Incongruent Expression Research Articles

Incongruent Expression of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor and Cortisol in Schizophrenia: Results from a Randomized Controlled Trial of Laughter Intervention.

ObjectiveSchizophrenia has been associated with dysfunction of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Furthermore, alterations in neurotrophic factors might contribute to the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. We aimed to evaluate the effects of a simulated laughter intervention on the levels of cortisol and BDNF and to determine whether the effects associated with simulated laughter could be sustained after discontinuation of the intervention.MethodsIn this randomized controlled study, patients with schizophrenia according to DSM-IV clinical criteria were randomly assigned to receive either 8-week-long simulated laughter intervention (n=32) or treatment-as-usual group (control group, n=27). The serum levels of BDNF and cortisol were measured at baseline, week 8, and four weeks after discontinuation (week 12) of the intervention program. ResultsAfter an 8-week simulated laughter intervention, the laughter group had significantly higher levels of BDNF; however, four weeks after discontinuation of the intervention, the levels of BDNF significantly dropped. Interestingly, the levels of cortisol did not change significantly at week 8, but they were significantly elevated at week 12. The levels of BDNF and cortisol in the control group did not change significantly between week 0 and week 8. ConclusionThese findings suggest that the simulated laughter intervention has an early effect on neurogenesis with a significant delayed effect on stress regulation in subjects with schizophrenia.

Gender Differences in the Social Cost of Affective Deviance

ABSTRACTThe current study tested whether men and women receive different degrees of social punishment for violating norms of emotional expression. Participants watched videos of male and female targets (whose reactions were pre-tested to be equivalent in expressivity and valence) viewing either a positive or negative slideshow, with their emotional reaction to the slideshow manipulated to be affectively congruent, affectively incongruent, or flat. Participants then rated the target on a number of social evaluation measures. Displaying an incongruent emotional expression, relative to a congruent one, harmed judgments of women more than men. Women are expected to be more emotionally expressive than men, making an incongruent expression more deviant for women. These results highlight the importance of social norms in construing another person’s emotion displays, which can subsequently determine acceptance or rejection of that person.

Adolescents’ expression and perception of emotion in music reflects their broader abilities of emotional communication

Musical behavior has been shown to reflect broader individual differences. However, despite the prevalence of music in the lives of young people little is known about the mechanisms through which adolescents’ musical behavior connects to their general socio-emotional behavior and adjustment. The current study focused on abilities of emotional communication and investigated whether adolescents’ abilities in both perceiving and expressing emotions through music would be reflective of their general abilities of socio-emotional communication and interaction, measured through empathy and conduct problems. Due to the lack of previous research the study was mainly exploratory, but we expected accurate and congruent perception and expression of musical emotions to correlate positively with higher empathy and negatively with conduct problems. Sixty-one 14-year-olds (45 female, mean age 14.72) were given three music-related tasks that assessed emotion perception and emotion expression through music. Participants also filled in self-report scales for empathy (perspective taking and empathic concern) and conduct problems (externalized symptoms). The results showed that perspective taking was particularly related to accurate recognition of tenderness in music and congruent use of staccato articulation for the expression of anger through music. Empathic concern was particularly related to congruent use of slow tempo for expressing sadness and loud volume for expressing anger and also correlated with an overall tendency for intensified perception of fear in music. Externalized symptoms were particularly related to incongruent expression of sadness and anger through music: the use of staccato for expressing sadness and dull timbre for expressing anger. Overall, the results preliminarily support the idea of using musical behavior as an indicator of the broader socio-emotional communication abilities, which in turn play a major role in adolescent adjustment and wellbeing.

