Facial Expressions Of Disgust Research Articles

Language access differentially alters functional connectivity during emotion perception across cultures.

It is often assumed that the ability to recognize the emotions of others is reflexive and automatic, driven only by observable facial muscle configurations. However, research suggests that accumulated emotion concept knowledge shapes the way people perceive the emotional meaning of others' facial muscle movements. Cultural upbringing can shape an individual's concept knowledge, such as expectations about which facial muscle configurations convey anger, disgust, or sadness. Additionally, growing evidence suggests that access to emotion category words, such as "anger," facilitates access to such emotion concept knowledge and in turn facilitates emotion perception. To investigate the impact of cultural influence and emotion concept accessibility on emotion perception, participants from two cultural groups (Chinese and White Americans) completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session to assess functional connectivity between brain regions during emotion perception. Across four blocks, participants were primed with either English emotion category words ("anger," "disgust") or control text (XXXXXX) before viewing images of White American actors posing facial muscle configurations that are stereotypical of anger and disgust in the United States. We found that when primed with "disgust" versus control text prior to seeing disgusted facial expressions, Chinese participants showed a significant decrease in functional connectivity between a region associated with semantic retrieval (the inferior frontal gyrus) and regions associated with semantic processing, visual perception, and social cognition. Priming the word "anger" did not impact functional connectivity for Chinese participants relative to control text, and priming neither "disgust" nor "anger" impacted functional connectivity for White American participants. These findings provide preliminary evidence that emotion concept accessibility differentially impacts perception based on participants' cultural background.

Implicit self-esteem and self-esteem discrepancy predict sensitivity to perceive dynamic facial expressions

The current study examined the relationship between Explicit Self-Esteem (ESE), Implicit Self-Esteem (ISE), and the size of discrepancy between them (SEDS) in relation to sensitivity to emotional facial cues signifying acceptance (happy facial expressions), rejection (angry and disgusted facial expressions), and fear. The results reveal a significant association between ISE and sensitivity to negative emotions, with the SEDS significantly predicting rejection cue sensitivity. Moreover, higher scores in psychological wellbeing were observed in individuals with higher ESE, higher ISE, and smaller ESE-ISE discrepancies. These findings not only support the sociometer theory, but also highlight the complex relationship between self-esteem dimensions, emotional sensitivity, and psychological wellbeing, highlighting the need for a more integrative approach in self-esteem research.

The impact of spontaneity and presentation mode on the ingroup advantage in recognizing angry and disgusted facial expressions

The impact of spontaneity and presentation mode on the ingroup advantage in recognizing angry and disgusted facial expressions

Lack of speeded disengagement from facial expressions of disgust in remitted major depressive disorder: Evidence from an eye-movement study

Acute major depression is characterized by specific abnormalities in the way emotional material is attended to. In late stages of stimulus processing, clinically depressed and dysphoric individuals show difficulties to disengage attention from emotionally negative material. It is unclear, however, whether aberrant disengagement is a transitory attentional phenomenon tied to depressive symptoms, or whether it constitutes a more stable disposition that outlast the symptomatic episode. To address this issue, the current study examined 39 currently euthymic individuals previously affected by major depression (RMD) and 40 healthy control participants reporting no lifetime psychopathology (ND). We used a gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm designed to separately assess the attentional components of engagement and disengagement when viewing facial expressions of sadness, disgust and happiness. Never-depressed healthy participants, but not remitted euthymic individuals, showed speeded disengagement from facial expressions of disgust. We propose that the lack of this distinct acceleration in previously depressed but fully remitted individuals might reflect an attentional disposition that carries over to euthymic phases of the disease. On the other hand, a tendency to disengage quickly from areas in the visual field that convey social disdain could potentially act as a protective, possibly mood-stabilizing bias in resilient individuals.

Facial emotion recognition difficulties may be specific to skin picking disorder, but could also be related to the presence of alexithymia in trichotillomania

Background and objectivesPrevious research has shown high rates of alexithymia and emotion dysregulation in trichotillomania (TTM) and skin picking disorder (SPD). Unfortunately, there are no data on facial emotion recognition (FER) in TTM and SPD. The present study aimed to compare patients with TTM and SPD and a healthy control group for the severity of alexithymia and rates of FER. MethodsForty patients with SPD, 30 patients with TTM, and 30 healthy controls were enrolled in this study. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Clinical Global Impression (CGI), Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), and the Facial Emotion Recognition Test were applied to the participants. ResultsPatients with TTM and SPD had less FER accuracy and higher alexithymia scores compared with healthy controls. According to ANCOVA analysis, when anxiety, depression, and alexithymia were fixed as covariates, disgusted facial expressions and total facial emotion recognition were still significantly lower in patients with SPD compared with the control group, but there was no difference between the TTM and control groups and TTM and SPD groups. ConclusionAlexithymia rates were high in patients with TTM and SPD. Interestingly, difficulty in recognizing disgusted facial expressions may be a distinctive sign in SPD. Future neuroimaging studies are needed to support possible FER impairment in patients with TTM/SPD.

