Fearful Expressions Research Articles

Emotional expressions as appeals to recipients.

Emotion expressions convey information. One important kind of information, from a communicative perspective, is information about what is demanded of the recipients of the expression. Compared to the vast body of research that focuses on whether, and to what degree, emotion expressions convey information about inner states, there is surprisingly little systematic research on the information emotion expressions convey about what the expresser wants the recipient to do. The present research documents for the first time the set of appeals associated with the expressions of anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and disgust. In two studies, we found that (a) generally, for each emotional expression, a core appeal is perceived as being made on recipients, but also a range of complementary demands, and that (b) context matters, as is the case for social perception of emotions in general. In this case, who caused the emotion expression affects the mapping between emotional expressions and appeals. Finally, (c) recipients report intentions to comply with these appeals, as can be expected from a functional point of view. Overall, these findings put the focus squarely on the imperative dimension of emotional expressions and lend support to the view that emotional communication entails an attempt to influence recipients rather than simply to inform them about how expressers feel or what they may do next. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Calcium regulates acid-sensing ion channel 3 activation by competing with protons in the channel pore and at an allosteric binding site.

The extracellular Ca2+ concentration changes locally under certain physiological and pathological conditions. Such variations affect the function of ion channels of the nervous system and consequently also neuronal signalling. We investigated here the mechanisms by which Ca2+ controls the activity of acid-sensing ion channel (ASIC) 3. ASICs are neuronal, H+-gated Na+ channels involved in several physiological and pathological processes, including the expression of fear, learning, pain sensation and neurodegeneration after ischaemic stroke. It was previously shown that Ca2+ negatively modulates the ASIC pH dependence. While protons are default activators of ASIC3, this channel can also be activated at pH7.4 by the removal of the extracellular Ca2+. Two previous studies concluded that low pH opens ASIC3 by displacing Ca2+ ions that block the channel pore at physiological pH. We show here that an acidic residue, distant from the pore, together with pore residues, controls the modulation of ASIC3 by Ca2+. Our study identifies a new regulatory site in ASIC3 and demonstrates that ASIC3 activation involves an allosteric mechanism together with Ca2+ unbinding from the channel pore. We provide a molecular analysis of a regulatory mechanism found in many ion channels.

A multi-method approach to compare presence, fear induction and desensitization in survival horror games within the reality-virtuality-continuum

Virtual environments and games are often used to evoke positive emotions. Contrary the survival horror genre aims to induce negative feelings in players. The effects of playing fear-inducing games in virtual reality (VR) is rather unexplored, since research mainly focuses on positive emotions. To investigate the relationship between immersion, presence and negative emotion induction, we compared repeated horror game usage between playing on desktop computers, in VR, and smart substitutional reality (SSR), which supplements VR with additional haptic and thermal stimuli. Conducting a longitudinal study utilizing questionnaires, observations and physiological measurements, we expected an increase of fear using VR and SSR due to the increased immersion. Physiological data was not analyzed due to huge data loss, while observations and self-reports revealed contradictory results. Behavioral data showed stronger expression of fear in VR and SSR. Presence was increased in the VR and SSR groups compared to PC, further a mediation of emotion induction via presence was confirmed. Altogether, the reception of horror games within VR or SSR is associated with strong emotional reactions for selected individuals. Future research should take methodological lessons learned into account.

Chronic gut inflammation impairs contextual control of fear

Chronic inflammatory diseases are highly comorbid with anxiety in humans. The extent to which chronic inflammation is responsible for this relationship remains to be determined. We therefore tested the hypothesis that prolonged, but not brief, gut inflammation is sufficient to evoke anxiety-related behaviours in mice. We used the discriminative fear to context conditioning paradigm to assess fear generalization, which is a prominent feature of anxiety disorders. Gut inflammation was induced by exposure to dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) in the drinking water, a well-established rodent model of ulcerative colitis evoking prolonged inflammation. Neither acute (1 × 5 day cycle) nor chronic (3 × 5 day cycles) exposure to DSS affected fear responses when tested shortly after conditioning. Mice in all groups generated more fear responses (freezing) in a chamber previously paired with mild shock, as compared to a chamber with no pairing. This suggests DSS exposure had no effect on acquisition or expression of conditioned fear. Acute and control animals showed this same contextual control of freezing when tested 9 days later. In contrast, at this remote time point, the chronically treated animals exhibited increased freezing in the unpaired chamber such that freezing was equivalent in both contexts. These animals, however, showed intact preference for the unpaired chamber when allowed to freely move between chambers. These data suggest that some mnemonic process engaged after training, such as memory consolidation, is affected by past chronic inflammation so as to generalize negative associations and engage fearful responding in inappropriate contexts, despite intact knowledge that the chambers have different affective associations sufficient for place preference.

