Emotional Facial Expressions Research Articles

Surgery for facial palsy in the hands of otorhinolaryngologists: a population-based study.

Modern facial surgery can improve eye closure and address facial functional and emotional expression disabilities in case of severe acute facial paralysis with low probability of recovery and in cases of chronic flaccid facial paralysis. Reports on outcome typically originate from specialized tertiary care centers, whereas population-based data from routine care beyond specialized centers is sparse. Therefore, patients' characteristics, surgical techniques, postoperative complications, and patients' satisfaction with the final outcome were analyzed for all inpatients with facial paralysis undergoing facial surgery in Thuringia, a federal state in Germany, between 2006 and 2022. 260 patients (female 41.5%; median age 65 years) were included. On average, the surgery rate was higher for men than for women (0.83 ± 0.39 versus 0.58 ± 0.24 per 100,000 population per year). For first surgery, static procedures were dominating (67.3%), followed by dynamic reconstruction (13.8%), and combined static and dynamic reconstructions (13.5%). The most frequent type of surgery was upper lid weight loading (38.5%), hypoglossal-facial jump nerve suture (17.3%), and facial-facial interpositional graft suture (16.9%). Bleeding/hematoma formation needing revision surgery was the most frequent complication (6.2%). Overall, 70.4% of the patients were satisfied with the final result. The satisfaction was higher if the target was to improve eye closure (65.2%) or to improve upper face function (65.3%) than to improve the lower face function (53.3%). If facial nerve reconstruction surgery and/or upper lid weight placement was performed, the satisfaction was significantly higher. If revision surgery was needed to improve the result, the satisfaction was significantly lower.

"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).

Valence sound symbolism facilitates classification of vowels and emotional facial expressions.

Research on iconicity or sound symbolism chronicles associations between aspects of word meaning and word form. In valence sound symbolism, specifically, vowels were demonstrated to be associated with valence, so that the vowel /i/ (as in English sea) is judged to fit positively valenced stimuli, whereas the vowel /o/ (as in German Boot) is judged to fit negatively valenced stimuli. However, because previous findings were based on judgments or name invention tasks, they may reflect deliberate strategies. The present research aims to demonstrate the automaticity of valence sound symbolism in online language processing by means of a speeded response task. A total of 163 participants performed a speeded categorization task in which they were requested to classify one of two simultaneously presented stimuli, pseudowords containing the vowels /i/ or /o/ and pictures with positive or negative emotional facial expressions. Thus, stimulus pairings could be either congruent (/i/-words and positive expressions; /o/-words and negative expressions) or incongruent (/i/-words and negative expressions; /o/-words and positive expressions). We observed faster and more accurate responses for congruent over incongruent combinations (the simple effects were significant for positive but not for negative expressions). Thus, sound symbolic congruency (vs. incongruency) of an irrelevant stimulus facilitated responses, which accords with an automatic process contributing to valence sound symbolism and indicates that valence sound symbolism is deeply engrained in the human cognitive system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Comparative study of emotional facial expression recognition among Prader-Willi syndrome subtypes.

Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) is a congenital disease caused by a rare and generally non-inherited genetic disorder. The inability to recognise facial expressions of emotion is an apparent social cognition deficit in people diagnosed with PWS. The main objective of the present study is to compare the ability to recognise emotional facial expression, in both non-contextualised and contextualised scenarios, among the main subtypes of PWS and a control group. The sample consisted of 46 children divided into three groups: deletion (n=10), maternal uniparental disomy (mUPD) (n=13) and control (n=23). The protocol included the Facially Expressed Emotion Labeling and the Deusto-e-Motion 1.0. The control group recognised facial emotions more accurately and quickly in both non-contextualised and contextualised scenarios than children with PWS, regardless of genetic subtype. Despite no differences being detected between PWS subtypes when non-contextualised scenarios were analysed, in contextualised situations, a longer reaction time was observed in children with the mUPD subtype. This is the first study to assess the ability to recognise emotional facial expressions in contextualised situations among PWS subtypes and a control group. The findings suggest that some of the social cognitive deficits evidenced in children with mUPD PWS may be similar to those in autism spectrum disorder.