Facial expression in patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in response to emotional stimuli: a partially shared cognitive and social deficit of the two disorders

IntroductionIt has recently been highlighted that patients affected by schizophrenia (SCZ) and those affected by bipolar disorder (BD) undergo gradual chronic worsening of cognitive and social functioning. The objective of the current study was to evaluate and compare (using the Facial Action Coding System [FACS]) the way by which patients with the two disorders experience and display emotions in relation to specific emotional stimuli.Materials and methodsForty-five individuals participated in the study: 15 SCZ patients, 15 BD patients, and 15 healthy controls. All participants watched emotion-eliciting video clips while their facial activity was videotaped. The congruent/incongruent feeling of emotions and the facial expression in reaction to emotions were evaluated.ResultsSCZ and BD patients presented similar incongruent emotive feelings and facial expressions (significantly worse than healthy participants); SCZ patients expressed the emotion of disgust significantly less appropriately than BD patients.DiscussionBD and SCZ patients seem to present a similar relevant impairment in both experiencing and displaying emotions; this impairment may be seen as a behavioral indicator of the deficit of social cognition present in both the disorders. As the disgust emotion is mainly elaborated in the insular cortex, the incongruent expression of disgust of SCZ patients can be interpreted as a further evidence of a functional deficit of the insular cortex in this disease. Specific remediation training could be used to improve emotion and social cognition in SCZ and BD patients.

Holistic Processing Happens at Later, Task-Specific Stages of Face Processing

We examined whether holistic processing, a hallmark of face perception, took place at an early stage of face processing shared by all facial judgments, or at later stages specific for processing different facial information such as identity, expression and gender. In Study 1, a composite paradigm was used where the two face halves could differ in identity, expression, or both. Participants' performance on recognizing the identity (or expression) from half of the face was influenced by incongruent identity (or expression) from the other half, but unaffected by incongruent expression (or identity) from the other half. This indicates that holistic processing of identity and expression are independent of each other. In Study 2, we found that the magnitude of holistic processing for identity and expression as measured by separate face composite tasks were not correlated across individuals. In Study 3, we also found no correlation between the magnitudes of holistic processing for identity and gender. The dissociation found between holistic processing of different facial information suggests that holistic processing does not originate from the general visual encoding required for all facial judgments. Instead it emerges later in processes devoted specifically to different facial judgments.

Effects of unconscious processing on implicit memory for fearful faces.

Emotional stimuli can be processed even when participants perceive them without conscious awareness, but the extent to which unconsciously processed emotional stimuli influence implicit memory after short and long delays is not fully understood. We addressed this issue by measuring a subliminal affective priming effect in Experiment 1 and a long-term priming effect in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, a flashed fearful or neutral face masked by a scrambled face was presented three times, then a target face (either fearful or neutral) was presented and participants were asked to make a fearful/neutral judgment. We found that, relative to a neutral prime face (neutral–fear face), a fearful prime face speeded up participants' reaction to a fearful target (fear–fear face), when they were not aware of the masked prime face. But this response pattern did not apply to the neutral target. In Experiment 2, participants were first presented with a masked faces six times during encoding. Three minutes later, they were asked to make a fearful/neutral judgment for the same face with congruent expression, the same face with incongruent expression or a new face. Participants showed a significant priming effect for the fearful faces but not for the neutral faces, regardless of their awareness of the masked faces during encoding. These results provided evidence that unconsciously processed stimuli could enhance emotional memory after both short and long delays. It indicates that emotion can enhance memory processing whether the stimuli are encoded consciously or unconsciously.

Infants’ intermodal perception of canine (Canis familairis) facial expressions and vocalizations.

From birth, human infants are able to perceive a wide range of intersensory relationships. The current experiment examined whether infants between 6 months and 24 months old perceive the intermodal relationship between aggressive and nonaggressive canine vocalizations (i.e., barks) and appropriate canine facial expressions. Infants simultaneously viewed static aggressive and nonaggressive expressions of the same canine and heard an aggressive or nonaggressive bark. Results indicate that 6-month-olds perceived the intermodal relationship for aggressive and nonaggressive barks and the appropriate expression. Results also revealed that in older but not younger infants, the initial or first looks were directed toward the appropriate expression and that older infants also looked proportionately longer to the incongruent expression during the latter half of the test trials. Findings are discussed in terms of perceptual narrowing and the effects of familiarity and experience.