Between Joy and Sympathy: Smiling and Sad Recipient Faces Increase Prosocial Behavior in the Dictator Game.

In human interactions, the facial expression of a bargaining partner may contain relevant information that affects prosocial decisions. We were interested in whether facial expressions of the recipient in the dictator game influence dictators’ behavior. To test this, we conducted an online study (n = 106) based on a modified version of a dictator game. The dictators allocated money between themselves and another person (recipient), who had no possibility to respond to the dictator. Importantly, before the allocation decision, the dictator was presented with the facial expression of the recipient (angry, disgusted, sad, smiling, or neutral). The results showed that dictators sent more money to recipients with sad or smiling facial expressions and less to recipients with angry or disgusted facial expressions compared with a neutral facial expression. Moreover, based on the sequential analysis of the decision and the interaction partner in the preceding trial, we found that decision-making depends upon previous interactions.

Social anxiety is related to impaired ability to filter out irrelevant information but not reduced storage capacity

Individuals with social anxiety have deficits in inhibiting task-irrelevant threatening information, but the mechanism is poorly understood. In this study, we instructed participants with high and low social anxiety to perform a variant change-detection task, recording their accuracy and electrophysiological data. The results indicated that individuals with high social anxiety showed impaired ability to filter out irrelevant information in disgust facial expression condition rather than neutral facial expression. While individuals with low social anxiety didn’t show filter efficiency defects under both disgust and neutral facial expressions. Furthermore, we found high socially anxious individuals could hold more information in visual working memory than low socially anxious individuals. These results suggest that the abundance of cognitive resources in socially anxious individuals compensates the presumed weak performance in accuracy produced by impaired filter efficiency. These results provide support for the claims of efficiency and effectiveness in attentional control theory.

Neural correlates of emotional processing in panic disorder

BackgroundDeficits in emotional processing are conceptualized in prevailing models of anxiety to underpin key symptoms of panic disorder (PD). Neuroimaging studies show evidence of aberrant neural functioning in PD patients during emotional processing, however little is understood about how non-conscious emotional processing impacts neural processes. MethodWe examined activation and functional connectivity differences in brain regions involved in emotional processing between PD and healthy controls (HC) during subliminal and supraliminal presentations of facial emotions. Twenty-two PD and 33 HC participants were shown happy, sad, neutral, fear, anger and disgust facial expressions during functional magnetic resonance imaging using a 3T MRI scanner. We performed voxelwise ROI analyses at FWE-corrected p < 0.05 for main effects of group and group*emotion interactions. ResultsThere was less pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) activation to subliminal presentations of happy and sad faces in PD compared to HC participants (group*emotion). In addition, PD patients had less pgACC - right amygdala connectivity than HC participants during sad and fear subliminal processing (group*emotion). PD patients also exhibited lower right cerebellum activity across all supraliminal presentations of facial expressions compared to HC. ConclusionThese findings suggest that there is aberrant neural processing in PD patients during both conscious and preconscious processing of both positive and negative stimuli, suggesting impaired recruitment of implicit regulatory networks during affective processing. It appears that PD patients may experience deficits in key regulatory connections between inhibitory and emotional neural networks at very early stages of processing of negative affective states.

Social anxiety and attention to dynamic disgust facial expression: No more attention captured from evidence of N2pc

In this study we investigated the role of stimulus-driven attention in the attentional bias in individuals with social anxiety using electrophysiological technique. For this purpose, we employed static and dynamic facial expressions as stimuli in a dot-probe task. The results revealed that in behavior high socially anxious (HSA) group had longer response time in incongruent trials than congruent trials, and showed higher trial level-bias score variability than low socially anxious (LSA) group. In electrophysiology, we found that compared to LSA group, HSA group showed an enhanced N2pc amplitude to disgust facial expressions in static condition, whereas this difference was eliminated in dynamic facial expression condition. The results suggest the faces with peak emotion intensity are more likely to capture initial attention of individuals with social anxiety.

