Affective Facial Expressions Research Articles

Addressing perceptual insensitivity to facial affect in violent offenders: first evidence for the efficacy of a novel implicit training approach

Although impaired recognition of affective facial expressions has been conclusively linked to antisocial behavior, little is known about the modifiability of this deficit. This study investigated whether and under which circumstances the proposed perceptual insensitivity can be addressed with a brief implicit training approach. Facial affect recognition was assessed with an animated morph task, in which the participants (44 male incarcerated violent offenders and 43 matched controls) identified the onset of emotional expressions in animated morph clips that gradually changed from neutral to one of the six basic emotions. Half of the offenders were then implicitly trained to direct attention to salient face regions (attention training, AT) using a modified dot-probe task. The other half underwent the same protocol but the intensity level of the presented expressions was additionally manipulated over the course of training sessions (sensitivity to emotional expressions training, SEE training). Subsequently, participants were reassessed with the animated morph task. Facial affect recognition was significantly impaired in violent offenders as compared with controls. Further, our results indicate that only the SEE training group exhibited a pronounced improvement in emotion recognition. We demonstrated for the first time that perceptual insensitivity to facial affect can be addressed by an implicit training that directs attention to salient regions of a face and gradually decreases the intensity of the emotional expression. Future studies should focus on the potential of this intervention to effectively increase empathy and inhibit violent behavior in antisocial individuals.

Random Sample

Adding to an often-used set of facial expression photographs of Caucasian adults, psychologists are now testing a new, multiethnic Child Affective Facial Expression set to see how well adults and children alike can identify children's facial expressions. And an expedition to study possible links between low blood oxygen levels and blood clot formation sets out on a climb toward the summit of France's Mont Blanc this week.

Affective facial expression processing in 15-month-old infants who have experienced maltreatment: an event-related potential study.

This study examined the neural correlates of facial affect processing in 15 month-old maltreated and nonmaltreated infants. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were elicited while infants passively viewed standardized pictures of female models posing angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Differences between maltreated (N = 25) and nonmaltreated (N = 20) infants were observed on three ERP components: P1, P260, and Nc. The results for the P260 waveform were consistent with previous ERP findings in older maltreated children, showing a hyperresponsivity to angry facial affect relative to happy in maltreated infants. However, the findings for the P1 and Nc indicated a hyperresponsivity to relative affective novelty, whereby the maltreated infants had greater amplitude in response to happy facial affect, whereas nonmaltreated infants had greater responsivity to angry faces. The results provided further support for the hypothesis that the experience of maltreatment and the predominantly negative emotional tone in maltreating families alters the functioning of neural systems associated with the processing of facial emotion. In particular, the findings suggested that at this early stage in the development of facial affect recognition, novelty of facial emotion is especially salient. These results exemplify the importance of early preventive interventions focused on emotion for children who have experienced maltreatment early in life.

Altered State and Trait Disgust in Borderline Personality Disorder

Clinical experience suggests that the emotion disgust plays an important role in borderline personality disorder (BPD). We investigated 30 female patients with BPD and 30 healthy women who answered different measures of trait disgust, specifically disgust proneness, disgust sensitivity, and self-disgust. Moreover, all participants rated affective facial expressions as well as affective scenes according to perceived or elicited basic emotions. The patients with BPD reported elevated trait disgust, especially for the area of self-disgust. They also rated facial expressions of disgust as more intense than did the healthy women but only when the person who displayed this emotion was male. This sex-specific disgust bias was independent of depression and experienced sexual/physical abuse in the clinical group. Altogether, the patients with BPD showed a broad spectrum of altered disgust processes, which was positively correlated with disorder severity. Consequently, the assessment of disgust reactivity should be introduced as a diagnostic tool for this disorder.

Different Stages in Attentional Processing of Facial Expressions of Pain: A Dot-Probe Task Modification

The way in which individuals attend to pain-related stimuli is thought to affect their pain experience. Early and late stages of processing, with shifts from attentional engagement to disengagement (avoidance), have been identified, but rarely investigated in the same protocol. Therefore, the present study aimed to consider 2 time frames that might be indicative of attentional engagement and disengagement. One hundred pain-free individuals performed a modified dot-probe task with pictorial stimuli displaying affective facial expressions (ie, pain, anger, joy, neutral face), presented either for 100 ms or for 500 ms. Because fear of pain has been found to moderate attentional processing of pain stimuli, the Fear of Pain Questionnaire (FPQ III) was also administered. Results indicated both early attentional engagement and later disengagement (avoidance) for negative facial expressions (anger, pain). This pattern was most prominent for pain faces and among those participants high in pain-related fear. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that the dot-probe task is suitable to investigate different stages of attentional processing for pain-related stimuli. In accordance with the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, pain-related stimuli seem to attract attention quickly, but attentional avoidance may occur shortly after. PerspectiveWe focused on different stages of attentional processing of pain faces in pain-free individuals. Results highlight the importance of distinguishing between early (engagement) and later (disengagement) components of attention, as well as considering the role that fear of pain has in understanding the nature of these effects.

