Emotional States Of Others Research Articles

Neural correlates of theory of mind in children and adults using CAToon: Introducing an open-source child-friendly neuroimaging task

Theory of Mind (ToM) or mentalizing is a basic social skill which is characterized by our ability of perspective-taking and the understanding of cognitive and emotional states of others. ToM development is essential to successfully navigate in various social contexts. The neural basis of mentalizing is well-studied in adults, however, less evidence exists in children. Potential reasons are methodological challenges, including a lack of age-appropriate fMRI paradigms. We introduce a novel child-friendly and open-source ToM fMRI task, for which accuracy and performance were evaluated behaviorally in 60 children ages three to nine (32♂). Furthermore, 27 healthy young adults (14♂; mean = 25.41 years) and 33 children ages seven to thirteen (17♂; mean = 9.06 years) completed the Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind Cartoon task (CAToon;www.jacobscenter.uzh.ch/en/research/developmental_neuroscience/downloads/catoon.html) during a fMRI session. Behavioral results indicate that children of all ages can solve the CAToon task above chance level, though reliable performance is reached around five years. Neurally, activation increases were observed for adults and children in brain regions previously associated with mentalizing, including bilateral temporoparietal junction, temporal gyri, precuneus and medial prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortices. We conclude that CAToon is suitable for developmental neuroimaging studies within an fMRI environment starting around preschool and up.

Emotional Awareness in Schizophrenia Is Associated With Gray Matter Volume of Right Precuneus.

Objectives: We assessed the relationship between emotional awareness (e.g., the ability to identify and differentiate our own feelings and feelings of others) and regional brain volumes in healthy and in schizophrenia groups.Methods: Magnetic resonance images of 29 subjects with schizophrenia and 33 matched healthy controls were acquired. Brain gray matter was parcellated using FreeSurfer and 28 regions of interest associated with emotional awareness were analyzed. All participants were assessed using the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale (LEAS) of Self and of Other. LEAS scores were correlated with gray matter volume for each hemisphere on the 14 brain regions of the emotional awareness network.Results: Individuals with schizophrenia showed decreased emotional awareness on both LEAS Self and LEAS Other compared to healthy controls. There were no statistically significant between-group differences in gray matter volumes of the emotional awareness network. The performance on LEAS Other correlated negatively with right precuneus gray matter volume only in the schizophrenia group.Conclusion: Our findings suggest a relationship between gray matter volume of the right precuneus and deficits in understanding of emotional states of others in schizophrenia.

Neural responses to morally laden interactions in female inmates with psychopathy

Much of social cognition requires making inferences about the mental and emotional states of others. Moreover, understanding the emotions of others is an important foundation for moral decision-making. Psychopathy is associated with both aberrant emotional understanding and atypical hemodynamic responses when viewing and evaluating morally laden social interactions. In the present functional MRI study, female inmates (N = 107) were asked to evaluate the likely emotional state of either the recipient or the initiator of harmful or helpful interactions. Psychopathy was assessed with the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R). PCL-R scores were not associated with differences in confidence or accuracy ratings. However, psychopathy scores were significantly related to increased hemodynamic response in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when viewing harmful interactions and decreased functional connectivity from right amygdala to inferior parietal cortex and insula, and from temporal parietal junction to dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Overall, this work indicates that in females, psychopathy is associated with normal behavioral accuracy and confidence but alterations in neural network activity during moral decision-making.

Inferential affective tracking reveals the remarkable speed of context-based emotion perception

Understanding the emotional states of others is important for social functioning. Recent studies show that context plays an essential role in emotion recognition. However, it remains unclear whether emotion inference from visual scene context is as efficient as emotion recognition from faces. Here, we measured the speed of context-based emotion perception, using Inferential Affective Tracking (IAT) with naturalistic and dynamic videos. Using cross-correlation analyses, we found that inferring affect based on visual context alone is just as fast as tracking affect with all available information including face and body. We further demonstrated that this approach has high precision and sensitivity to sub-second lags. Our results suggest that emotion recognition from dynamic contextual information might be automatic and immediate. Seemingly complex context-based emotion perception is far more efficient than previously assumed.