"Fake it till You Make it"! Contaminating Rubber Hands ("Multisensory Stimulation Therapy") to Treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a deeply enigmatic psychiatric condition associated with immense suffering worldwide. Efficacious therapies for OCD, like exposure and response prevention (ERP), are sometimes poorly tolerated by patients. As many as 25% of patients refuse to initiate ERP mainly because they are too anxious to follow exposure procedures. Accordingly, we proposed a simple and tolerable (immersive yet indirect) low-cost technique for treating OCD that we call “multisensory stimulation therapy.” This method involves contaminating a rubber hand during the so-called “rubber hand illusion” (RHI) in which tactile sensations may be perceived as arising from a fake hand. Notably, Jalal et al. (2015) showed that such fake hand contamination during the RHI provokes powerful disgust reactions in healthy volunteers. In the current study, we explored the therapeutic potential of this novel approach. OCD patients (n = 29) watched as their hidden real hand was being stroked together with a visible fake hand; either synchronously (inducing the RHI; i.e., the experimental condition; n = 16) or asynchronously (i.e., the control condition; n = 13). After 5 min of tactile stimulation, the rubber hand was contaminated with fake feces, simulating conventional exposure therapy. Intriguingly, results suggested sensory assimilation of contamination sensations into the body image via the RHI: patients undergoing synchronous stimulation did not report greater contamination sensations when the fake hand was initially contaminated relative to asynchronous stroking. But contrary to expectations, they did so after the rubber hand had been contaminated for 5 min, as assessed via disgust facial expressions (a secondary outcome) and in vivo exposure (upon discontinuing the illusion). Further, to our surprise, synchronous and asynchronous stroking induced an equally vivid and fast-emerging illusion, which helps explain why both conditions initially (5 min after initiating tactile stimulation) provoked contamination reactions of equal magnitude. This study is the first to suggest heightened malleability of body image in OCD. Importantly, it may pave the way for a tolerable technique for the treatment of OCD—highly suitable for poorly resourced and emergency settings, including low-income and developing countries with minimal access to high-tech solutions like virtual reality.

Responding to the emotions of others: Age differences in facial expressions and age-specific associations with relational connectedness.

Responding prosocially to the emotion of others may become increasingly important in late life, especially as partners and friends encounter a growing number of losses, challenges, and declines. Facial expressions are important avenues for communicating empathy and concern, and for signaling that help is forthcoming when needed. In a study of young, middle-aged, and older adults, we measured emotional responses (facial expressions, subjective experience, and physiological activation) to a sad, distressing film clip and a happy, uplifting film clip. Results revealed that, relative to younger adults, older adults showed more sadness and confusion/concern facial expressions during the distressing film clip. Moreover, for older adults only, more sadness and fewer disgust facial expressions during the distressing film clip were associated with higher levels of relational connectedness. These findings remained stable when accounting for subjective emotional experience, physiological activation, and trait empathy in response to the film clip. When examining the uplifting film clip, older adults showed more happiness facial expressions relative to younger adults at trend levels. More facial expressions of happiness were associated with higher levels of relational connectedness, but unlike the effect of sadness expressions, this was not moderated by age. These findings underscore an important adaptive social function of facial expressions-particularly in response to the distress of others-in late life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Characteristics of facial muscle activity during voluntary facial expressions: Imaging analysis of facial expressions based on myogenic potential data.

PurposeFacial expressions are formed by the coordination of facial muscles and reflect changes in emotion. Nurses observe facial expressions as way of understanding patients. This study conducted basic research using facial myogenic potential topography to visually determine changes in the location and strength of facial muscle activity associated with voluntary facial expression to examine relationships with facial expressions.MethodsParticipants comprised 18 healthy adults (6 men, 12 women; mean age, 24.3 ± 4.3 years). Facial myogenic potentials were measured from 19 electrodes arranged concentrically on the face, and topographic analysis was conducted. Using potential changes and topograms, the muscle activity associated with nonvoluntary facial expression and voluntary facial expressions of happiness and disgust were classified according to the characteristics of expressions. To classify homogeneous groups among the reaction of disgust, hierarchical cluster analysis was utilized.ResultsOne characteristic of the facial expression of happiness was activity in areas including the greater zygomatic muscle. With the facial expression of disgust, characteristic changes were seen in areas including the corrugator supercilii. Cluster analysis of the expression of disgust showed four homogeneous subgroups.ConclusionWith facial myogenic potential topography, facial expressions can be evaluated objectively without being influenced by face shape or countenance. Color changes in topograms showed subtle changes in expressions that could not be supplemented with statistical processing alone, and these were useful in identifying individuality. Topography is thus expected to be utilized to supplement basic knowledge of facial expressions for a better understanding of patients.

