Emotional Face Stimuli Research Articles

Test–retest reliability and task order effects of emotional cognitive tests in healthy subjects

ABSTRACTLittle is known of the retest reliability of emotional cognitive tasks or the impact of using different tasks employing similar emotional stimuli within a battery. We investigated this in healthy subjects. We found improved overall performance in an emotional attentional blink task (EABT) with repeat testing at one hour and one week compared to baseline, but the impact of an emotional stimulus on performance was unchanged. Similarly, performance on a facial expression recognition task (FERT) was better one week after a baseline test, though the relative effect of specific emotions was unaltered. There was no effect of repeat testing on an emotional word categorising, recall and recognition task. We found no difference in performance in the FERT and EABT irrespective of task order. We concluded that it is possible to use emotional cognitive tasks in longitudinal studies and combine tasks using emotional facial stimuli in a single battery.

Empathy costs: Negative emotional bias in high empathisers

Excessive empathy has been associated with compassion fatigue in health professionals and caregivers. We investigated an effect of empathy on emotion processing in 137 healthy individuals of both sexes. We tested a hypothesis that high empathy may underlie increased sensitivity to negative emotion recognition which may interact with gender. Facial emotion stimuli comprised happy, angry, fearful, and sad faces presented at different intensities (mild and prototypical) and different durations (500ms and 2000ms). The parameters of emotion processing were represented by discrimination accuracy, response bias and reaction time. We found that higher empathy was associated with better recognition of all emotions. We also demonstrated that higher empathy was associated with response bias towards sad and fearful faces. The reaction time analysis revealed that higher empathy in females was associated with faster (compared with males) recognition of mildly sad faces of brief duration. We conclude that although empathic abilities were providing for advantages in recognition of all facial emotional expressions, the bias towards emotional negativity may potentially carry a risk for empathic distress.

Compensating for age limits through emotional crossmodal integration.

Social interactions in daily life necessitate the integration of social signals from different sensory modalities. In the aging literature, it is well established that the recognition of emotion in facial expressions declines with advancing age, and this also occurs with vocal expressions. By contrast, crossmodal integration processing in healthy aging individuals is less documented. Here, we investigated the age-related effects on emotion recognition when faces and voices were presented alone or simultaneously, allowing for crossmodal integration. In this study, 31 young adults (M = 25.8 years) and 31 older adults (M = 67.2 years) were instructed to identify several basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and a neutral expression, which were displayed as visual (facial expressions), auditory (non-verbal affective vocalizations) or crossmodal (simultaneous, congruent facial and vocal affective expressions) stimuli. The results showed that older adults performed slower and worse than younger adults at recognizing negative emotions from isolated faces and voices. In the crossmodal condition, although slower, older adults were as accurate as younger except for anger. Importantly, additional analyses using the “race model” demonstrate that older adults benefited to the same extent as younger adults from the combination of facial and vocal emotional stimuli. These results help explain some conflicting results in the literature and may clarify emotional abilities related to daily life that are partially spared among older adults.

Affective resonance in response to others’ emotional faces varies with affective ratings and psychopathic traits in amygdala and anterior insula

Despite extensive research on the neural basis of empathic responses for pain and disgust, there is limited data about the brain regions that underpin affective response to other people’s emotional facial expressions. Here, we addressed this question using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess neural responses to emotional faces, combined with online ratings of subjective state. When instructed to rate their own affective response to others’ faces, participants recruited anterior insula, dorsal anterior cingulate, inferior frontal gyrus, and amygdala, regions consistently implicated in studies investigating empathy for disgust and pain, as well as emotional saliency. Importantly, responses in anterior insula and amygdala were modulated by trial-by-trial variations in subjective affective responses to the emotional facial stimuli. Furthermore, overall task-elicited activations in these regions were negatively associated with psychopathic personality traits, which are characterized by low affective empathy. Our findings suggest that anterior insula and amygdala play important roles in the generation of affective internal states in response to others’ emotional cues and that attenuated function in these regions may underlie reduced empathy in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits.

