Neutral Expressions Research Articles

On the relationship between emotions and cognitive control: Evidence from an observational study on emotional priming Stroop task.

Evidence is discordant regarding how emotional processing and cognitive control interact to shape behavior. This observational study sought to examine this interaction by looking at the distinction between proactive and reactive modes of control and how they relate to emotional processing. Seventy-four healthy participants performed an emotional priming Stroop task. On each trial, target stimuli of a spatial Stroop task were preceded by sad or neutral facial expressions, providing two emotional conditions. To manipulate the requirement of both proactive and reactive control, the proportion of congruent trials (PC) was varied at the list-wide (LWPC) and item-specific (ISPC) levels, respectively. We found that sad priming led to behavioral costs only in trials with low proactive and reactive cognitive control demands. Our findings suggest that emotional processing affects cognitive processes other than cognitive control in the Stroop task. Moreover, both proactive and reactive control modes seem effective in overcoming emotional interference of priming stimuli.

Influence of stimulus manipulation on conscious awareness of emotional facial expressions in the match-to-sample paradigm

The conscious perception of emotional facial expressions plays an indispensable role in social interaction. However, previous psychological studies have reported inconsistent findings regarding whether conscious awareness is greater for emotional expressions than for neutral expressions. Furthermore, whether this phenomenon is attributable to emotional or visual factors remains unknown. To investigate these issues, we conducted five psychological experiments to test the conscious perception of emotional and neutral facial expressions using the match-to-sample paradigm. Facial stimuli were momentarily presented in the peripheral visual fields while participants read simultaneously presented letters in the central visual fields. The participants selected a perceived face from nine samples. The results of all experiments demonstrated that emotional expressions were more accurately identified than neutral expressions. Furthermore, Experiment 4 showed that angry expressions were identified more accurately than anti-angry expressions, which expressed neutral emotions with comparable physical changes to angry expressions. Experiment 5, testing the interaction between emotional expression and face direction, showed that angry expressions looking toward participants were more accurately identified than those looking away from participants, even though they were physically identical. These results suggest that the conscious awareness of emotional facial expressions is enhanced by their emotional significance.

Estradiol effects on an emotional interference task in adolescents with current and remitted depression

Attentional biases to emotional stimuli are thought to reflect vulnerability for mood disorder onset and maintenance. This study examined the association between the endogenous sex hormone estradiol and emotional attentional biases in adolescent females with either current or remitted depression. Three groups of participants (mean age ± SD) completed the Emotional Interrupt Task: 1) 20 adolescent females (15.1 ± 1.83 years) currently diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), 2) 16 adolescent females (16.4 ± 1.31 years) who had experienced at least one episode of MDD in their lifetime but currently met criteria for MDD in remission, and 3) 30 adolescent female (15.4 ± 1.83 years) healthy controls. Attentional interference (AI) scores were calculated as differences in target response reaction time between trials with emotional facial expressions versus neutral facial expressions. Estradiol levels were assayed by Salimetrics LLC using saliva samples collected within 30 min of waking on assessment days. Robust multiple regression with product terms evaluated estradiol's main effect on AI scores, as well as hypothesized estradiol × diagnostic group interactions. Although neither mean estradiol levels nor mean AI scores in the current-MDD and remitted-MDD groups differed from controls, the relationship between estradiol and overall AI score differed between control adolescents and the remitted-MDD group. Specifically, the remitted-MDD adolescents performed worse (i.e., showed greater attentional interference) when they had higher estradiol; no significant relationship existed in the current-MDD group. Because this finding was driven by angry and not happy stimuli, it appears higher estradiol levels were associated with greater susceptibility to the attention-capturing effects of negatively-valenced emotional content in girls at risk for MDD from prior history.

The transcription factor CREB3–2 regulated neutral lipase gene expression in ovary of Nilaparvata lugens

The cyclic AMP-responsive element-binding protein 3 (CREB3) members have unique regulatory roles in cellular lipid metabolism as transcription factors. Two CREB3 proteins in Nilaparvata lugens were identified and analyzed. In ovary, when silencing NlCREB3–2, triacylglycerol (TAG) content dramatically increased but glycerol and free fatty acid (FFA) significantly decreased, which implicated that NlCREB3–2 was involved in the lipase-related TAG metabolism. In N. lugens, five neutral lipases with complete features for TAG hydrolytic activity and high expression in ovary were focused. Among them, the expression levels of three neutral lipase genes were significantly down-regulated by NlCREB3–2 RNAi. The direct regulation of NlCREB3–2 towards the three neutral lipase genes was evidenced by the dual-luciferase reporter assay. After jointly silencing three neutral lipase genes, TAG and glycerol contents displayed similar changes as NlCREB3–2 RNAi. The study proved that NlCREB3–2 participated in TAG metabolism in ovary via the direct activation towards the ovary-specific neutral lipase genes.