Autism as a developmental disorder in intentional movement and affective engagement.

We review evidence that autistic spectrum disorders have their origin in early prenatal failure of development in systems that program timing, serial coordination and prospective control of movements, and that regulate affective evaluations of experiences. There are effects in early infancy, before medical diagnosis, especially in motor sequencing, selective or exploratory attention, affective expression and intersubjective engagement with parents. These are followed by retardation of cognitive development and language learning in the second or third year, which lead to a diagnosis of ASD. The early signs relate to abnormalities that have been found in brain stem systems and cerebellum in the embryo or early fetal stage, before the cerebral neocortex is functional, and they have clear consequences in infancy when neocortical systems are intensively elaborated. We propose, with evidence of the disturbances of posture, locomotion and prospective motor control in children with autism, as well as of their facial expression of interest and affect, and attention to other persons' expressions, that examination of the psychobiology of motor affective disorders, rather than later developing cognitive or linguistic ones, may facilitate early diagnosis. Research in this area may also explain how intense interaction, imitation or “expressive art” therapies, which respond intimately with motor activities, are effective at later stages. Exceptional talents of some autistic people may be acquired compensations for basic problems with expectant self-regulations of movement, attention and emotion.

Genetic variants affecting the neural processing of human facial expressions: evidence using a genome-wide functional imaging approach

Human faces present crucial visual information for social interaction. Specialized brain regions are involved in the perception of faces, with the fusiform face area (FFA) a key neuronal substrate. Face processing is genetically controlled, but by which specific genes is unknown. A genome-wide approach identified common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with areas of increased brain activity in response to affective facial expressions, measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. SNPs in 20 genetic regions were linked with neural responses to negative facial expressions in a Norwegian sample (n=246), which included patients with mental illness. Three genetic regions were linked with FFA activation in a further discovery experiment using positive facial expressions and involving many of the same individuals (n=284). Two of these three regions showed significant association with right FFA activation to negative facial expressions in an independent North American replication sample of healthy Caucasians (n=85, 3q26.31, P=0.004; 20p12.3, P=0.045). The activation patterns were particularly striking for the SNP in 3q26.31, which lies in a gene TMEM212; only the FFA was activated. The specialized function of this brain region suggests that TMEM212 could contribute to the innate architecture of face processing.

Facial Expression Analysis Based on Synergetic Trust Model in Proactive Environment

With the rapid development of affective computing and facial expression analysis,it is important to understand trusted facial expressions during human-computer interaction.This paper presents a novel approach for synergetic trust analysis of facial expression.Based on the cooperative mechanism between facial expression features and affective trust evidences,the synergy theory is applied to extend the evidences and to achieve the reasoning algorithm in a proactive environment.The resultant model from cooperative interaction and synergetic dependence evaluation is potentially capable of analyzing the trusted facial expression.Experiments have been conducted to evaluate the rationality of the approach.It is suggested that synergetic trust model can reduce the subjective impacts of overall analysis and perform at a higher credibility can allow the user to further comprehend affective computing with trust factors.

Affect-specific activation of shared networks for perception and execution of facial expressions

Previous studies have shown overlapping neural activations for observation and execution or imitation of emotional facial expressions. These shared representations have been assumed to provide indirect evidence for a human mirror neuron system, which is suggested to be a prerequisite of action comprehension. We aimed at clarifying whether shared representations in and beyond human mirror areas are specifically activated by affective facial expressions or whether they are activated by facial expressions independent of the emotional meaning. During neuroimaging, participants observed and executed happy and non-emotional facial expressions. Shared representations were revealed for happy facial expressions in the pars opercularis, the precentral gyrus, in the superior temporal gyrus/medial temporal gyrus (MTG), in the pre-supplementary motor area and in the right amygdala. All areas showed less pronounced activation in the non-emotional condition. When directly compared, significant stronger neural responses emerged for happy facial expressions in the pre-supplementary motor area and in the MTG than for non-emotional stimuli. We assume that activation of shared representations depends on the affect and (social) relevance of the facial expression. The pre-supplementary motor area is a core-shared representation-structure supporting observation and execution of affective contagious facial expressions and might have a modulatory role during the preparation of executing happy facial expressions.

