPN, P3) demonstrated that the difference in the structure and amplitude characteristics of the ERP curve was not that significant, but it demonstrated an increase in attentional resources involvement and a strengthening of the primary emotional analysis. Later ERP components (N400, LPP) showed a more compelling difference, that reflected the complexity of semantic decoding, subsequent conscious evaluation, and processes related to decision-making. Thus, reducing the time of image display from 500 ms to 100 ms created the expected difficulties for the perception and processing of emotional facial expressions and was not sufficient for the normal course of these processes.