Discrimination Of Facial Expressions Research Articles

Нolistic and Analytic Processing of Facial Expressions: A Method of Multidimentional Scaling

Contemporary scientific literature is controversial about the two basic mechanisms that play a significant role in the identification and discrimination of facial expressions, that is, the analytic process (perceiving individual facial features) and the holistic process (perceiving the face as a Gestalt). Despite the large number of studies, the question of their relative contributions into the perception of facial expressions remains open. In the present study, we investigated the interaction of the analytic and holistic processing simultaneously using the methods of composite and inverted faces in the task of assessing the expression similarity. To achieve this goal, the method of multidimensional scaling was used to enable the construction of a subjective space of expression similarities and then to analyze the clustering of expressions under up-right and inverted exposure conditions. The results showed that: 1. In up-right conditions of face presentations holistic processing plays a more important role; 2. Under the inverted conditions, the role of analytic processing is increased that is manifested in a change of expression clustering in the subjective space of expression similarities; 3. The method of multidimensional scaling is productive for investigating the interaction of analytic and holistic encoding mechanisms of facial expressions; 4. Sharing methods of the composite and inverted faces is an effective tool for changing the impact of analytic and holistic processes in assessing expression similarities.

My body, your emotions: Viscerosomatic modulation of facial expression discrimination

Interoception reflects the ability to observe one’s innermost bodily states. Here, we assessed whether interoceptive accuracy (IA) is related to the empathic ability to discriminate others’ emotions. Participants (N = 111) completed a heartbeat tracking task, as well as an emotional go/no-go task with fearful and disgusted faces. Empathic facial mimicry during the go/no-go task was measured using electromyography (EMG) of the Corrugator Supercilii muscle. Higher IA was associated with higher perceptual sensitivity for emotional faces but was unrelated to response bias. Individuals higher in IA had stronger coupling between facial EMG and task performance. IA and facial EMG were associated with Go but not with NoGo trials, consistent with a specific modulation of perceptual sensitivity. These results suggest that tuning into one’s own viscerosomatic signals relates to empathic mimicry and perception of others’ emotional states.

Discrimination of facial expressions and pain through different viewing distances

Discrimination of facial expressions and pain through different viewing distances

The impact of gender on visual strategies underlying the discrimination of facial expressions of pain.

The impact of gender on visual strategies underlying the discrimination of facial expressions of pain.

Brief mindfulness training enhances cognitive control in socioemotional contexts: Behavioral and neural evidence.

In social contexts, the dynamic nature of others’ emotions places unique demands on attention and emotion regulation. Mindfulness, characterized by heightened and receptive moment-to-moment attending, may be well-suited to meet these demands. In particular, mindfulness may support more effective cognitive control in social situations via efficient deployment of top-down attention. To test this, a randomized controlled study examined effects of mindfulness training (MT) on behavioral and neural (event-related potentials [ERPs]) responses during an emotional go/no-go task that tested cognitive control in the context of emotional facial expressions that tend to elicit approach or avoidance behavior. Participants (N = 66) were randomly assigned to four brief (20 min) MT sessions or to structurally equivalent book learning control sessions. Relative to the control group, MT led to improved discrimination of facial expressions, as indexed by d-prime, as well as more efficient cognitive control, as indexed by response time and accuracy, and particularly for those evidencing poorer discrimination and cognitive control at baseline. MT also produced better conflict monitoring of behavioral goal-prepotent response tendencies, as indexed by larger No-Go N200 ERP amplitudes, and particularly so for those with smaller No-Go amplitude at baseline. Overall, findings are consistent with MT’s potential to enhance deployment of early top-down attention to better meet the unique cognitive and emotional demands of socioemotional contexts, particularly for those with greater opportunity for change. Findings also suggest that early top-down attention deployment could be a cognitive mechanism correspondent to the present-oriented attention commonly used to explain regulatory benefits of mindfulness more broadly.

Functional decline in facial expression generation in older women: A cross-sectional study using three-dimensional morphometry.