Stability of Facial Affective Expressions in Schizophrenia

Thirty-two videorecorded interviews were conducted by two interviewers with eight patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Each patient was interviewed four times: three weekly interviews by the first interviewer and one additional interview by the second interviewer. 64 selected sequences where the patients were speaking about psychotic experiences were scored for facial affective behaviour with Emotion Facial Action Coding System (EMFACS). In accordance with previous research, the results show that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia express negative facial affectivity. Facial affective behaviour seems not to be dependent on temporality, since within-subjects ANOVA revealed no substantial changes in the amount of affects displayed across the weekly interview occasions. Whereas previous findings found contempt to be the most frequent affect in patients, in the present material disgust was as common, but depended on the interviewer. The results suggest that facial affectivity in these patients is primarily dominated by the negative emotions of disgust and, to a lesser extent, contempt and implies that this seems to be a fairly stable feature.

Anxiety disorders in adolescence are associated with impaired facial expression recognition to negative valence

Objective The aim of the present study was to test the ability of adolescents with a current anxiety diagnosis to recognize facial affective expressions, compared to those without an anxiety disorder. Methods Forty cases and 27 controls were selected from a larger cross sectional community sample of adolescents, aged from 10 to 17 years old. Adolescent’s facial recognition of six human emotions (sadness, anger, disgust, happy, surprise and fear) and neutral faces was assessed through a facial labeling test using Ekman’s Pictures of Facial Affect (POFA). Results Adolescents with anxiety disorders had a higher mean number of errors in angry faces as compared to controls: 3.1 (SD = 1.13) vs. 2.5 (SD = 2.5), OR = 1.72 (CI95% 1.02 to 2.89; p = 0.040). However, they named neutral faces more accurately than adolescents without anxiety diagnosis: 15% of cases vs. 37.1% of controls presented at least one error in neutral faces, OR = 3.46 (CI95% 1.02 to 11.7; p = 0.047). No differences were found considering other human emotions or on the distribution of errors in each emotional face between the groups. Conclusion Our findings support an anxiety-mediated influence on the recognition of facial expressions in adolescence. These difficulty in recognizing angry faces and more accuracy in naming neutral faces may lead to misinterpretation of social clues and can explain some aspects of the impairment in social interactions in adolescents with anxiety disorders.

Habitual Emotion Regulation and the Facial Grimace

Summary.-Images of pleasant scenes usually produce increased activity over the zygomaticus major muscie, as measured by electromyography (EMG), while less activity is elicited by unpleasant images. However, increases in zygomaticus major EMG activity while viewing unpleasant images have occasionally been reported in the literature on affective facial expression (i.e., "grimacing"). To examine the possibility that individual differences in emotion regulation might be responsible for this inconsistently observed phenomenon, the habitual emotion regulation tendencies of 63 participants (32 women) were assessed and categorized according to their regulatory tendencies. Participants viewed emotionally salient images while zygomaticus major EMG activity was recorded. Participants also provided self-report ratings of their experienced emotional valence and arousal while viewing the pictures. Despite demonstrating intact affective ratings, the "grimacing" pattern of zygomaticus major activity was observed in those who were less likely to use the cognitive reappraisal strategy to regulate their emotions.

Impact of chronic hypercortisolemia on affective processing

Cushing syndrome (CS) is the classic condition of cortisol dysregulation, and cortisol dysregulation is the prototypic finding in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). We hypothesized that subjects with active CS would show dysfunction in frontal and limbic structures relevant to affective networks, and also manifest poorer facial affect identification accuracy, a finding reported in MDD. Twenty-one patients with confirmed CS (20 ACTH-dependent and 1 ACTH-independent) were compared to 21 healthy control subjects. Identification of affective facial expressions (Facial Emotion Perception Test) was conducted in a 3 Tesla GE fMRI scanner using BOLD fMRI signal. The impact of disease (illness duration, current hormone elevation and degree of disruption of circadian rhythm), performance, and comorbid conditions secondary to hypercortisolemia were evaluated. CS patients made more errors in categorizing facial expressions and had less activation in left anterior superior temporal gyrus, a region important in emotion processing. CS patients showed higher activation in frontal, medial, and subcortical regions relative to controls. Two regions of elevated activation in CS, left middle frontal and lateral posterior/pulvinar areas, were positively correlated with accuracy in emotion identification in the CS group, reflecting compensatory recruitment. In addition, within the CS group, greater activation in left dorsal anterior cingulate was related to greater severity of hormone dysregulation. In conclusion, cortisol dysregulation in CS patients is associated with problems in accuracy of affective discrimination and altered activation of brain structures relevant to emotion perception, processing and regulation, similar to the performance decrements and brain regions shown to be dysfunctional in MDD.This article is part of a Special Issue entitled ‘Anxiety and Depression’.