Intervention response among preschoolers with ADHD: The role of emotion understanding

Emotion recognition/understanding (ERU), which is the ability to correctly identify emotional states in others as well as one's self, plays a key role in children's social-emotional development and is often targeted in early intervention programs. Yet the extent to which young children's ERU predicts their intervention response remains unclear. The current study examined the extent to which initial levels of ERU and changes in ERU predicted intervention response to a multimodal early intervention program (Summer Treatment Program for Pre-Kindergarteners; STP-PreK). Participants included 230 young children (Mage = 4.90, 80.0% male) with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who participated in the 8-week STP-PreK. Children's ERU was measured via a standardized behavioral task. Similarly, standardized measures of academic achievement (Woodcock-Johnson-IV), executive functioning (Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders-Task), and social-emotional functioning (Challenging Situation Task) were obtained pre- and post-intervention. Parents and teachers also reported on children's behavioral functioning pre- and post-intervention. Children with better initial ERU made greater improvements in academic, executive functioning (EF), and social-emotional domains, along with decreases in inattention symptom severity. However, pre-intervention levels of ERU were not associated with improvements in parent/teacher report of hyperactivity, oppositional defiant disorder, and overall behavioral impairment. Lastly, changes in ERU only predicted improvement in EF, but not any other school readiness outcomes. We provide preliminary evidence that initial levels of ERU predict intervention response across school readiness domains in a sample of preschoolers with ADHD.

FEATURES OF EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN CHILDREN IN THE ASPECT OF INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP FORMATION

The topicality of the research lies in the fact that negative changes in modern children’ development are more common nowadays.The aim of the article is to analyse peculiarities of the child’s emotional development in senior preschool age. The following key features of the preschooler’s emotional sphere were singled out in scientific literature: the ability to realize emotional states of others around him, the ability to empathize. During diagnostics, the formation of the following indicators was checked: awareness of emotional states of others and the ability to empathize. The following methods were used: «Study of understanding the emotional states of people», «Study of children’s awareness of moral norms» (G.Uruntayeva, Y.Afonkina), «The nature of empathic reactions’ manifestations in behaviour» (A. Shchetinina), «Unfinished stories» (T. Gavrilova). The analysis of the methods showed that 70.5% of older preschoolers demonstrate zero and elementary levels of awareness of the emotional states of others. This is manifested in the fact that preschoolers partially understand the emotional states of others, allow inaccuracies when asked to determine them. As a rule, children cannot identify mimics which helped them to identify emotions. In most cases, preschoolers mention situations or possible causes of the emotional states being assessed. Zero and elementary levels of empathy were demonstrated by 56.3% of preschoolers. Children show occasional interest in the emotional behavior of their peers, sometimes «get infected» by their emotional state. Manifestations of empathy are isolated and often depend on the presence of an adult. As a rule, preschoolers understand the situation only from their point of view, thus there is no peer orientation.

Screw Those Guys: Polarization, Empathy, and Attitudes About Out‐Partisans

Empathic ability is the ability to interpret the emotional state of others. In today's highly partisan and polarized environment, empathic ability may play a key role in determining how partisans respond emotionally to changes in public policy and those helped or harmed by the policy. Utilizing Baron‐Cohen et al.'s (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 241–251, 2001) “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test to measure empathic ability, we conduct a survey experiment where we asked participants to read about a partisan individual who may lose their health insurance if the Affordable Care Act were to be repealed. We show that empathic ability shapes attitudes about people and policies, but that the effects are contingent upon the respondent's partisanship, the target's partisanship, and an interaction of the two. Empathic ability produces more positive affect and policy support among Democrats but reduces positive affect among Republicans. The divergent effects of empathic ability on Democrats and Republicans are further exacerbated when the target is an out‐partisan.