Distinct neural correlates of accuracy and bias in the perception of facial emotion expressions

ABSTRACT We investigated neural correlates of Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) using the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE). ACE infuses context by presenting emotion expressions in a naturalistic group setting and distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions (signal), and bias due to perceiving additional, secondary emotions (noise). This social perception process is argued to induce perspective taking in addition to pattern matching in ERA. Thirty participants were presented with an fMRI-compatible adaptation of the ACE consisting of blocks of neutral and emotional faces in single and group-embedded settings. Participants rated the central character’s expressions categorically or using scalar scales in consequent fMRI scans. Distinct brain activations were associated with the perception of emotional vs. neutral faces in the four conditions. Moreover, accuracy and bias scores from the original ACE task performed on another day were associated with brain activation during the scalar (vs. categorical) condition for emotional (vs. neutral) faces embedded in group. These findings suggest distinct cognitive mechanisms linked to each type of emotional rating and highlight the importance of considering cognitive bias in the assessment of social emotion perception.

The Development of Ambiguity Processing Is Explained by an Inverted U-Shaped Curve.

Understanding the developmental trajectories for recognizing facial expressions is important for a better understanding of development of psychiatric disorders. In this study, we examined the recognition of emotional and neutral facial expressions in 93 typically developing adolescents and adults. The Emotion Intensity Rating task required participants to rate the intensity of emotional expression in happy, neutral, and sad faces on a scale from 1 to 9. A score of '5' had to be assigned to neutral faces, scores between '6' (slightly happy) and '9' (very happy) to happy faces, and scores between '4' (slightly sad) and '1' (very sad) to sad faces. Mixed effects models were used to examine the effects of age and emotion on recognition accuracy, reaction time (RT), and emotional intensity. Participants tended to misjudge neutral faces as sad. Adolescents were less accurate than adults for neutral face recognition. There were significant quadratic effects of age on accuracy (negative quadratic effect) and RT (positive quadratic effect). The most accurate and fastest performance was observed in 25- to 35-year-old subjects. This trajectory may be associated with prefrontal cortex maturation, which provides top-down control over the heightened amygdala response to ambiguity that may be misinterpreted as emotional content.

Differences between overt, covert and natural attention shifts to emotional faces

In daily life, individuals pay attention to emotional facial expressions and dynamically choose how to shift their attention, i.e. either overtly (with eye-movements) or covertly (without eye-movements). However, research on attention to emotional faces has mostly been conducted in controlled laboratory settings, in which people were instructed where to look. The current preregistered study co-registered EEG and eye-tracking to investigate differences in emotion-driven attention between instructed and uninstructed natural attention shifts in 48 adults. While a central stimulus was presented to the participant, a face appeared in the periphery, showing either a happy, neutral or an angry expression. In three counterbalanced blocks participants were instructed to either move their eyes overtly to the peripheral face, keep fixating the center and therefore covertly shift their attention, or freely look wherever they would like to look. We found that emotional content had stronger effects on the amplitude of the Early Posterior Negativity when participants shifted attention naturally, and that natural shifts of attention differed from instructed shifts in both saccade behavior and neural mechanisms. In summary, our results emphasize the importance of investigating modulation of attention using paradigms that allow participants to allocate their attention naturally.

Altered emotion perception in insomnia, anxiety, depression, mania, psychotic experiences and schizotypal symptoms: a dataset

This data resource provides evidence concerning the prevalence of perceptual alterations of emotional faces amongst individuals experiencing symptoms of insomnia, anxiety, depression, mania, psychotic experiences, and schizotypal tendencies. More specifically, we explored the categorisation accuracy (whether the displayed emotion was correctly identified), misperception (which emotion an incorrect judgment was perceived to be), intensity (extent of the emotion signal strength) and emotional valence (the extent and direction of perceived affect) of six facial expressions of emotion from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database. Complete data from N = 572 respondents are included. The dataset is available to other researchers and is provided on Figshare. Information concerning the data records, usage notes, code availability and technical validation are presented. Finally, we present demographic and correlational data concerning psychiatric symptoms and alterations in the perception of emotional faces.