Affective facial expression processing in young children who have experienced maltreatment during the first year of life: An event-related potential study

This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural correlates of facial affect processing in maltreated and nonmaltreated children at 42 months of age. ERPs elicited while children passively viewed standardized pictures of female models posing angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions were examined, and differences between maltreated (N = 46) and nonmaltreated (N = 25) children were reported. Three occipital components (P1, N170, and P400) and four frontal-central components (N150, P240, Nc, and a positive slow wave [PSW]) were identified. Findings revealed that maltreated children had greater P1 and P400 amplitude in response to angry facial affect compared to other emotions, and compared to nonmaltreated children. N170 amplitude was greater in response to happy compared to angry in the maltreated group. For the P240 component, maltreated children had greater amplitude in response to angry facial expressions relative to happy, whereas children in the nonmaltreated group had greater P240 amplitude in response to happy relative to angry facial affect. Further, the nonmaltreated group had greater PSW amplitude in response to angry facial affect, whereas those in the maltreated group showed greater PSW amplitude to happy facial expressions. The results provided further support for the hypothesis that the experience of maltreatment and the predominantly negative emotional tone in maltreating families alters the functioning of neural systems associated with the identification and processing of facial emotion. These results exemplify the importance of early preventive interventions focused on emotion for children who have experienced maltreatment early in life.

Temporal dissociation in the brain processing of pain and anger faces with different intensities of emotional expression

Facial expression is one of the most relevant nonverbal behaviors in the communication of pain. However, little is known about brain processing of pain expressions in comparison with other affective facial expressions. The present experiment aimed to examine the effects of pain expression intensity on affective ratings and brain dynamics by recording electroencephalography (EEG) from 20 female healthy volunteers 18–24 years of age. Participants were asked to rate the affective characteristics of 144 stimuli depicting facial expressions of pain and anger with 3 level of intensities (high, mild, and low), as well as neutral faces. Results indicated that pain faces were judged as more unpleasant and arousing than anger and neutral faces for all intensity levels. EEG results further showed that facial expressions of pain elicited more enhanced amplitudes of the visual evoked potentials than anger and neutral faces in the latency between 350 and 550milliseconds after stimulus onset; whereas anger faces elicited greater P200 amplitudes than pain and neutral faces. In addition, more increased theta activity in the latency of 200 to 400milliseconds after stimulus onset was observed to high-intense as compared with low-intense facial expressions. These findings indicate that brain activity elicited by affective faces is modulated by the intensity of facial expressions and suggest the involvement of different brain mechanisms during the processing and recognition of facial expressions of pain and anger in healthy volunteers.Facial expression is one of the most relevant nonverbal behaviors in the communication of pain. Here, neurophysiological evidence is provided regarding the differential processing of pain and anger faces with high and low intensities of emotional expression, which may provide a framework for future investigations of psychosocial factors involved in the maintenance of chronic pain.

Association between depression severity and amygdala reactivity during sad face viewing in depressed preschoolers: An fMRI study

Background Previous research has indicated that symptom severity and amygdala reactivity during the viewing of facial expressions of emotion are related in depression. However, it remains unclear how early in development this can be detected. Methods A sample of 11 depressed preschoolers (4.5 ± 0.8; 6 males) participated in an fMRI experiment where they viewed facial expressions of emotion. A region of interest approach was used in order to examine the relationship between amygdala activation and depression severity. Additional whole-brain analyses were conducted and the results of these analyses were examined for potential relationships with depression severity. Results Findings indicated that depressed preschoolers exhibited a significant positive relationship between depression severity and right amygdala activity when viewing facial expressions of negative affect. In addition, we found a significant positive relationship between degree of functional activation in the occipital cortex while viewing faces and level of depression severity. Limitations Additional research including a larger sample of depressed preschoolers, as well as a healthy comparison group, is needed to replicate the current findings and examine their specificity at this age. Conclusions This is the first study directly examining brain function in depressed preschoolers. The results suggest that, similar to older children and adults with depression, amygdala responsivity and degree of depression severity are related as early as age 3.