Increased activity of frontal and limbic regions to emotional stimuli in children at-risk for anxiety disorders

Neuroimaging studies of children with anxiety disorders are limited, and no study has examined children who are at increased risk for developing anxiety disorders based on parental anxiety. The objective of this study was to examine the function of frontal and limbic brain regions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in children at risk for anxiety disorders. Study participants included high-risk children (n=20) who had at least one parent with a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder and normal-risk control children (n=19). Using fMRI, we measured the blood oxygenation level dependent response while high-risk and normal-risk children were exposed to different emotional facial stimuli. We found greater activation of frontal, temporal and limbic regions in high-risk children relative to normal-risk children during the presentation of emotional stimuli (angry and happy). These regions included the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, hippocampus and insula. Our within-group analysis revealed similar patterns of hyperactivity in high-risk children with and without current anxiety symptoms. To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate functional alterations in emotion-processing brain regions in children who are at risk for anxiety disorders based on parental anxiety. These findings are consistent with previous fMRI studies of pediatric anxiety and behaviorally inhibited children, and they contribute to our understanding of the neural correlates of risk for anxiety disorders.

The complex duration perception of emotional faces: effects of face direction.

The perceived duration of emotional face stimuli strongly depends on the expressed emotion. But, emotional faces also differ regarding a number of other features like gaze, face direction, or sex. Usually, these features have been controlled by only using pictures of female models with straight gaze and face direction. Doi and Shinohara (2009) reported that an overestimation of angry faces could only be found when the model’s gaze was oriented toward the observer. We aimed at replicating this effect for face direction. Moreover, we explored the effect of face direction on the duration perception sad faces. Controlling for the sex of the face model and the participant, female and male participants rated the duration of neutral, angry, and sad face stimuli of both sexes photographed from different perspectives in a bisection task. In line with current findings, we report a significant overestimation of angry compared to neutral face stimuli that was modulated by face direction. Moreover, the perceived duration of sad face stimuli did not differ from that of neutral faces and was not influenced by face direction. Furthermore, we found that faces of the opposite sex appeared to last longer than those of the same sex. This outcome is discussed with regards to stimulus parameters like the induced arousal, social relevance, and an evolutionary context.

The Effects of Social Anxiety and State Anxiety on Visual Attention: Testing the Vigilance–Avoidance Hypothesis

A growing theoretical and research literature suggests that trait and state social anxiety can predict attentional patterns in the presence of emotional stimuli. The current study adds to this literature by examining the effects of state anxiety on visual attention and testing the vigilance–avoidance hypothesis, using a method of continuous visual attentional assessment. Participants were 91 undergraduate college students with high or low trait fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a core aspect of social anxiety, who were randomly assigned to either a high or low state anxiety condition. Participants engaged in a free view task in which pairs of emotional facial stimuli were presented and eye movements were continuously monitored. Overall, participants with high FNE avoided angry stimuli and participants with high state anxiety attended to positive stimuli. Participants with high state anxiety and high FNE were avoidant of angry faces, whereas participants with low state and low FNE exhibited a bias toward angry faces. The study provided partial support for the vigilance–avoidance hypothesis. The findings add to the mixed results in the literature that suggest that both positive and negative emotional stimuli may be important in understanding the complex attention patterns associated with social anxiety. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Training of Affect Recognition in Schizophrenia Patients with Violent Offences: Treatment Effects and Electrophysiological Correlates

Introduction There is a need for specific treatment approaches for the subgroup of schizophrenia violent offenders. Deficits in affect recognition were shown to be more severe in this group compared to non-violent schizophrenia patients. Objective A standardized training of affect recognition (TAR) has been proven effective in non-forensic schizophrenia patients with regard to social-cognitive function. It has not yet been evaluated in the subgroup of forensic schizophrenia patients with violent offences. Aims To examine feasibility and behavioral treatment effects of TAR in forensic schizophrenia patients. To study electrophysiological correlates of treatment. Methods 19 male schizophrenia patients, forensically detained because of violent offences, received weekly sessions of TAR over 2 months. Performance of affect recognition was tested using a standardized emotional picture set before, immediately and two months after treatment. During testing qEEGs were registered for event related potentials (ERPs) and LORETA analysis. Results Study participants had a low drop-out rate and a marked improvement in affect recognition immediately and two months after treatment (Cohen's d = 1,88). Loreta analysis revealed reduced activities at P100 and N170 in left tempero-pariatal-occipital brain regions. At P250 activation increases were observable in the right dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex. Conclusion In schizophrenia violent offenders brain activity correlates of improved affect recognition after treatment may indicate an improved efficiency in structural decoding of faces and a more reflective mode of affect evaluation. This could lead to a higher degree of deliberation and behavioral control when responding to emotional facial stimuli.