Elderly people show a decline in the ability to decode facial expressions, but also experience age-related facial structure changes that may render their facial expressions harder to decode. However, to date there is no empirical evidence to support the latter mechanism. The objective of this study was to assess the effects of age on facial morphology at rest and during smiling, in younger (n = 100; age range, 18–32 years) and older (n = 30; age range, 55–65 years) Japanese women. Three-dimensional images of each subject’s face at rest and during smiling were obtained and wire mesh fitting was performed on each image to quantify the facial surface morphology. The mean node coordinates in each facial posture were compared between the groups using t-tests. Further, the node coordinates of the fitted mesh were entered into a principal component analysis (PCA) and a multifactor analysis of variance (MANOVA) to examine the direct interactions of aging and facial postures on the 3D facial morphology. The results indicated that there were significant age-related 3D facial changes in facial expression generation and the transition from resting to smiling produced a smaller amount of soft tissue movement in the older group than in the younger group. Further, 185 surface configuration variables were extracted and the variables were used to create four discriminant functions: the age-group discrimination for each facial expression, and the facial expression discrimination for each age group. For facial expression discrimination, the older group showed 80% accuracy with 2 of 66 significant variables, whereas the younger group showed 99% accuracy with 15 of 144 significant variables. These results indicate that in both facial expressions, the facial morphology was distinctly different in the younger and older subjects, and that in the older group, the facial morphology during smiling could not be as easily discriminated from the morphology at rest as in the younger group. These results may help to explain one aspect of the communication dysfunction observed in older people.

Hemispheric asymmetries in categorical facial expression perception.

Although many sensory phenomena vary continuously, humans tend to divide them into discrete categories with facial expressions being divided into categories such as happy, sad, anger, and fear. A critical effect of category use is categorical perception: same sized physical differences are better perceived if the difference occurs between two categories rather than within the same category. Here we investigate the lateralization of categorical perception of facial expressions. Categorical perception of facial expressions may be lateralized to the right hemisphere due to the intimacy of basic, possibly universal and innate, prototypical facial expression categories and face processing which is predominantly lateralized to the right hemisphere. Alternatively, facial expression categories may be a linguistic phenomenon and thus predominantly involve the left hemisphere. A visual half-field paradigm was used to assess categorical perception of morphed facial expressions running between happy-sad, and anger-fear. Across two experiments, the lateralization of categorical perception was found to be contingent upon previous exposure. Better between-than within-category discrimination of facial expressions was found in both visual half-fields when participants had previously been exposed to facial expression categories; but for naïve participants, categorical perception was restricted to the right visual hemifield, corresponding to the left cerebral hemisphere. Facial expressions presented to the right hemisphere are therefore not necessarily encoded in terms of their emotional expression category and such category-based encoding, when it does occur, may be due to the left hemisphere and so is likely to be subject to biases related to language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Spatial frequencies for accurate categorization and discrimination of facial expressions

Spatial frequencies for accurate categorization and discrimination of facial expressions

Infants Discriminate the Affective Expressions of their Peers: The Roles of Age and Familiarization Time.

Research examining infants' discrimination of affect often uses unfamiliar faces and voices of adults. Recently, research has examined infant discrimination of affect in familiar faces and voices. In much of this research, infants were habituated to the affective expressions using a "standard" 50% habituation criterion. We extend this line of research by examining infants' discrimination of unfamiliar peers', that is, 4-month-olds, dynamic, facial, and vocal affective expressions and assessing how discrimination is affected by changing the habituation criterion. In two experiments, using an infant-controlled habituation design, we explored 3- and 5-month-olds' discrimination of their peers' dynamic audiovisual displays of positive and negative expressions of affect. Results of Experiment 1, using a 50% habituation criterion, revealed that 5-month-olds, but not 3-month-olds discriminated the affective expressions of their peers. In Experiment 2, we examined whether 3-month-olds' lack of discrimination in Experiment 1 was a result of insufficient habituation (i.e., familiarization). Specifically, 3-month-olds were habituated using a 70% habituation criterion, providing them with longer familiarization time. Results revealed that using the more stringent habituation criterion, 3-month-olds showed longer habituation times, that is increased familiarization, and discriminated their peers' affective expressions. Results are discussed in terms of infants' discrimination of affect, the role of familiarization time, and limitations of the 50% habituation criterion.