Pupillary Responses to Dynamic Negative Versus Positive Facial Expressions of Emotion in Children and Parents: Links to Depression and Anxiety.

Witnessing emotional expressions in others triggers physiological arousal in humans. The current study focused on pupil responses to emotional expressions in a community sample as a physiologicalindex of arousal and attention. We explored the associations between parents' and offspring's responses to dynamic facial expressions of emotion, as well as the links between pupil responses and anxiety/depression. Children (N=90, MAge=10.13, range=7.21-12.94, 47 girls) participated in this lab study with one of their parents (47 mothers). Pupil responses were assessed in a computer task with dynamic happy, angry, fearful, and sad expressions, while participants verbally labeled the emotion displayed on the screen as quickly as possible. Parents and children reported anxiety and depression symptoms in questionnaires. Both parents and children showed stronger pupillary responses to negative versus positive expressions, and children's responses were overall stronger than those of parents. We also found links between the pupil responses of parents and children to negative, especially to angry faces. Child pupil responses were related to their own and their parents' anxiety levels and to their parents' (but not their own) depression. We conclude that child pupils are sensitive to individual differences in parents' pupils and emotional dispositions in community samples.

Multidimensional signal detection modeling reveals Gestalt-like perceptual integration of face emotion and identity.

Numerous studies have tested the hypothesis that facial identity and emotional expression are independently processed, but a solid conclusion has been difficult to reach, with the literature showing contradictory results. We argue that this is partly due to different researchers using different definitions of perceptual integration and independence, usually vague and/or simply operational, and also due to lack of proper stimulus control. Here, we performed a study using three-dimensional realistic computer-generated faces for which the discriminability of identities and expressions, the intensity of the expressions, and low-level features of the faces were controlled. A large number of participants, distributed across twelve experimental groups, performed identification tasks for the six basic emotional expressions and the neutral expression (between 2018 and 2019). A multidimensional signal detection model was utilized to analyze the data, which allowed us to dissociate between multiple formally defined notions of independence and holism. Results showed strong and robust violations of perceptual independence that were consistent across all experiments and suggest Gestalt-like perceptual integration of face identity and expression. To date, our results provide the strongest evidence for holistic/Gestalt processing found among face perception studies that have used formal definitions of independence and holism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy.

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

Attentional processes in response to emotional facial expressions in adults with retrospectively reported peer victimization of varying severity: Results from an ERP dot-probe study

BackgroundAttentional processes are influenced by both stimulus characteristics and individual factors such as mood or personal experience. Research has suggested that attentional biases to socially relevant stimuli may occur in individuals with a history of peer victimization in childhood and adolescence. Based on this, the present study aimed to examine attentional processes in response to emotional faces at both the behavioral and neurophysiological levels in participants with experiences of peer victimization.MethodsIn a sample of 60 adult participants with varying severity of retrospectively reported peer victimization in childhood and adolescence, the dot-probe task was administered with angry, disgusted, sad, and happy facial expressions. In addition to behavioral responses, physiological responses (i.e., event-related potentials) were analyzed.ResultsAnalyses of mean P100 and P200 amplitudes revealed altered P200 amplitudes in individuals with higher degrees of peer victimization. Higher levels of relational peer victimization were associated with increased P200 amplitudes in response to facial expressions, particularly angry and disgusted facial expressions. Hierarchical regression analyses showed no evidence for an influence of peer victimization experiences on reaction times or P100 amplitudes in response to the different emotions.ConclusionCortical findings suggest that individuals with higher levels of peer victimization mobilize more attentional resources when confronted with negative emotional social stimuli. Peer victimization experiences in childhood and adolescence appear to influence cortical processes into adulthood.

Facial Expressions of Emotion in Children with Cleft Lip and Palate.