Virtual lesion of right posterior superior temporal sulcus modulates conscious visual perception of fearful expressions in faces and bodies

The posterior Superior Temporal Suclus (pSTS) represents a central hub in the complex cerebral network for person perception and emotion recognition as also suggested by its heavy connections with face- and body-specific cortical (e.g., the fusiform face area, FFA and the extrastriate body area, EBA) and subcortical structures (e.g., amygdala). Information on whether pSTS is causatively involved in sustaining conscious visual perception of emotions expressed by faces and bodies is lacking. We explored this issue by combining a binocular rivalry procedure (where emotional and neutral face and body postures rivaled with house images) with off-line, 1-Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). We found that temporary inhibition of the right pSTS reduced perceptual dominance of fearful faces and increased perceptual dominance of fearful bodies, while leaving unaffected the perception of neutral face and body images. Inhibition of the vertex had no effect on conscious visual perception of neutral or emotional face or body stimuli. Thus, the right pSTS plays a causal role in shortening conscious vision of fearful faces and in prolonging conscious vision of fearful bodies. These results suggest that pSTS selectively modulates the activity of segregated networks involved in the conscious visual perception of emotional faces or bodies. We speculate that the opposite role of the right pSTS for conscious perception of fearful face and body may be explained by the different connections that this region entertains with face- and body-selective visual areas as well as with amygdalae and premotor regions.

Sex differences in event-related potentials and attentional biases to emotional facial stimuli.

Attentional processes play an important role in the processing of emotional information. Previous research reported attentional biases during stimulus processing in anxiety and depression. However, sex differences in the processing of emotional stimuli and higher prevalence rates of anxiety disorders among women, compared to men, suggest that attentional biases may also differ between the two sexes. The present study used a modified version of the dot probe task with happy, angry, and neutral facial stimuli to investigate the time course of attentional biases in healthy volunteers. Moreover, associations of attentional biases with alexithymia were examined on the behavioral and physiological level. Event-related potentials were measured while 21 participants (11 women) performed the task, utilizing also for the first time a difference wave approach in the analysis to highlight emotion-specific aspects. Women showed overall enhanced probe P1 amplitudes compared to men, in particular after rewarding facial stimuli. Using the difference wave approach, probe P1 amplitudes appeared specifically enhanced with regard to congruently presented happy facial stimuli among women, compared to men. Both methods yielded enhanced probe P1 amplitudes after presentation of the emotional stimulus in the left compared to the right visual hemifield. Probe P1 amplitudes correlated negatively with self-reported alexithymia, most of these correlations were only observable in women. Our results suggest that women orient their attention to a greater extent to facial stimuli than men and corroborate that alexithymia is a correlate of reduced emotional reactivity on a neuronal level. We recommend using a difference wave approach when addressing attentional processes of orientation and disengagement also in future studies.

A Markov Chain Analysis of Emotional Exchange in Voice-to-Voice Communication: Testing for the Mimicry Hypothesis of Emotional Contagion

Mimicry is a central plank of the emotional contagion theory; however, it was only tested with facial and postural emotional stimuli. This study explores the existence of mimicry in voice-to-voice communication by analyzing 8,747 sequences of emotional displays between customers and employees in a call-center context. We listened live to 967 telephone inter-actions, registered the sequences of emotional displays, and analyzed them with a Markov chain. We also explored other propositions of emotional contagion theory that were yet to be tested in vocal contexts. Results supported that mimicry is significantly present at all levels. Our findings fill an important gap in the emotional contagion theory; have practical implications regarding voice-to-voice interactions; and open doors for future vocal mimicry research.

Emotional content of stimuli improves visuospatial working memory

Processing and storage in visuospatial working memory (VSWM) seem to depend on attention-based mechanisms. In order to explore the effect of attention-attractive stimuli, such as emotional faces on VSWM performance, ERPs were obtained from 20 young adults while reproducing spatial sequences of six facial (happy and neutral) and non-facial control stimuli in inverse order. Behavioral performances revealed that trials with happy facial expressions resulted in a significantly higher amount of correct responses. For positive emotional facial stimuli, N170 amplitude was higher over right temporo–parietal regions, while P2 amplitude was higher over frontal and lower over parietal regions. In addition, LPP amplitude was also significantly higher for this type of stimuli. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results support the notion of the domain-general attention-based mechanism of VSWM maintenance, in which spatial to-be-remembered locations might be influenced by the emotional content of the stimuli.

Facial emotion recognition deficits following moderate-severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): re-examining the valence effect and the role of emotion intensity.