F59. VISUALIZING MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF TRUSTWORTHY FACES IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

BackgroundThe ability to perceive, recognize and process own and others’ emotions is crucial for efficient and effective social communication. Many different tasks have been used to investigate impairments herein in patients with schizophrenia. Evidence suggests that perception, discrimination and recognition of affective facial expressions are impaired in schizophrenia patients. Importantly, not everyone may interpret the same facial expression similarly. People match their internal representation of specific facial expressions to perceived faces and variation in these internal representations may result in a distortion of social reality. The impairments in face and/or emotion processing and the bias toward a more negative experience may be causally related to degradation of the internal representation itself or to disturbances in the higher-order evaluation of visual input against functionally intact internal representations. In an attempt to develop ways of visualizing an individuals’ internal representation of an emotional face on a computer screen, we set out to visualize the representation of a male and a female face.MethodsWe use a data-driven technique, i.e. reverse correlation image classification (RCIC), which makes it possible to visualize internal representations of faces on computer screens. Participants judge noisy images of faces that are created by superimposing random noise on a single constant base face. The random noise distorts the base face at the pixel level, generating facial variation across stimuli that is fully unconstrained and unaffected by researchers’ a priori expectations. The participants’ responses to a large number of faces are used to model the facial information that was idiosyncratically diagnostic for the judgments. This analysis yields a classification image (CI) for each participant, which visualizes the facial characteristics that drive judgments of emotional expressions (i.e., their internal representation).We introduce an objective metric, i.e. infoVal, using gender as proof-of-principle. infoVal quantifies the probability that an observed CI was not generated by a random process and is equivalent to a modified z score. First, we test the association between infoVal and more common markers of data quality, i.e. the subjective recognizability, objective discriminability and test-retest reliability of CIs (convergent validity). Second, we use RCIC to investigate and reconstruct the mental representation of trustworthiness as expressed on the face in 32 patients with schizophrenia and 39 controls.ResultsSubjective ratings showed that male and female CIs were more strongly associated with masculinity and femininity, respectively, when infoVal scores where high (p<.001). Second, infoVal scores were highly correlated with test-retest reliability, i.e., higher scores corresponded with higher test-retest reliability (p<1x10-13).Preliminary analyses of the RCIC task on the internal representation of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces showed that both patients and controls are capable of performing the task adequately. Data-driven multidimensional scaling of the classification images implicate 3 clusters of images, reflecting untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy faces. These first analyses suggest that there is no evidence for differences in internal representation of (un)trustworthy faces between patients and controls.DiscussionWe showed how infoVal scores can facilitate the interpretation of CIs. This opens the way to comprehensively investigate internal representations of emotional faces in patients with schizophrenia.

Comparison of visual and auditory emotion recognition in patients with cerebellar and Parkinson´s disease

ABSTRACTWidespread cortical-subcortical networks are involved in the recognition and discrimination of emotional contents of facial and vocal expression, whereby the cerebellum and basal ganglia are two subcortical regions implicated in these networks with limited evidence to their specific contributions. To investigate this we compared patients with circumscribed cerebellar lesions and patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) on an approved test battery. We studied two groups with subcortical disease, focal cerebellar infarction (n = 22) and PD (n = 22), and a neurological control group with focal supratentorial ischemia (SI) (n = 16) were. Assessments were according to inpatient protocols for neuropsychological routine evaluation, including tests of memory, executive function and attention. Participants completed the Tuebingen Affect Battery, a recognized measure of recognition and discrimination of facial and vocal expression of emotion. As a result, cerebellar lesions were associated with greater impairment than PD and SI in recognition and discrimination of cues of both facial and vocal expressions of differing basic emotions. No confounding effect of other cognitive domains, particularly executive function and attention, was found. Taken together, our findings suggest a specific contribution of the cerebellum to cerebral networks that process facial and vocal emotion expression, related to rapid decisions regulating appropriate behavioral responses in social environments.

Facial expressions as a model to test the role of the sensorimotor system in the visual perception of the actions.

A long-term debate concerns whether the sensorimotor coding carried out during transitive actions observation reflects the low-level movement implementation details or the movement goals. On the contrary, phonemes and emotional facial expressions are intransitive actions that do not fall into this debate. The investigation of phonemes discrimination has proven to be a good model to demonstrate that the sensorimotor system plays a role in understanding actions acoustically presented. In the present study, we adapted the experimental paradigms already used in phonemes discrimination during face posture manipulation, to the discrimination of emotional facial expressions. We submitted participants to a lower or to an upper face posture manipulation during the execution of a four alternative labelling task of pictures randomly taken from four morphed continua between two emotional facial expressions. The results showed that the implementation of low-level movement details influence the discrimination of ambiguous facial expressions differing for a specific involvement of those movement details. These findings indicate that facial expressions discrimination is a good model to test the role of the sensorimotor system in the perception of actions visually presented.