A primitive-based representation of dance: modulations by experience and perceptual validity.

The generation of complex movements such as dance might be possible due to the utilization of movement building blocks, i.e., movement primitives. However, it is largely unexplored how the temporal structure of a movement sequence and the recruitment of these primitives change with experience. Therefore, we obtained a representation of primitives with the temporal movement primitive model from the motion capture data of dancers with varying experiences, both for improvised and choreographed movements (elements from contemporary/modern/jazz) with different qualitative expressions. We analyzed differences between movement conditions regarding the number of temporal segments and the number of primitives, as well as their association with dance experience. Especially for the choreography with a neutral expression, the results indicate a negative association between experience and the number of segments and a positive association between experience and the number of primitives. The variation in the recruitment of these primitives suggests an increased consistency of modular control with experience, particularly for improvised dance. A prerequisite for the meaningful interpretation of these results regarding human movement production is that the model can generate perceptually valid dance movements. This was confirmed in a subsequent experiment, although the validity was slightly impaired for improvised movements. Overall, the results of the choreographed movement sequences suggest that experience is associated with an increase in motor repertoire that might facilitate fewer and longer temporal segments.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study demonstrates that a temporal movement primitive model, trained with movements performed by dancers with different levels of experience, is able to generate natural-looking dance movements. The results suggest that motor experience in dance is associated not only with fewer temporal segments but also with an increase in the number of underlying movement building blocks. The recruitment of these primitives, which might be used to simplify movement production, additionally seems to become more consistent with experience.

Incidental learning of faces during threat: No evidence for enhanced physiological responses to former threat identities

Remembering an unfamiliar person and the contextual conditions of that encounter is important for adaptive future behavior, especially in a potentially dangerous situation. Initiating defensive behavior in the presence of former dangerous circumstances can be crucial. Recent studies showed selective electrocortical processing of faces that were previously seen in a threat context compared to a safety context, however, this was not reflected in conscious recognition performance. Here, we investigated whether previously seen threat-faces, that could not be remembered, were capable to activate defensive psychophysiological response systems. During an encoding phase, 50 participants with low to moderate levels of anxiety viewed 40 face pictures with neutral expressions (6 s each), without an explicit learning instruction (incidental learning task). Each half of the faces were presented with contextual background colors that signaled either threat-of-shock or safety. In the recognition phase, all old and additional new faces (total of 60) were presented intermixed without context information. Participants had to decide whether a face was new or had been presented previously in a threatening or a safe context. Results show moderate face recognition independent of context conditions. Startle reflex and skin conductance responses (SCR) were more pronounced for threat compared to safety during encoding. For SCR, this differentiation was enhanced with higher levels of depression and anxiety. There were no differential startle reflex or SCR effects during recognition. From a clinical perspective, these findings do not support the notion that perceptual biases and physiological arousal directly relate to threat-associated identity recognition deficits in healthy and clinical participants with anxiety and trauma-related disorders.

Melatonin mobilizes the metabolism of sugars, ascorbic acid and amino acids to cope with chilling injury in postharvest pear fruit

Chilling injury manifesting as internal browning is an irreversible physiological disorder in cold-stored ‘Yali’ pear fruit, which seriously restricts postharvest handling and commercialization of pear fruit. This study investigated the impact of melatonin (MN) treatment on chilling injury and the metabolism of sugars, ascorbic acid (AsA), proline, and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) during chilling injury development in ‘Yali’ pears. The findings revealed that MN-treated pear fruit exhibited considerably improved tolerance to chilling stress compared with untreated control fruit. MN application augmented proline accumulation, likely owing to increased activities and transcriptional concentrations of Δ1-pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthase and ornithine-δ-aminotransferase as well as diminished activity and transcriptional level of proline dehydrogenase. MN immersion increased enzyme activities and gene expression related to the GABA shunt pathway, leading to increased GABA concentrations in cold-stored pear fruit. Furthermore, MN treatment elevated AsA concentrations in the fruit, exerting protective effects against cell membrane damage and mitigating oxidative stress damage caused by chilling. Compared with the control group, MN-treated fruit exhibited reduced neutral invertase enzyme activity and gene expression. Additionally, MN treatment increased both sucrose-phosphate synthase and sucrose synthase activities and gene expression in pear fruit. These observations indicated that the enhanced chilling tolerance of ‘Yali’ pear fruit following MN treatment may be associated with the regulation of proline, GABA, AsA, and soluble sugars metabolism.