Many individuals who sustain moderate-severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are poor at recognizing emotional expressions, with a greater impairment in recognizing negative (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness, and anger) than positive emotions (e.g., happiness and surprise). It has been questioned whether this "valence effect" might be an artifact of the wide use of static facial emotion stimuli (usually full-blown expressions) which differ in difficulty rather than a real consequence of brain impairment. This study aimed to investigate the valence effect in TBI, while examining emotion recognition across different intensities (low, medium, and high). Twenty-seven individuals with TBI and 28 matched control participants were tested on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). The TBI group was more impaired in overall emotion recognition, and less accurate recognizing negative emotions. However, examining the performance across the different intensities indicated that this difference was driven by some emotions (e.g., happiness) being much easier to recognize than others (e.g., fear and surprise). Our findings indicate that individuals with TBI have an overall deficit in facial emotion recognition, and that both people with TBI and control participants found some emotions more difficult than others. These results suggest that conventional measures of facial affect recognition that do not examine variance in the difficulty of emotions may produce erroneous conclusions about differential impairment. They also cast doubt on the notion that dissociable neural pathways underlie the recognition of positive and negative emotions, which are differentially affected by TBI and potentially other neurological or psychiatric disorders.

Abnormal activation of the social brain network in children with autism spectrum disorder: an FMRI study.

ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to investigate abnormal findings of social brain network in Korean children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared with typically developing children (TDC).MethodsFunctional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed to examine brain activations during the processing of emotional faces (happy, fearful, and neutral) in 17 children with ASD, 24 TDC.ResultsWhen emotional face stimuli were given to children with ASD, various areas of the social brain relevant to social cognition showed reduced activation. Specifically, ASD children exhibited less activation in the right amygdala (AMY), right superior temporal sulcus (STS) and right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than TDC group when fearful faces were shown. Activation of left insular cortex and right IFG in response to happy faces was less in the ASD group. Similar findings were also found in left superior insular gyrus and right insula in case of neutral stimulation.ConclusionThese findings suggest that children with ASD have different processing of social and emotional experience at the neural level. In other words, the deficit of social cognition in ASD could be explained by the deterioration of the capacity for visual analysis of emotional faces, the subsequent inner imitation through mirror neuron system (MNS), and the ability to transmit it to the limbic system and to process the transmitted emotion.

Effects of nicotine and nicotine expectancy on attentional bias for emotional stimuli.

Nicotine's effects on mood are thought to enhance its addictive potential. However, the mechanisms underlying the effects of nicotine on affect regulation have not been reliably demonstrated in human laboratory studies. We investigated the effects of nicotine abstinence (Experiment 1), and nicotine challenge and expectancy (Experiment 2) on attentional bias towards facial emotional stimuli differing in emotional valence. In Experiment 1, 46 nicotine-deprived smokers were randomized to either continue to abstain from smoking or to smoke immediately before testing. In Experiment 2, 96 nicotine-deprived smokers were randomized to smoke a nicotinized or denicotinized cigarette and to be told that the cigarette did or did not contain nicotine. In both experiments participants completed a visual probe task, where positively valenced (happy) and negatively valenced (sad) facial expressions were presented, together with neutral facial expressions. In Experiment 1, there was evidence of an interaction between probe location and abstinence on reaction time, indicating that abstinent smokers showed an attentional bias for neutral stimuli. In Experiment 2, there was evidence of an interaction between probe location, nicotine challenge and expectation on reaction time, indicating that smokers receiving nicotine, but told that they did not receive nicotine, showed an attentional bias for emotional stimuli. Our data suggest that nicotine abstinence appears to disrupt attentional bias towards emotional facial stimuli. These data provide support for nicotine's modulation of attentional bias as a central mechanism for maintaining affect regulation in cigarette smoking.

The influence of emotional faces on the spatial allocation of attention

Background objectives: Studies suggest that the right hemisphere is dominant for emotional facial recognition. In addition, whereas some studies suggest the right hemisphere mediates the processing of all emotions (dominance hypothesis), other studies suggest that the left hemisphere mediates positive emotions the right mediates negative emotions (valence hypothesis). Since each hemisphere primarily attends to contralateral space, the goals of this study was to learn if emotional faces would induce a leftward deviation of attention and if the valence of facial emotional stimuli can influence the normal viewer’s spatial direction of attention. Methods: Seventeen normal right handed participants were asked to bisect horizontal lines that had all combinations of sad, happy or neutral faces at ends of these lines. During this task the subjects were never requested to look at these faces and there were no task demands that depended on viewing these faces. Results: Presentation of emotional faces induced a greater leftward deviation compared to neutral faces, independent of where (spatial position) these faces were presented. However, faces portraying negative emotions tended to induce a greater leftward bias than positive emotions. Conclusions: Independent of location, the presence of emotional faces influenced the spatial allocation of attention, such that normal subjects shift the direction of their attention toward left hemispace and this attentional shift appears to be greater for negative (sad) than positive faces (happy).