Visual processing in patients with age-related macular degeneration performing a face detection test.

PurposePeople with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) have difficulties in familiar face recognition and facial expression discrimination. Our aim was to evaluate the visual processing of faces in AMD patients and whether this would be improved by anti-vascular endothelial growth factor therapy. This was a prospective interventional cohort study.PatientsTwelve patients with monocular wet AMD and 6 control subjects were recruited. Face detection processes were studied using cortical event-related potentials (ERPs). Patients received 3 bevacizumab intravitreal injections to the single affected eye. At baseline and 4–6 weeks after the last injection, clinical presentation and ERPs of the face task were evaluated. Face pictures were shown as targets (16.7%) among standard pictures of pixelated faces in an oddball-type paradigm.ResultsFace pictures elicited well-defined electrical components in occipital and parieto-occipital cortical areas at baseline and after treatment. The face-specific N170 component was evident in all subjects with longer peak latency in patients than in controls (170±13 vs 155±14, P=0.032). Unexpectedly, an early component reflecting unintentional prediction of perceiving a face, that is, deviance-related negativity, was present in patients and controls. Visual acuity of the affected eye seemed improved in patients from logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution 0.71 (±0.33) to 0.52 (±0.39) by 119 (±23) days without accompanying significant change in face-specific ERPs.ConclusionsMonocular wet AMD distinctly influenced face-specific brain electrophysiological components. However, the anti-vascular endothelial growth factor treatment did not improve the binocular face detection ability. The EudraCT number of this study is 2012-000765-20.

62.1 Visualizing Mental Representations of Emotional Faces in Schizophrenia

Background: The ability to perceive, recognize and process own and others’ emotions is crucial for efficient and effective social communication. Many different tasks have been used to investigate impairments herein in patients with schizophrenia. Evidence suggests that perception, discrimination and recognition of affective facial expressions are impaired in schizophrenia patients (Green, Horan & Lee, 2015; Chan et al 2010). Importantly, not everyone may interpret the same facial expression similarly. People match their internal representation of specific facial expressions to perceived faces and variation in these internal representations may result in distortions of social reality. The impairments in face and/or emotion processing and the bias toward a more negative experience may be causally related to degradation of the internal representation itself or to disturbances in the higher order evaluation of visual input against functionally intact internal representations. Methods: We use a data-driven technique of psychophysical reverse correlation, which makes it possible to visualize internal representations on computer screens. Participants judge noisy images of faces that are created by superimposing random noise on a single constant base face. The random noise distorts the base face at the pixel level, generating facial variation across stimuli that is fully unconstrained and unaffected by researchers’ a priori expectations. The participants’ responses to a large number of faces are then used to model the facial information that was idiosyncratically diagnostic for the judgments. This analysis yields a classification image (CI) for each participant, which visualizes the facial characteristics that drive judgments of emotional expressions (i.e., their internal representation). Specifically, we used reverse correlation image classification (RCIC) to investigate and reconstruct the mental representation of trustworthiness as expressed on the face. Results: Thus far, we have reliable data from 11 patients and 9 controls. While our results are preliminary, they show that patients are capable of performing the task adequately. Both a visual inspection of the group-level visualizations of the 3 constructs probed (i.e., untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy) as well as the computed correlations between these visualizations suggest that the internal representation of these constructs is less expressive in patients when compared to controls. Conclusion: Being able to visualize mental representations of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces in patients with schizophrenia opens up the possibility of further use of RCIC tasks in the investigation of emotion-processing deficiencies in schizophrenia.

Discrimination of emotional facial expressions by tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella).