To examine the facial movements children with cleft lip and palate (CLP) employ to express basic emotions. Ability of observers to interpret facial expressions of children with CLP was also considered. Prospective case-control design. Outpatient craniofacial anomalies clinic. Twenty-five children with CLP (age 8 to 12) and 25 age/sex-matched controls. Children were video recorded making facial expressions representing anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Magnitude of children's facial movements was quantified and compared using OpenFace. Subsequently, emotion videos were presented to 19 adults who were asked to identify the emotion conveyed in each facial expression. Accuracy of emotion recognition was compared across groups. Compared with controls, children with CLP employed significantly (P < .05) smaller magnitude superior and lateral perioral movements to express disgust (Cohen's d = .50), happiness (Cohen's d = 1.1), and fear (Cohen's d = .93). For disgust and sadness, children with CLP employed significantly greater magnitude movements of the nose and chin, presumably to compensate for reduced perioral range of motion. For anger, happiness, and sadness, children with CLP employed smaller magnitude movements of the upper face when compared with controls. Observers identified disgust (OR = 1.26), and fear (OR = 2.44) significantly less accurately in children with CLP when compared with controls. Children with CLP employed different facial movements to express certain emotions. Observers less accurately identified some emotions conveyed by facial expressions in children with CLP when compared with controls, likely due in part to differences in facial movements. Future research should explore the implications of these differences for social communication.

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.

Happy facial emotional congruence in patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis

ABSTRACT Background Emotion categorization has often been studied in the relapsing-remitting form of multiple sclerosis (RR-MS), suggesting an impairment in the recognition of emotions. The production of facial emotional expressions in RR-MS has not been considered, despite their importance in non-verbal communication. Method Twenty-five RR-MS patients and twenty-five matched controls completed a task of emotional categorization during which their faces were filmed. The stimuli were dynamic (sound or visual), expressed by adults (women or men), and expressing happy (laughing or smiling) or negative emotion. Two independent blinded raters quantified the happy facial expressions produced. The categorization task was used as a proxy for emotional categorization, while the happy facial expressions produced assessed the production of emotions. Results The main analysis indicated impaired categorization of RR-MS for happy stimuli selectively, whereas their happy facial expressions were not statistically different from those of the control group. More specifically, this group effect was found for smiles (and not laughter) and for happy stimuli produced by men. Analysis of individual patient profiles suggested that 77% of patients with impaired judgments produced normal facial expressions, suggesting a high prevalence of this dissociation. Only 8% of our samples showed reverse dissociation, with happy facial expressions significantly different from those of the control group and normal emotional judgments. Conclusion These results corroborated the high prevalence of emotional categorization impairment in RR-MS but not for negative stimuli, which can probably be explained by the methodological specificities of the present work. The unusual impairment found for happy stimuli (for both emotional categorization and facial congruence) may be linked to the intensity of the perceived happy expressions but not to the emotional valence. Our results also indicated a mainly preserved production of facial emotions, which may be used in the future sociocognitive care of RR-MS patients with impaired emotional judgments.

AI-enhanced analysis of naturalistic social interactions characterizes interaffective impairments in schizophrenia

Social deficits in schizophrenia have been attributed to an impaired attunement to mutual interaction, or “interaffectivity”. While impairments in emotion recognition and facial expressivity in schizophrenia have been consistently reported, findings on mimicry and social synchrony are inconsistent, and previous studies have often lacked ecological validity. To investigate interaffective behavior in dyadic interactions in a real-world-like setting, 20 individuals with schizophrenia and 20 without mental disorder played a cooperative board game with a previously unacquainted healthy control participant. Facial expression analysis was conducted using Affectiva Emotion AI in iMotions 9.3. The contingency and state space distribution of emotional facial expressions was assessed using Mangold INTERACT. Psychotic symptoms, subjective stress, affectivity and game experience were evaluated through questionnaires. Due to a considerable between-group age difference, age-adjusted ANCOVA was performed. Overall, despite an unchanged subjective experience of the social interaction, individuals with schizophrenia exhibited reduced responsiveness to positive affective stimuli. Subjective game experience did not differ between groups. Descriptively, facial expressions in schizophrenia were generally more negative, with increased sadness and decreased joy. Facial mimicry was impaired specifically regarding joyful expressions in schizophrenia, which correlated with blunted affect as measured by the SANS. Dyadic interactions involving persons with schizophrenia were less attracted toward mutual joyful affective states. Only unadjusted for age, in the absence of emotional stimuli from their interaction partner, individuals with schizophrenia showed more angry and sad expressions. These impairments in interaffective processes may contribute to social dysfunction in schizophrenia and provide new avenues for future research.