Attention to Emotional Information in Social Anxiety Disorder With and Without Co-Occurring Depression

Despite the high comorbidity of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), we know little about how persons with co-occurring SAD–MDD compare to their counterparts with pure disorders. In the present study we investigated attention to facial emotional stimuli in adult women with SAD only (n = 18), MDD only (n = 24), co-occurring SAD–MDD (n = 24), and healthy controls (CTL; n = 33). Participants were exposed to angry, sad, neutral, and happy faces for 200 and 1,000 ms as cues in a Posner attention task. We examined patterns of attentional engagement, disengagement, and vigilance-avoidance as a function of cue valence. Across the attentional indices, both the SAD and SAD–MDD groups differed most consistently from the MDD and CTL groups: they exhibited differential patterns of attention to angry, sad, and happy faces, including relatively greater vigilance-avoidance for angry faces. There was little evidence for any MDD-associated biases in attention. Findings suggest that the attentional processing of emotional information in SAD generally overrides the potential influence of co-occurring MDD. Implications for the understanding and treatment of co-occurring SAD–MDD are discussed.

Altered neurophysiological responses to emotional faces discriminate children with ASD, ADHD and ASD + ADHD

There are high rates of overlap between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Emotional impairment in the two disorders, however, has not been directly compared using event-related potentials (ERPs) that are able to measure distinct temporal stages in emotional processing. The N170 and N400 ERP components were measured during presentation of emotional face stimuli to boys with ASD (n=19), ADHD (n=18), comorbid ASD+ADHD (n=29) and typically developing controls (n=26). Subjects with ASD (ASD/ASD+ADHD) displayed reduced N170 amplitude across all stimuli, particularly for fearful versus neutral facial expressions. Conversely, subjects with ADHD (ADHD/ASD+ADHD) demonstrated reduced modulation of N400 amplitude by fearful expressions in parietal scalp regions and happy facial expressions in central scalp regions. These findings indicate a dissociation between disorders on the basis of distinct stages of emotion processing; while children with ASD show alterations at the structural encoding stage, children with ADHD display abnormality at the contextual processing stage. The comorbid ASD+ADHD group presents as an additive condition with the unique deficits of both disorders. This supports the use of objective neural measurement of emotional processing to delineate pathophysiological mechanisms in complex overlapping disorders.

Different brain activity in response to emotional faces alone and augmented by contextual information.

This study examined the extent to which emotional face stimuli differ from the neural reactivity associated with more ecological contextually augmented stimuli. Participants were scanned when they viewed contextually rich pictures depicting both emotional faces and context, and pictures of emotional faces presented alone. Emotional faces alone were more strongly associated with brain activity in paralimbic and social information processing regions, whereas emotional faces augmented by context were associated with increased and sustained activity in regions potentially representing increased complexity and subjective emotional experience. Furthermore, context effects were modulated by emotional intensity and valence. These findings suggest that cortical elaboration that is apparent in contextually augmented stimuli may be missed in studies of emotional faces alone, whereas emotional faces may more selectively recruit limbic reactivity.

Musical chords and emotion: major and minor triads are processed for emotion.

Musical chords are arguably the smallest building blocks of music that retain emotional information. Major chords are generally perceived as positive- and minor chords as negative-sounding, but there has been debate concerning how early these emotional connotations may be processed. To investigate this, emotional facial stimuli and musical chord stimuli were simultaneously presented to participants, and facilitation of processing was measured via event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes. Decreased amplitudes of the P1 and N2 ERP components have been found to index the facilitation of early processing. If simultaneously presented musical chords and facial stimuli are perceived at early stages as belonging to the same emotional category, then early processing should be facilitated for these congruent pairs, and ERP amplitudes should therefore be decreased as compared to the incongruent pairs. ERPs were recorded from 30 musically naive participants as they viewed happy, sad, and neutral faces presented simultaneously with a major or minor chord. When faces and chords were presented that contained congruent emotional information (happy-major or sad-minor), processing was facilitated, as indexed by decreased N2 ERP amplitudes. This suggests that musical chords do possess emotional connotations that can be processed as early as 200 ms in naive listeners. The early stages of processing that are involved suggest that major and minor chords have deeply connected emotional meanings, rather than superficially attributed ones, indicating that minor triads possess negative emotional connotations and major triads possess positive emotional connotations.