REAL TIME SPEECH EMOTION RECOGNITION USING MACHINE LEARNING

A speech recognition system, which can detect emotions contained in the dataset such as sad, happy, neural, angry, disgust, surprised, fearful and calm expressions. In real time we can use this application in various decisions. Although we are in a pandemic situation all processes are taking place only through online like job interviews, doctor appointments etc. In these cases this application is very useful whether in what state they are and to detect their emotions through speech. Here we are using a library called Librosa. Librosa is a python package for music and audio analysis. It provides the building blocks necessary to concoct music information retrieval systems. It was developed by Brian McFee, assistant professor of music technology and data science at NYU, and creator of Librosa, a python package for music and audio analysis. Librosa upholds a few elements connected with sound records handling and extraction like burden sound from a circle, register of different spectrogram portrayals, symphonious percussive source detachment, conventional spectrogram decay, stacks and translates the sound, Timespace sound handling, successive demonstrating, coordinating consonant percussive partition, beatsimultaneous and some more.

Involvement of D2-like dopaminergic receptors in contextual fear conditioning in female rats: influence of estrous cycle.

Introduction: Dopamine has been increasingly recognized as a key neurotransmitter regulating fear/anxiety states. Nevertheless, the influence of sex and estrous cycle differences on the role of dopamine in fear responses needs further investigation. We aimed to evaluate the effects of sulpiride (a dopaminergic D2-like receptor antagonist) on contextual fear conditioning in females while exploring the influence of the estrous cycle. Methods: First, using a contextual fear conditioning paradigm, we assessed potential differences in acquisition, expression, and extinction of the conditioned freezing response in male and female (split in proestrus/estrus and metestrus/diestrus) Wistar rats. In a second cohort, we evaluated the effects of sulpiride (20 and 40 mg/kg) on contextual conditioned fear in females during proestrus/estrus and metestrus/diestrus. Potential nonspecific effects were assessed in motor activity assays (catalepsy and open-field tests). Results: No sex differences nor estrous cycle effects on freezing behavior were observed during the fear conditioning phases. Sulpiride reduced freezing expression in female rats. Moreover, females during the proestrus/estrus phases of the estrous cycle were more sensitive to the effects of sulpiride than females in metestrus/diestrus. Sulpiride did not cause motor impairments. Discussion: Although no sex or estrous cycle differences were observed in basal conditioned fear expression and extinction, the estrous cycle seems to influence the effects of D2-like antagonists on contextual fear conditioning.

Neural processing of lateralised task-irrelevant fearful faces under different awareness conditions

The neural fate of task-irrelevant emotional faces under different awareness conditions is poorly understood. Here, we examined the electrophysiological activity during an experiment where the location of target information (contrast-induced line) was manipulated orthogonally to the location of task-irrelevant fearful faces, under subliminal or supraliminal viewing conditions. We found that only target lines elicited an N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc), indexing spatial attention shifting, in the supraliminal condition. No N2pc was found for the targets in the subliminal condition or for task-irrelevant fearful faces in either conditions. However, the mere presence of a fearful face enhanced early neural activity between 200 and 300 ms only in the subliminal condition. Additionally, the presence of a target line, but not a fearful face, enhanced the P3. Our results suggest that the N2pc is dependent on visual awareness and task-relevancy of the information and that laterally-presented task-irrelevant fearful expressions can be processed without awareness during early visual processing.

White matter microstructure predicts individual differences in infant fear (But not anger and sadness).

We examine neural correlates of discrete expressions of negative emotionality in infants to determine whether the microstructure of white matter tracts at 1 month of age foreshadows the expression of specific negative emotions later in infancy. Infants (n=103) underwent neuroimaging at 1-month, and mothers reported on infant fear, sadness, and anger at 6, 12, and 18 months using the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised. Levels and developmental change in fear, sadness, and anger were estimated from mother reports. Relations between MRI and infant emotion indicated that 1-month white matter microstructure was differentially associated with level and change in infant fear, but not anger or sadness, in the left stria terminalis (p<0.05, corrected), a tract that connects frontal and tempo-parietal regions and has been implicated in emerging psychopathology in adults. More relaxed constraints on significance (p<0.10, corrected) revealed that fear was associated with lower white matter microstructure bilaterally in the inferior portion of the stria terminalis and regions within the sagittal stratum. Results suggest the neurobehavioral uniqueness of fear as early as 1 month of age in regions that are associated with potential longer-term outcomes. This work highlights the early neural precursors of fearfulness, adding to literature explaining the psychobiological accounts of affective development. HIGHLIGHTS: Expressions of infant fear and anger, but not sadness, increase from 6 to 18 months of age. Early neural architecture in the stria terminalis is related to higher initial levels and increasing fear in infancy. After accounting for fear, anger and sadness do not appear to be associated with differences in early white matter microstructure. This work identifies early neural precursors of fearfulness as early as 1-month of age.