Analysis on components of attentional bias on anger and disgust emotional faces in college students with social anxiety disorders

Objective To analyze the components of attentional bias on anger and disgust emotional faces in college students with social anxiety disorder. Methods DSM-V was used for clinical diagnosis after the initial screening with Interaction Anxiousness Scale. The subjects meet the inclusion criteria were divided into social anxiety disorder group (SAD group) and healthy control group (HC group). Koster's improved dot-probe paradigm was used in a 2 (group: SAD group, HC group)×2 (emotion categories: anger, disgust) mixed-design experiment, and the different characteristics of attentional bias between the two groups on different emotional faces were compared. Results In SAD group, under the condition of angry faces, the response times to the probe targets with the same or different positions from the negative faces were (369.7±53.0)ms and (447.2±54.3)ms, while the response times were (429.6±70.2)ms and (444.2±55.8)ms under the condition of disgust faces, and the SAD group showed attentional bias towards both anger and disgust faces (t=24.15 and 2.45, P<0.05). Under the condition of anger faces, the response time of HC group to the consistent and inconsistent position of probe target were (466.9±40.0)ms and (483.8±43.8) ms, and the HC group had an attentional bias towards anger faces(t=6.58, P<0.05). The response time under disgust faces was (493.8±43.6)ms and (498.0±46.7)ms in HC group, and did not show an attentional bias towards disgust(t=1.65, P=0.108). The scores of attentional orientation to anger faces in SAD group were significantly higher than those in the HC group(F=19.26, P<0.001), but there was no significant difference between the two groups towards disgust faces(F=0.02, P=0.897). Compared with disgust faces, the attentional orientation to anger faces was faster in both HC and SAD groups (F=101.66 and 8.00, P<0.05). Compared with the HC group, the SAD group had an impaired attentional disengagement from anger faces(F=8.66, P=0.004). Conclusion The students with social anxiety disorder have attentional bias towards both anger and disgust facial expressions, which manifested as facilitated attentional orientation and impaired attentional disengagement to anger faces. Key words: Social anxiety disorder; College students; Attentional bias; Facilitated attentional orientation; Impaired attentional disengagement

The influence of context on distinct facial expressions of disgust.

Face perception is susceptible to contextual influence and perceived physical similarities between emotion cues. However, studies often use structurally homogeneous facial expressions, making it difficult to explore how within-emotion variability in facial configuration affects emotion perception. This study examined the influence of context on the emotional perception of categorically identical, yet physically distinct, facial expressions of disgust. Participants categorized two perceptually distinct disgust facial expressions, "closed" (i.e., scrunched nose, closed mouth) and "open" (i.e., scrunched nose, open mouth, protruding tongue), that were embedded in contexts comprising emotion postures and scenes. Results demonstrated that the effect of nonfacial elements was significantly stronger for "open" disgust facial expressions than "closed" disgust facial expressions. These findings provide support that physical similarity within discrete categories of facial expressions is mutable and plays an important role in affective face perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Different levels of facial expression recognition in patients with first-episode schizophrenia: A functional MRI study

BackgroundThe impairment of facial expression recognition has become a biomarker for early identification of first-episode schizophrenia, and this kind of research is increasing.AimsTo explore the differences in brain area activation...

Facial emotion recognition in violent men.

The goal of this study was to explore the ability of violent men to recognise facial affect. In contrast to traditional approaches to this research question, we took the effects of the models' sex and different types of violent behaviour into consideration. Data obtained from 71 violent men revealed that they recognised facial expressions of fear (p = .019) and disgust (p = .013) more accurately when displayed by female than male models. The opposite was found for angry faces (p = .006), while the models' sex did not affect the recognition of sad, happy and surprised facial expressions or neutral faces. Furthermore, sexual coercion perpetrators were more accurate than other violent men in the recognition of female facial disgust (p = .006). These results are discussed in the context of social learning theory, and the hypothesis that female facial expressions of disgust could be subtle cues to their sexual infidelity that motivate sexual coercion in some men.

Background Odors Modulate N170 ERP Component and Perception of Emotional Facial Stimuli.