Physiological Detection of Affective States in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with emotion processing difficulties, including limitations in understanding the emotional states of others and processing one's own internal experiences. The nature of these difficulties remains largely unknown. This is due, in part, to challenges in acquiring reliable self-reports of emotional experiences from this population. Automatically characterizing emotional states with the use of physiological signals is a potential means of overcoming this problem, as physiological signals can provide an objective and nonverbal method for assessing affective states. However, this approach has not been well considered with ASD to date. To this end, we investigated detection of autonomic responses to positive and negative stimuli in children with ASD using four physiological measurements. Electrocardiograms, respiration, skin conductance and temperature were measured while 15 children with ASD viewed standard images known to evoke varying levels of valence (positive and negative) and arousal (low and high intensity). Using an ensemble of classifiers, affective states induced by stimuli of positive and negative valence or high and low arousal was differentiated at average accuracies approaching or exceeding 80 percent. These results suggest the feasibility of discerning affective states in individuals with ASD objectively using physiological signals.

A crowd of emotional voices influences the perception of emotional faces: Using adaptation, stimulus salience, and attention to probe audio-visual interactions for emotional stimuli.

Correctly assessing the emotional state of others is a crucial part of social interaction. While facial expressions provide much information, faces are often not viewed in isolation, but occur with concurrent sounds, usually voices, which also provide information about the emotion being portrayed. Many studies have examined the crossmodal processing of faces and sounds, but results have been mixed, with different paradigms yielding different results. Using a psychophysical adaptation paradigm, we carried out a series of four experiments to determine whether there is a perceptual advantage when faces and voices match in emotion (congruent), versus when they do not match (incongruent). We presented a single face and a crowd of voices, a crowd of faces and a crowd of voices, a single face of reduced salience and a crowd of voices, and tested this last condition with and without attention directed to the emotion in the face. While we observed aftereffects in the hypothesized direction (adaptation to faces conveying positive emotion yielded negative, contrastive, perceptual aftereffects), we only found a congruent advantage (stronger adaptation effects) when faces were attended and of reduced salience, in line with the theory of inverse effectiveness.

TMS over the posterior cerebellum modulates motor cortical excitability in response to facial emotional expressions.

Evidence suggests that the posterior cerebellum is involved in emotional processing. Specific mechanisms by which the cerebellum contributes to the perception of and reaction to the emotional state of others are not well-known. It is likely that perceived emotions trigger anticipatory/preparatory motor changes. However, the extent to which the cerebellum modulates the activity of the motor cortex to contribute to emotional processing has not been directly investigated. In this study, we assessed whether the activity of the posterior cerebellum influences the modulation of motor cortical excitability in response to emotional stimuli. To this end, we transiently disrupted the neural activity of the left posterior cerebellum using 1Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and examined its effect on motor cortical excitability witnessed during emotional face processing (in comparison to the effects of sham rTMS). Motor excitability was measured as TMS-based motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from bilateral first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscles during the viewing of negative emotional (i.e. fearful) and neutral facial expressions. In line with previous evidence, we found that MEP amplitude was increased during the viewing of fearful compared to neutral faces. Critically, when left posterior cerebellar activity was transiently inhibited with 1Hz rTMS, we observed a reduction in amplitude of MEPs recorded from the contralateral (right) motor cortex during the viewing of emotional (but not neutral) faces. In turn, inhibition of the left posterior cerebellum did not affect the amplitude of MEPs recorded from the ipsilateral motor cortex. Our findings suggest that the posterolateral (left) cerebellum modulates motor cortical response to negative emotional stimuli and may serve as an interface between limbic, cognitive, and motor systems.