Tufted or brown capuchin monkeys (Sapajus apella) have been shown to recognize conspecific faces as well as categorize them according to group membership. Little is known, though, about their capacity to differentiate between emotionally charged facial expressions or whether facial expressions are processed as a collection of features or configurally (i.e., as a whole). In 3 experiments, we examined whether tufted capuchins (a) differentiate photographs of neutral faces from either affiliative or agonistic expressions, (b) use relevant facial features to make such choices or view the expression as a whole, and (c) demonstrate an inversion effect for facial expressions suggestive of configural processing. Using an oddity paradigm presented on a computer touchscreen, we collected data from 9 adult and subadult monkeys. Subjects discriminated between emotional and neutral expressions with an exceptionally high success rate, including differentiating open-mouth threats from neutral expressions even when the latter contained varying degrees of visible teeth and mouth opening. They also showed an inversion effect for facial expressions, results that may indicate that quickly recognizing expressions does not originate solely from feature-based processing but likely a combination of relational processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Social Anxiety and Interpretation Bias: Effect of Positive Priming.

This study examined how positive-scale assessment of ambiguous social stimuli affects interpretation bias in social anxiety. Participants with high and low social anxiety (N = 60) performed a facial expression discrimination task to assess interpretation bias. Participants were then randomly assigned to assess the emotion of briefly presented faces either on a negative or on a positive scale. They subsequently repeated the facial expression discrimination task. Participants with high versus low social anxiety made more negative interpretations of ambiguous facial expressions. However, those in the positive-scale assessment condition subsequently showed reduced negative interpretations of ambiguous facial expressions. These results suggest that interpretation bias in social anxiety could be mediated by positive priming rather than an outright negative bias.

Emotion Evaluation and Social Inference Impairments in Huntington's Disease.

Huntington's disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disorder characterised by motor, cognitive and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Recent research has established that individuals with HD display reduced discrimination of emotional facial expressions and impaired higher-order social cognitive skills, including 'theory of mind'. This study aimed to further characterise the emotion evaluation and theory of mind deficits in HD in an ecologically-valid context, and determine their impact on socially-relevant functional abilities. A sample of 17 HD participants and 24 healthy controls were assessed using The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT), together with additional self- and informant rated measures of cognition, social communication, empathy and neuropsychiatric symptoms. Participants with HD showed significant difficulties in evaluating negative emotions, and understanding sincere, sarcastic and 'paradoxical sarcastic' statements, compared with controls. The ability to evaluate positive emotions was negatively correlated with behavioural problems, but no other clinical, behavioural or communication measures correlated significantly with TASIT subscales. These findings suggest that social cognitive difficulties in symptomatic HD may be underpinned by more generalised impairments, related to deciphering social exchanges, as opposed to a selective theory of mind deficit. Such difficulties have the potential to place significant strain on interpersonal relationships, and thus warrant thorough clinical assessment, using ecologically-valid tools, to promote early detection and development of person-centred interventions.

PT551. Recognition and discrimination of facial emotion expression in Children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder

PT551. Recognition and discrimination of facial emotion expression in Children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder

Putting the face in context: Body expressions impact facial emotion processing in human infants

Body expressions exert strong contextual effects on facial emotion perception in adults. Specifically, conflicting body cues hamper the recognition of emotion from faces, as evident on both the behavioral and neural level. We examined the developmental origins of the neural processes involved in emotion perception across body and face in 8-month-old infants by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We primed infants with body postures (fearful, happy) that were followed by either congruent or incongruent facial expressions. Our results revealed that body expressions impact facial emotion processing and that incongruent body cues impair the neural discrimination of emotional facial expressions. Priming effects were associated with attentional and recognition memory processes, as reflected in a modulation of the Nc and Pc evoked at anterior electrodes. These findings demonstrate that 8-month-old infants possess neural mechanisms that allow for the integration of emotion across body and face, providing evidence for the early developmental emergence of context-sensitive facial emotion perception.

Altering sensorimotor feedback disrupts visual discrimination of facial expressions.

Looking at another person's facial expression of emotion can trigger the same neural processes involved in producing the expression, and such responses play a functional role in emotion recognition. Disrupting individuals' facial action, for example, interferes with verbal emotion recognition tasks. We tested the hypothesis that facial responses also play a functional role in the perceptual processing of emotional expressions. We altered the facial action of participants with a gel facemask while they performed a task that involved distinguishing target expressions from highly similar distractors. Relative to control participants, participants in the facemask condition demonstrated inferior perceptual discrimination of facial expressions, but not of nonface stimuli. The findings suggest that somatosensory/motor processes involving the face contribute to the visual perceptual-and not just conceptual-processing of facial expressions. More broadly, our study contributes to growing evidence for the fundamentally interactive nature of the perceptual inputs from different sensory modalities.