Constitutive 5-HT2C receptor knock-out facilitates fear extinction through altered activity of a dorsal raphe-bed nucleus of the stria terminalis pathway

Serotonin 2C receptors (5-HT2CRs) are widely distributed throughout the brain and are strongly implicated in the pathophysiology of anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although in recent years, a considerable amount of evidence supports 5-HT2CRs facilitating effect on anxiety behavior, the involvement in learned fear responses and fear extinction is rather unexplored. Here, we used a 5-HT2CR knock-out mouse line (2CKO) to gain new insights into the involvement of 5-HT2CRs in the neuronal fear circuitry. Using a cued fear conditioning paradigm, our results revealed that global loss of 5-HT2CRs exclusively accelerates fear extinction, without affecting fear acquisition and fear expression. To investigate the neuronal substrates underlying the extinction enhancing effect, we mapped the immediate-early gene product cFos, a marker for neuronal activity, in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN), amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST). Surprisingly, besides extinction-associated changes, our results revealed alterations in neuronal activity even under basal home cage conditions in specific subregions of the DRN and the BNST in 2CKO mice. Neuronal activity in the dorsal BNST was shifted in an extinction-supporting direction due to 5-HT2CR knock-out. Finally, the assessment of DRN-BNST connectivity using antero- and retrograde tracing techniques uncovered a discrete serotonergic pathway projecting from the most caudal subregion of the DRN (DRC) to the anterodorsal portion of the BNST (BNSTad). This serotonergic DRC-BNSTad pathway showed increased neuronal activity in 2CKO mice. Thus, our results provide new insights for the fear extinction network by revealing a specific serotonergic DRC-BNSTad pathway underlying a 5-HT2CR-sensitive mechanism with high significance in the treatment of PTSD.

The time course of categorical perception of facial expressions

Decoding emotions on others’ faces is one of the most important functions of the human brain, which has been widely studied in cognitive neuroscience. However, the precise time course of facial expression categorization in the human brain is still a matter of debate. Here we used an original paradigm to measure categorical perception of facial expression changes during event-related potentials (ERPs) recording, in which a face stimulus dynamically switched either to a different expression (between-category condition) or to the same expression (within-category condition), the physical distance between the two successive faces being equal across conditions. The switch between faces generated a negative differential potential peaking at around 160 ms over occipito-temporal regions, similar in term of latency and topography to the well-known face-selective N170 component. This response was larger in the condition where the switch occurred between faces that were perceived as having different facial expressions compared to the same expression. In addition, happy expressions were categorized around 20 ms faster than fearful expressions (respectively, 135 and 156 ms). These findings provide evidence that changes of facial expressions are categorically perceived as early as 160 ms following stimulus onset over the occipito-temporal cortex.

Do expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have different impacts on attracting donations? Evidence from a Chinese online charitable crowdfunding platform

PurposeExtant research shows mixed results on the impact of expressed negative emotions on donations in online charitable crowdfunding. This study solves the puzzle by examining how different types of negative emotions (i.e. sadness, anxiety and fear) expressed in crowdfunding project descriptions affect donations.Design/methodology/approachData on 15,653 projects across four categories (medical assistance, education assistance, disaster assistance and poverty assistance) from September 2013 to May 2019 come from a leading online crowdfunding platform in China. Text analysis and regression models serve to test the hypotheses.FindingsIn the medical assistance category, the expression of sadness has an inverted U-shaped effect on donations, while the expression of anxiety has a negative effect. An appropriate number of sadness words is helpful but should not exceed five times. In the education assistance and disaster assistance categories, the expression of sadness has a positive effect on donations, but disclosure of anxiety and fear has no influence on donations. Expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have no impact on donations in the poverty assistance category.Research limitations/implicationsThis work has important implications for fundraisers on how to regulate the fundraisers' expressions of negative emotions in a project's description to attract donations. These insights are also relevant for online crowdfunding platforms.Originality/valueOnline crowdfunding research often studies negative emotions as a whole and does not differentiate project types. The current work contributes by empirically testing the impact of three types of negative emotions on donations across four major online crowdfunding categories.

Limited Effects of Pain Control Treatments on Behaviour and Weight Gain of Pure and Crossbred Nellore Heifer Calves When Subjected to Hot-Iron Branding.