Deficits in recognizing female facial expressions related to social network in cocaine-addicted men

BackgroundThe ability to accurately recognise facial expressions of emotion is crucial for social functioning and maintaining healthy relationships. Recognising the emotional state of others allows us to respond to their needs and adjust our behaviour appropriately. Impairments in facial affect recognition have been reported in chronic cocaine users but little is known whether these contribute to their difficulties in social situations. MethodsWe assessed facial emotional expression recognition in forty-five men with cocaine use disorder (CUD) and forty-four healthy control participants. Using standardised questionnaires, we also collected information on perceived social support, social provision and community integration. ResultsOur results found that male cocaine users had greater difficulty in recognising female emotional facial expressions than male controls. This effect was not explained by demographic variables but it was associated with their social network; including social support, social provisions and community integration. ConclusionOur findings suggest that men with CUD have greater difficulty in identifying emotional expression in female faces, which is linked with their social support networks. This may play an important role in misunderstanding non-verbal communications that contribute to destabilising friendship and family ties typically seen in drug addiction. Addressing deficits in recognising female emotional expressions may be an important piece of information for counselling and other interventions.

Facial emotion recognition in adult with traumatic brain injury: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background:Traumatic brain injury (TBI) refers to head injuries that disrupt normal function of the brain. TBI commonly lead to a wide range of potential psychosocial functional deficits. Although psychosocial function after TBI is influenced by many factors, more and more evidence shows that social cognitive skills are critical contributors. Facial emotion recognition, one of the higher-level skills of social cognition, is the ability to perceive and recognize emotional states of others based on their facial expressions. Numerous studies have assessed facial emotion recognition performance in adult patients with TBI. However, there have been inconsistent findings. The aim of this study is to conduct a meta-analysis to characterize facial emotion recognition in adult patients with TBI.Methods:A systematic literature search will be performed for eligible studies published up to March 19, 2020 in three international databases (PubMed, Web of Science and Embase). The work such as article retrieval, screening, quality evaluation, data collection will be conducted by two independent researchers. Meta-analysis will be conducted using Stata 15.0 software.Results:This meta-analysis will provide a high-quality synthesis from existing evidence for facial emotion recognition in adult patients with TBI, and analyze the facial emotion recognition performance in different aspects (i.e., recognition of negative emotions or positive emotions or any specific basic emotion).Conclusions:This meta-analysis will provide evidence of facial emotion recognition performance in adult patients with TBI.INPLASY registration number:INPLASY202050109.

Pathways to the criminalisation of emotional distress: An offence- and harm-based typology

The article examines the criminalisation of causing negative emotional states in others and pursues a principled response to the question under which conditions, in a liberal democratic society, it is legitimate to criminalise human conduct that leads to emotional distress in others. Its main aim is to develop an exploratory typology of different types of legally-relevant emotional distress, based on existing offences and informed by the criteria drawn from criminal law philosophy. Following the conceptual distinction between ‘harm’ and ‘offence’, a typology of legally relevant emotional distress ranging from simpler cases of distress through more in-depth offendedness and offence-plus-harm to states of emotional harm is presented. The article then discusses some ‘hard cases’, such as special vulnerabilities and the question of changing sensibilities through time. The repercussions of these changes for an effective and legitimate criminal justice as well as policy implications are addressed in the concluding section.

Diagnosis of Autism using Machine Learning as a Healthcare Technology

Autism is one of the inborn disease, researchers are presently focusing on. The autistic child faces inflexibility in language, thinking and behavior together with the difficulties in understanding emotional states of others. There are lot of interventions going on to make them understand the feelings of others and vice-versa. Now a day, ASD became one of the quick spreading diseases all over the world. Therefore there is a huge need to provide a time-consuming and easy accessible diagnostic tool to detect autism at an early stage to help the clinicians in providing prior medications. Though there is no proper curability of autism, still easy detection helps to provide better therapy session and supports the autistic child to lead a comfort independent life. The thesis deals with the building up of a model where the parents and relatives of a suspected autistic child can easily detect if they are suffering from autism by providing their answers of some particular questions related to the characteristics of autism. In order to build that model, the data were collected manually from different autism therapy centers in India and those raw data are then classified by using three different classifiers namely Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine and Random Forest with Python as a programming tool to find out the one with higher accuracy by various analyses after pre-processing. The Random Forest classifier with the highest accuracy is utilized in framing the question based model for the early discovery of autism which can be operated as a primary diagnostic model to assist medical professionals technologically.