Successful social interaction relies on the accurate decoding of other peoples’ emotional signals, and their contextual integration. However, little is known about how contextual odors may lead to modulation of cortical processing in response to facial expressions. We investigated how unpleasant and pleasant contextual background odors affected emotion perception and cortical event-related potential (ERP) responses to pictures of faces expressing happy, neutral and disgusted facial expressions. Faces were, regardless of expression, rated more positively in the pleasant odor condition and more negatively in the unpleasant odor condition. Faces were overall rated as more emotionally arousing in the presence of an odor, irrespective of its valence. Contextual odors also interacted with facial expressions, such that happy faces were rated as especially non-arousing in the unpleasant odor condition. The early, face-sensitive N170 ERP component also displayed an interaction effect. Here, disgusted faces were affected by the odor context such that the N170 revealed a relatively larger negativity in the context of a pleasant odor compared with an unpleasant odor. There were no odor effects on the responses to faces in other measured ERP components (P1, VPP, P2, and LPP). These results suggest that odors bias socioemotional perception early stages of the visual processing stream. However, effects may vary across emotional expressions and measurements.

Supplemental Material for The Influence of Context on Distinct Facial Expressions of Disgust

Supplemental Material for The Influence of Context on Distinct Facial Expressions of Disgust

F144. MUSCARINIC M1 RECEPTOR SIGNALLING UNDERLYING COGNITION IN PSYCHOTIC DISORDERS

BackgroundAntipsychotic treatment has failed to improve cognitive deficits associated with psychotic disorders. This has led to an increased interest to revisit earlier implications from post-mortem studies that lowered muscarinic M1 receptor signaling may underlie these symptoms. This receptor is highly expressed in important regions for cognition such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and hippocampus, and administration of anti-muscarinic agents gives induce cognitive deficits in healthy volunteers. Administration of xanomeline, a M1/4 agonist in patients with schizophrenia resulted in improved learning and memory scores and decreased psychotic symptom severity. Therefore, the current study sought to examine alterations in muscarinic M1 receptor signaling in relation to cognitive functioning in medication free subjects with psychotic disorders and matched controls.MethodsMuscarinic M1 binding potential (BPND) was measured using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) with the M1 selective radiopharmaceutical 123I-iododexetimide in the DLPFC and hippocampus in the psychotic group. Pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging (phMRI) with the M1 antagonist biperiden was used to assess differences in functional response on the paired associate learning task (PAL) and emotion recognition task (ERT) adapted for fMRI from The Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery in all subjects. The PAL task assessed encoding phase (learning) and retrieval (memory) of figure-place associations and the ERT task social cognition, both highly predictive of functional outcome. Cluster significance was set at Z>2.3, with cluster threshold correction at p<0.05.ResultsThe current study included 26 (mean age: 27.68; 19male/7 female) subjects with a psychotic disorder and 29 (mean age 25.63; 20 male/9 female) matched controls. Subjects with psychotic disorders recalled less figure place associations than controls (t=2.9, p=0.005) and were worse in recognizing different intensities of disgust emotions (t=2.26, p=0.03). Psychotic subjects showed a blunted response in functional reactivity to biperiden in the bilateral superior and medial frontal gyri with decreasing intensity of disgust facial expressions compared to controls, this blunted response was greatest in those with lower M1 BPND in the DLPFC. During encoding processes, psychotic subjects also showed differential reactivity to biperiden in the left middle frontal gyrus, insula, and caudate nucleus showing hypoactivation compared to controls. Greater hypoactivation was significantly associated with lower hippocampal M1 BPND. For retrieval both groups showed lowered activation under biperiden in the inferior frontal gyrus, but psychotic subjects failed to show increased activation with increasing cognitive load in the placebo condition, like the controls. Lower hippocampal M1 BPND in psychotic subjects was associated with lower activation of this region.DiscussionResults show preliminary evidence for altered M1 signaling of prefrontal areas in psychotic disorders underlying social cognition and learning and memory processes. Additionally, results show an important role for the M1 receptor in the DLPFC and hippocampus in altered fronto-striatal activation underlying encoding processes. Lower hippocampal M1 BPND is related to more severe alterations in underlying functional activation in encoding and retrieval processes. Results further support the need for development of therapeutic strategies that focus on the M1 receptor to improve cognitive functioning and functional outcome in psychosis.

Putting "context" in context: The effects of body posture and emotion scene on adult categorizations of disgust facial expressions.

Affective face perception is influenced by nonfacial contextual elements. However, investigations often conflate body posture and emotion scene, making it unclear whether posture or the combination of posture and scene produces perception-altering effects. This study examined adults' categorizations of disgust facial expressions superimposed onto isolated emotion postures or postures embedded in emotion scenes. Results indicated that emotional postures exerted a significant contextual effect on adults' emotion categorizations of disgust faces. Of note, postures in emotion scenes exerted a stronger contextual effect than isolated postures for sadness and fear contexts. These findings suggest that contextual elements exert varying degrees of influence on emotion perception and produce combinatorial effects. (PsycINFO Database Record