Hot-iron branding is still commonly performed in cattle farming in tropical countries, and possibly has negative consequences for animal welfare and weight gain. This study examined the behavioural and weight gain responses of pure and crossbred Nellore heifer calves subjected to hot-iron branding on the cheek, without and with use of anaesthesia and analgesia. Ninety-two heifer calves, around 120 days old, were studied prospectively when subjected to hot-iron branding on the cheek (a statutory procedure in Brazil following brucellosis vaccination). Four randomly selected groups of calves were allocated to four treatments: no pain control (CO); subcutaneous anaesthetic local block (LA); intramuscular analgesia (meloxicam) (LT); and local anaesthesia plus meloxicam (LL). Behaviour, flight speed and body weight were evaluated before, during, and five (5-d) and 60 days (60-d) after branding. For these parameters, the only difference observed was higher tension in the CO group 5-d post-branding, suggesting a short-term negative effect of branding without pain control. The limited effects of the pain control treatments suggest interference in pain assessment by other factors, such as expression of fear and stress. Despite the lack of differences observed in behaviour and production parameters, facial hot-iron branding is an obvious welfare issue and, due to the additional handling involved, adoption of a simple pain relief protocol is not sufficient to minimise the welfare impact.

“Am I Going to Die?”: Delivering Serious News to Patients With Liver Disease

“Am I Going to Die?”: Delivering Serious News to Patients With Liver Disease

Control of Theta Oscillatory Activity Underlying Fear Expression by mGlu5 Receptors.

Metabotropic glutamate 5 receptors (mGlu5) are thought to play an important role in mediating emotional information processing. In particular, negative allosteric modulators (NAMs) of mGlu5 have received a lot of attention as potential novel treatments for several neuropsychiatric diseases, including anxiety-related disorders. The aim of this study was to assess the influence of pre- and post-training mGlu5 inactivation in cued fear conditioned mice on neuronal oscillatory activity during fear retrieval. For this study we used the recently developed mGlu5 NAM Alloswicth-1 administered systemically. Injection of Alloswicth-1 before, but not after, fear conditioning resulted in a significant decrease in freezing upon fear retrieval. Mice injected with Alloswicth-1 pre-training were also implanted with recording microelectrodes into both the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and ventral hippocampus (vHPC). The recordings revealed a reduction in theta rhythmic activity (4-12 Hz) in both the mPFC and vHPC during fear retrieval. These results indicate that inhibition of mGlu5 signaling alters local oscillatory activity in principal components of the fear brain network underlying a reduced response to a predicted threat.

Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons

Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons (1612) deservedly ranks, as its editor Jean Céard observes, among the ‘grands textes de la démonologie de la Renaissance’. In fact, it was probably the last of the great demonologies. In the wake of the Louis Gaufridi affair, France, as even de Lancre himself realized, was becoming obsessed with demonic possession instead. The Tableau was more, however, than just one judge’s account of a bout of Basque witch-hunting. As the title suggests, the text had clear philosophical aspirations. A preoccupation with inconstancy was the one constant thread throughout the author’s literary career. Indeed, the literary merits of de Lancre’s output should not be underestimated. Rich in metaphors and allusions, de Lancre’s language was ‘toujours souple et aisée’. The text is also a cornucopia of examples and stories. Céard is certainly right that de Lancre ‘visiblement prend plaisir à conter’—a fact that usually goes unnoticed by witchcraft historians on the look-out for expressions of horror and fear, but that is entirely in keeping with the milieu of the Bordeaux Parlement from which he hailed. The Tableau is a display of erudition and good manners. It is perhaps not surprising that in France, de Lancre, a relative of Michel de Montaigne, is principally studied in literature departments.

The positive energy of netizens: development and application of fine-grained sentiment lexicon and emotional intensity model.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to a global health crisis and caused huge emotional swings. However, the positive emotional expressions, like self-confidence, optimism, and praise, that appear in Chinese social networks are rarely explored by researchers. This study aims to analyze the characteristics of netizens' positive energy expressions and the impact of node events on public emotional expression during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, a total of 6,525,249 Chinese texts posted by Sina Weibo users were randomly selected through textual data cleaning and word segmentation for corpus construction. A fine-grained sentiment lexicon that contained POSITIVE ENERGY was built using Word2Vec technology; this lexicon was later used to conduct sentiment category analysis on original posts. Next, through manual labeling and multi-classification machine learning model construction, four mainstream machine learning algorithms were selected to train the emotional intensity model. Finally, the lexicon and optimized emotional intensity model were used to analyze the emotional expressions of Chinese netizens. The results show that POSITIVE ENERGY expression accounted for 40.97% during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of time, POSITIVE ENERGY emotions were displayed at the highest levels and SURPRISES the lowest. The analysis results of the node events showed after the outbreak was confirmed officially, the expressions of POSITIVE ENERGY and FEAR increased simultaneously. After the initial victory in pandemic prevention and control, the expression of POSITIVE ENERGY and SAD reached a peak, while the increase of SAD was the most prominent. The fine-grained sentiment lexicon, which includes a POSITIVE ENERGY category, demonstrated reliable algorithm performance and can be used for sentiment classification of Chinese Internet context. We also found many POSITIVE ENERGY expressions in Chinese online social platforms which are proven to be significantly affected by nod events of different nature.