M135. DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL SCANPATH PATTERN ANALYSIS BASED ON FACIAL EMOTION PERCEPTION ENHANCEMENT TRAINING PROGRAM IN SCHIZOPHRENIA PATIENTS

BackgroundFacial expression is an important non-verbal way of expressing the person’s emotional state. If the process of perceiving facial features is impaired, the ability to recognize the emotional state of others is degraded, which may make it difficult to maintain interpersonal and social communications. Many studies have reported on the association between deficit of facial emotion perception (FEP) and the social functioning in schizophrenia. Therefore, we developed visual scanpath pattern analysis based FEP enhancement training program in schizophrenia.MethodsWe enrolled patients visited and admitted Gongju National Hospital and those lived in shared housing facilities for rehabilitation from Sep 2018 to May 2019. 128 patients attended to FEP training program as open, blind and randomized-controlled cross-over design. Both FEP training and mock programs were provided twice a week for a month treatment period with a 4-week washout period between treatment periods. Primary outcome was results of heatmaps based on visual scanpath patterns.ResultsAmong 128 patients, 121 completed the study and 7 was dropped out. In FEP training group, their visual scanpath pattern somewhat closer to normal than mock group. When they had an efforts to perceive the emotion of face pictures, FEP training group tended to scan the face pictures more broadly including eye rims, middle of forehead and sided of the mouth in addition to eyes, nose and mouth whereas mock group tended to gaze eyes, nose and mouth intensively.DiscussionThis FEP training program may improve the ability to integrate facial expression cues through visual scanpath pattern changes in schizophrenia patients.Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (Grant number NRF-2016R1E1A2A01953732 & 2018R1E1A2A02059043).

Visual Behavior, Pupil Dilation, and Ability to Identify Emotions From Facial Expressions After Stroke.

Social cognition is the innate human ability to interpret the emotional state of others from contextual verbal and non-verbal information, and to self-regulate accordingly. Facial expressions are one of the most relevant sources of non-verbal communication, and their interpretation has been extensively investigated in the literature, using both behavioral and physiological measures, such as those derived from visual activity and visual responses. The decoding of facial expressions of emotion is performed by conscious and unconscious cognitive processes that involve a complex brain network that can be damaged after cerebrovascular accidents. A diminished ability to identify facial expressions of emotion has been reported after stroke, which has traditionally been attributed to impaired emotional processing. While this can be true, an alteration in visual behavior after brain injury could also negatively contribute to this ability. This study investigated the accuracy, distribution of responses, visual behavior, and pupil dilation of individuals with stroke while identifying emotional facial expressions. Our results corroborated impaired performance after stroke and exhibited decreased attention to the eyes, evidenced by a diminished time and number of fixations made in this area in comparison to healthy subjects and comparable pupil dilation. The differences in visual behavior reached statistical significance in some emotions when comparing individuals with stroke with impaired performance with healthy subjects, but not when individuals post-stroke with comparable performance were considered. The performance dependence of visual behavior, although not determinant, might indicate that altered visual behavior could be a negatively contributing factor for emotion recognition from facial expressions.