Facial and Emotion Recognition Deficits in Myasthenia Gravis.

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is a neuromuscular disease of autoimmune etiology and chronic evolution. In addition to the muscle weakness and fatigue that characterize MG, in some studies patients show an inferior performance in cognitive tasks and difficulties in recognizing basic emotions from facial expressions. However, it remains unclear if these difficulties are due to anxious-depressive symptoms that these patients present or related to cognitive abilities, such as facial recognition. This study had a descriptive cross-sectional design with a sample of 92 participants, 52 patients with MG and 40 healthy controls. The data collection protocol included measures to assess recognition of facial expressions (BRFT), facial emotional expression (FEEL), and levels of anxiety and depression (HADS). The MG group had worse performance than the control group in recognizing "fear" (p = 0.001; r = 0.344), "happiness" (p = 0.000; r = 0.580), "disgust" (p = 0.000; r = 0.399), "surprise" (p = 0.000; r = 0.602), and "anger" (p = 0.007; r = 0.284). Likewise, the MG group also underperformed in facial recognition (p = 0.001; r = 0.338). These difficulties were not related to their levels of anxiety and depression. Alterations were observed both in the recognition of facial emotions and in facial recognition, without being mediated by emotional variables. These difficulties can influence the interpersonal interaction of patients with MG.

Dimensions of Alexithymia and Identification of Emotions in Masked and Unmasked Faces.

Alexithymia, a multifaceted personality construct, is known to be related to difficulties in the decoding of emotional facial expressions, especially in case of suboptimal stimuli. The present study investigated whether and which facets of alexithymia are related to impairments in the recognition of emotions in faces with face masks. Accuracy and speed of emotion recognition were examined in a block of faces with and a block of faces without face masks in a sample of 102 healthy individuals. The order of blocks varied between participants. Emotions were recognized better and faster in unmasked than in masked faces. Recognition performance was worst and slowest for participants starting the task with masked faces. In the whole sample, there were no correlations of alexithymia facets with accuracy and speed of emotion recognition for masked and unmasked faces. In participants starting the task with masked faces, the facet externally oriented thinking was positively correlated with reaction latencies of correct responses for masked faces. Our findings indicate that an externally oriented thinking style could be linked to a less efficient identification of emotions from faces wearing masks when task difficulty is high and support the utility of a facet approach in alexithymia research.

The Emotional Power of Partisan Media: A Computer Vision Analysis of the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Primaries

ABSTRACT Building on theories of emotional contagion and affective priming, the study assesses the emotional impact of the U.S. partisan media’s coverage of six leading political candidates’ images during the 2020 New Hampshire Democratic Party presidential primary. Results show that the partisan media’s representations of the candidates’ facial expressions of emotions are associated with the voters’ feelings toward the politicians in their desired directions. Additionally, the partisan-media-primed emotions among the voters consistently align with their voting decisions. Methodologically, the study combines state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and survey research conducted with a representative sample of New Hampshire voters.

The role of functional emotion circuits in distinct dimensions of psychopathology in youth

Several mental disorders emerge during childhood or adolescence and are often characterized by socioemotional difficulties, including alterations in emotion perception. Emotional facial expressions are processed in discrete functional brain modules whose connectivity patterns encode emotion categories, but the involvement of these neural circuits in psychopathology in youth is poorly understood. This study examined the associations between activation and functional connectivity patterns in emotion circuits and psychopathology during development. We used task-based fMRI data from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC, N = 1221, 8–23 years) and conducted generalized psycho-physiological interaction (gPPI) analyses. Measures of psychopathology were derived from an independent component analysis of questionnaire data. The results showed positive associations between identifying fearful, sad, and angry faces and depressive symptoms, and a negative relationship between sadness recognition and positive psychosis symptoms. We found a positive main effect of depressive symptoms on BOLD activation in regions overlapping with the default mode network, while individuals reporting higher levels of norm-violating behavior exhibited emotion-specific lower functional connectivity within regions of the salience network and between modules that overlapped with the salience and default mode network. Our findings illustrate the relevance of functional connectivity patterns underlying emotion processing for behavioral problems in children and adolescents.