Differential Effects of Incongruent Anger Expression on Memory Performance

Abstract. There is growing evidence that certain strategies of emotion regulation may lead to impaired cognitive performance. The present study investigated the impact of manipulated discrepancy between felt and displayed anger on cognitive performance and how it is modulated by extraversion. Fifty-six female participants were asked to solve two blocks of anagrams. Additionally, half of the subjects were instructed to show an angry emotional expression while solving the second block of anagrams, the remaining half were asked to keep their expression neutral. Before the second anagram trial, half of the participants were provoked, half of them were not. The subsequent unexpected memory test revealed a detrimental effect of the incongruent anger expression on the recall of the anagram solutions seen in the second trial. Compared to participants low on extraversion, high extraverts appeared to profit from showing an emotional display that was congruent with their feelings.

Direct crossregulation between retinoic acid receptor β and Hox genes during hindbrain segmentation

During anteroposterior (AP) patterning of the developing hindbrain, the expression borders of many transcription factors are aligned at interfaces between neural segments called rhombomeres (r). Mechanisms regulating segmental expression have been identified for Hox genes, but for other classes of AP patterning genes there is only limited information. We have analysed the murine retinoic acid receptor beta gene (Rarb) and show that it is induced prior to segmentation, by retinoic-acid (RA) signalling from the mesoderm. Induction establishes a diffuse expression border that regresses until, at later stages, it is stably maintained at the r6/r7 boundary by inputs from Hoxb4 and Hoxd4. Separate RA- and Hox-responsive enhancers mediate the two phases of Rarb expression: a regulatory mechanism remarkably similar to that of Hoxb4. By showing that Rarb is a direct transcriptional target of Hoxb4, this study identifies a new molecular link, completing a feedback circuit between Rarb, Hoxb4 and Hoxd4. We propose that the function of this circuit is to align the initially incongruent expression of multiple RA-induced genes at a single segment boundary.

Integrated Genomic and Proteomic Analyses of Gene Expression in Mammalian Cells

Using DNA microarrays together with quantitative proteomic techniques (ICAT reagents, two-dimensional DIGE, and MS), we evaluated the correlation of mRNA and protein levels in two hematopoietic cell lines representing distinct stages of myeloid differentiation, as well as in the livers of mice treated for different periods of time with three different peroxisome proliferative activated receptor agonists. We observe that the differential expression of mRNA (up or down) can capture at most 40% of the variation of protein expression. Although the overall pattern of protein expression is similar to that of mRNA expression, the incongruent expression between mRNAs and proteins emphasize the importance of posttranscriptional regulatory mechanisms in cellular development or perturbation that can be unveiled only through integrated analyses of both proteins and mRNAs.

Incongruent expression profiles between human and mouse orthologous genes suggest widespread neutral evolution of transcription control.

Rapid rates of evolution can signify either a lack of selective constraint and the consequent accumulation of neutral alleles, or positive Darwinian selection driving the fixation of advantageous alleles. Based on a comparison of 1,350 orthologous gene pairs from human and mouse, we show that the evolution of gene expression profiles is so rapid that it is comparable to that of paralogous gene pairs or randomly paired genes. The expression divergence in the entire set of orthologous pairs neither strongly correlates with sequence divergence, nor focuses in any particular tissue. Moreover, comparing tissue expressions across the orthologous gene pairs, we observe that any human tissue is more similar to any other human tissue examined than to its corresponding mouse tissue. Collectively, these results indicate that, while some differences in expression profiles may be due to adaptive evolution, the levels of divergence are mostly compatible with a neutral mode of evolution, in which a mutation for ectopic expression may rise to fixation by random drift without significantly affecting the fitness. A disturbing corollary of these findings is that knowledge of where the gene is expressed may not carry information about its function.