AGE-RELATED DECLINES IN SOCIAL COGNITIVE PROCESSES OF OLDER ADULTS

Despite current literature suggesting that various social cognitive processes seem to be impaired in late adulthood, e.g., processing of social gaze cues, the trajectory decline of social cognition in late adulthood is not well understood (e.g., Grainger et al., 2018; Paal & Bereczkei, 2007). As part of a multi-institutional research project, we began to systematically investigate whether there is age-related decline in older adults’ ability to infer others’ mental states, integrate multiple referential cues, and identify emotional states of others using prosodic cues. Sixteen older adults aged 71-85, of which 9 were cognitively healthy and 7 with mild-to-moderate dementia, and 7 younger adults aged 19-37 underwent three tasks. In a theory-of-mind story task, participants answered true/false questions about the beliefs of the protagonists in the stories. A cue integration task assessed participants’ ability to integrate the experimenter’s gaze and semantic cues to identify a referent object. In an emotion-prosody task, participants judged whether the speaker sounded happy or sad in low-pass filtered audio. Non-parametric tests revealed that younger adults outperformed both groups of older adults (both ps=.001) in inferring the protagonists’ beliefs in the stories. Younger adults were also better and more accurate than both groups of older adults in integrating cues to identify the referent object and in using prosodic cues to identify emotional states respectively (ps<.001). Both groups of older adults did not differ significantly from each other in the tasks. These findings provide emerging and important insights into the decline of social cognitive processes in late adulthood.

Automatic Change Detection of Emotional and Neutral Body Expressions: Evidence From Visual Mismatch Negativity.

Rapidly and effectively detecting emotions in others is an important social skill. Since emotions expressed by the face are relatively easy to fake or hide, we often use body language to gauge the genuine emotional state of others. Recent studies suggest that expression-related visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) reflects the automatic processing of emotional changes in facial expression; however, the automatic processing of changes in body expression has not yet been studied systematically. The current study uses an oddball paradigm where neutral body actions served as standard stimuli, while fearful body expressions and other neutral body actions served as two different deviants to define body-related vMMN, and to compare the mechanisms underlying the processing of emotional changes to neutral postural changes. The results show a more negative vMMN amplitude for fear deviants 210–260 ms after stimulus onset which corresponds with the negativity bias that was obtained on the N190 component. In earlier time windows, the vMMN amplitude following the two types of deviant stimuli are identical. Therefore, we present a two-stage model for processing changes in body posture, where changes in body posture are processed in the first 170–210 ms, but emotional changes in the time window of 210–260 ms.

Seeing a Face in a Crowd of Emotional Voices: Changes in Perception and Cortisol in Response to Emotional Information across the Senses.

One source of information we glean from everyday experience, which guides social interaction, is assessing the emotional state of others. Emotional state can be expressed through several modalities: body posture or movements, body odor, touch, facial expression, or the intonation in a voice. Much research has examined emotional processing within one sensory modality or the transfer of emotional processing from one modality to another. Yet, less is known regarding interactions across different modalities when perceiving emotions, despite our common experience of seeing emotion in a face while hearing the corresponding emotion in a voice. Our study examined if visual and auditory emotions of matched valence (congruent) conferred stronger perceptual and physiological effects compared to visual and auditory emotions of unmatched valence (incongruent). We quantified how exposure to emotional faces and/or voices altered perception using psychophysics and how it altered a physiological proxy for stress or arousal using salivary cortisol. While we found no significant advantage of congruent over incongruent emotions, we found that changes in cortisol were associated with perceptual changes. Following exposure to negative emotional content, larger decreases in cortisol, indicative of less stress, correlated with more positive perceptual after-effects, indicative of stronger biases to see neutral faces as happier.

Toward Artificial Emotional Intelligence for Cooperative Social Human–Machine Interaction

The aptitude to identify the emotional states of others and response to exposed emotions is an important aspect of human social intelligence. Robots are expected to be prevalent in society to assist humans in various tasks. Human–robot interaction (HRI) is of critical importance in the assistive robotics sector. Smart digital assistants and assistive robots fail quite often when a request is not well defined verbally. When the assistant fails to provide services as desired, the person may exhibit an emotional response such as anger or frustration through expressions in their face and voice. It is critical that robots understand not only the language, but also human psychology. A novel affection-based perception architecture for cooperative HRIs is studied in this paper, where the agent is expected to recognize human emotional states, thus encourages a natural bonding between the human and the robotic artifact. We propose a method to close the loop using measured emotions to grade HRIs. This metric will be used as a reward mechanism to adjust the assistant’s behavior adaptively. Emotion levels from users are detected through vision and speech inputs processed by deep neural networks (NNs). Negative emotions exhibit a change in performance until the user is satisfied.