Facial expressions of pain modulate observer's long‐latency responses in superior temporal sulcus

The strength of brain responses to others' pain has been shown to depend on the intensity of the observed pain. To investigate the temporal profile of such modulation, we recorded neuromagnetic brain responses of healthy subjects to facial expressions of pain. The subjects observed grayscale photos of the faces of genuine chronic pain patients when the patients were suffering from their ordinary pain (Chronic) and when the patients' pain was transiently intensified (Provoked). The cortical activation sequence during observation of the facial expressions of pain advanced from occipital to temporo-occipital areas, and it differed between Provoked and Chronic pain expressions in the right middle superior temporal sulcus (STS) at 300-500 ms: the responses were about a third stronger for Provoked than Chronic pain faces. Furthermore, the responses to Provoked pain faces were about 40% stronger in the right than the left STS, and they decreased from the first to the second measurement session by one-fourth, whereas no similar decrease in responses was found for Chronic pain faces. Thus, the STS responses to the pain expressions were modulated by the intensity of the observed pain and by stimulus repetition; the location and latency of the responses suggest close similarities between processing of pain and other affective facial expressions.

ELOQUENT ACTION: THE BODY AND MEANING IN EARLY COMMEDIA DELL'ARTE

One of the things that strikes one most forcibly in surviving images of early commedia dell'arte is its enigmatic physicality, the manner in which its actors everywhere adopt postures and make gestures that seem not merely emphatic and exaggerated but almost hieroglyphic, full of some additional implication, laden with a figural and emblematic resonance that we sense but no longer see. In general terms, this quality is easily understood, as the body clearly served in commedia as a complex and polyvalent instrument of expression. Its gestures and movements were, as in all theatre, indexically linked to dramatic action, and they also served, as in much masked drama, as surrogates for the facial expression of affect, in that the movements and aspects of the whole body were enlisted to articulate the motions and mien of a veiled face and to overcome or play upon the sensation of estranged speech produced by the half-mask's bifurcation of the visage. Moreover, in a manner less familiar but illustrated well in Fig. 1, these movements and aspects also functioned as expressions in their own right, not articulating the affect or expression attendant upon immediate speech or situation or delineating the lines of external action but signaling the many impulses and various appetites of the world, the varied aspects of all persons and of the body itself, and invoking at times as their implicatory context human nature, common character, and identity rather than situation, attitude, or emotion.

Startle modulation by affective faces

Startle reflex modulation by affective pictures is a well-established effect in human emotion research. However, much less is known about startle modulation by affective faces, despite the growing evidence that facial expressions robustly activate emotion-related brain circuits. In this study, acoustic startle probes were administered to 37 young adult participants (20 women) during the viewing of slides from the Pictures of Facial Affect set including neutral, happy, angry, and fearful faces. The effect of expression valence (happy, neutral, and negative) on startle magnitude was highly significant ( p < .001). Startle reflex was strongly potentiated by negative expressions (fearful and angry), however, no attenuation by happy faces was observed. A significant valence by gender interaction suggests stronger startle potentiation effects in females. These results demonstrate that affective facial expressions can produce significant modulation of the startle reflex.

Categorical perception of affective and linguistic facial expressions

Two experiments investigated categorical perception (CP) effects for affective facial expressions and linguistic facial expressions from American Sign Language (ASL) for Deaf native signers and hearing non-signers. Facial expressions were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) or in an ASL verb context (Experiment 2). Participants performed ABX discrimination and identification tasks on morphed affective and linguistic facial expression continua. The continua were created by morphing end-point photo exemplars into 11 images, changing linearly from one expression to another in equal steps. For both affective and linguistic expressions, hearing non-signers exhibited better discrimination across category boundaries than within categories for both experiments, thus replicating previous results with affective expressions and demonstrating CP effects for non-canonical facial expressions. Deaf signers, however, showed significant CP effects only for linguistic facial expressions. Subsequent analyses indicated that order of presentation influenced signers’ response time performance for affective facial expressions: viewing linguistic facial expressions first slowed response time for affective facial expressions. We conclude that CP effects for affective facial expressions can be influenced by language experience.