Nurses’ clinical practices reducing the impact of HIV-related stigmatisation in non-HIV-specialised healthcare settings: a protocol for a realist synthesis

IntroductionDespite tremendous progress in care, people living with HIV (PLHIV) continue to experience HIV-related stigmatisation by nurses in non-HIV-specialised healthcare settings. This has consequences for the health of PLHIV and...

Maternal stress and development of infant attention to threat-related facial expressions.

Attentional biases to threat-related stimuli, such as fearful and angry facial expressions, are important to survival and emerge early in development. Infants demonstrate an attentional bias to fearful facial expressions by 5-7months of age and an attentional bias toward anger by 3years of age that are modulated by experiential factors. In a longitudinal study of 87 mother-infant dyads from families predominantly experiencing low income, we examined whether maternal stress and depressive symptoms were associated with trajectories of attentional biases to threat, assessed during an attention disengagement eye-tracking task when infants were 6-, 9-, and 12-month old. By 9months, infants demonstrated a generalized bias toward threat (both fearful and angry facial expressions). Maternal perceived stress was associated with the trajectory of the bias toward angry facial expressions between 6 and 12months. Specifically, infants of mothers with higher perceived stress exhibited a greater bias toward angry facial expressions at 6months that decreased across the next 6months, compared to infants of mothers with lower perceived stress who displayed an increased bias to angry facial expressions over this age range. Maternal depressive symptoms and stressful life events were not associated with trajectories of infant attentional bias to anger or fear. These findings highlight the role of maternal perceptions of stress in shaping developmental trajectories of threat-alerting systems.

A comparison of humans and machine learning classifiers categorizing emotion from faces with different coverings

Partial face coverings such as sunglasses and face masks unintentionally obscure facial expressions, causing a loss of accuracy when humans and computer systems attempt to categorize emotion. With the rise of soft computing techniques interacting with humans, it is important to know not just their accuracy, but also the confusion errors being made—do humans make less random/damaging errors than soft computing? We analyzed the impact of sunglasses and different face masks on the ability to categorize emotional facial expressions in humans and computer systems. Computer systems, represented by VGG19, ResNet50, and InceptionV3 deep learning algorithms, and humans assessed images of people with varying emotional facial expressions and with four different types of coverings, i.e. unmasked, with a mask covering the lower face, a partial mask with transparent mouth window, and with sunglasses. The first contribution of this work is that computer systems were found to be better classifiers (98.48%) than humans (82.72%) for faces without covering (>15% difference). This difference is due to the significantly lower accuracy in categorizing anger, disgust, and fear expressions by humans (p′s<.001). However, the most novel aspect of the work is identifying how soft computing systems make different mistakes to humans on the same data. Humans mainly confuse unclear expressions as neutral emotion, which minimizes affective effects. Conversely, soft techniques often confuse unclear expressions as other emotion categories, which could lead to opposing decisions being made, e.g. a robot categorizing a fearful user as happy. Importantly, the variation in the misclassification can be adjusted by variations in the balance of categories in the training set.

How the speaker’s emotional facial expressions may affect language comprehension

ABSTRACT During communicative face-to-face interactions, emotional expressions are typically processed along with auditory speech. Although previous research has demonstrated the interaction between emotion and linguistic processes, so far no study has focused on the effect of the speaker’s emotional facial expression on natural language processing. In the present event-related potential (ERP) study, participants listened to spoken sentences while seeing the portrait of the speaker’s face with either happy, neutral, or fearful emotional expression. In Study 1A, the N400 effect, a neural marker of semantic comprehension, was unaffected by the speaker’s emotional expression. In Study 1B, we manipulated morphosyntactic agreement. The P600 effect was boosted by the happy emotional expression. This may be interpreted as reflecting additional effort in linguistic reanalysis, in line with the heuristic processing style that characterises positive emotions. The present results demonstrate an influence of the speaker’s emotional facial expressions on non-emotional language processing during audiovisual communicative interactions.