Event-related alpha power in early stage of facial expression processing in social anxiety: Influence of language context.

Accurate interpretation of the emotional information conveyed by others' facial expressions is crucial for social interactions. Event-related alpha power, measured by time-frequency analysis, is a frequently used EEG index of emotional information processing. However, it is still unclear how event-related alpha power varies in emotional information processing in social anxiety groups. In the present study, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants from the social anxiety and healthy control groups viewed facial expressions (angry, happy, neutral) preceded by contextual sentences conveying either a positive or negative evaluation of the subject. The impact of context on facial expression processing in both groups of participants was explored by assessing behavioral ratings and event-related alpha power (0-200 ms after expression presentation). In comparison to the healthy control group, the social anxiety group exhibited significantly lower occipital alpha power in response to angry facial expressions in negative contexts and neutral facial expressions in positive contexts. The influence of language context on facial expression processing in individuals with social anxiety may occur at an early stage of processing.

Facial emotion expressivity in patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are neurodegenerative disorders with some overlapping clinical features. Hypomimia (reduced facial expressivity) is a prominent sign of PD and it is also present in AD. However, no study has experimentally assessed hypomimia in AD and compared facial expressivity between PD and AD patients. We compared facial emotion expressivity in patients with PD, AD, and healthy controls (HCs). Twenty-four PD patients, 24 AD patients and 24 HCs were videotaped during neutral facial expressions and while posing six facial emotions (anger, surprise, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). Fifteen raters were asked to evaluate the videos using MDS-UPDRS-III (item 3.2) and to identify the corresponding emotion from a seven-forced-choice response format. We measured the percentage of accuracy, the reaction time (RT), and the confidence level (CL) in the perceived accuracy of the raters’ responses. We found the highest MDS-UPDRS 3.2 scores in PD, and higher in AD than HCs. When evaluating the posed expression captures, raters identified a lower percentage of correct answers in the PD and AD groups than HCs. There was no difference in raters’ response accuracy between the PD and AD. No difference was observed in RT and CL data between groups. Hypomimia in patients correlated positively with the global MDS-UPDRS-III and negatively with Mini Mental State Examination scores. PD and AD patients have a similar pattern of reduced facial emotion expressivity compared to controls. These findings hold potential pathophysiological and clinical implications.

Language and Gender: Investigating the Representation of Chinese Women in Mandarin Slang and Its Implications for Professional Communication (1970s-1990s)

This study highlights the role of language and slang in perpetuating cultural attitudes and gender roles and the need for a more positive and inclusive representation of women in language. This study examines the representation of Chinese women in Mandarin slang from the 1970s to the 1990s and its impact on business and professional communication. Employing qualitative methods, such as interviews and documents review, the research explores how the portrayal of women through Mandarin slang affected their participation and perception in the professional sphere. The findings reveal that most slang vocabulary used during this era carried negative connotations. Historical and cultural contexts, political events, and personal opinions and attitudes influenced the representation of women in Mandarin slang. The prevalence of negative expressions reinforced cultural expectations for women to conform to traditional gender roles and moral codes. In contrast, the limited use of positive and neutral expressions indicated evolving cultural attitudes. This study underscores the role of language and slang in perpetuating cultural attitudes and gender roles in professional contexts, emphasizing the need for a more positive and inclusive representation of women in language to foster greater gender equality in business and professional environments.

ERR-Net: Facial Expression Removal and Recognition Network With Residual Image

Facial expression recognition is an important part of computer vision and has attracted great attention. Although deep learning pushes forward the development of facial expression recognition, it still faces huge challenges due to unrelated factors such as identity, gender, and race. Inspired by decomposing an expression into two parts: neutral component and expression component, we define residual features and propose an end-to-end network framework named Expression Removal and Recognition Network (ERR-Net), which can simultaneously perform expression removal and recognition tasks. The residual features are represented in two ways: pixel level and facial landmark level. Our network focuses on interpreting the encoder’s output and corresponding its segments to expressions to maximize the inter-class distances. We explore the improved generative adversarial network to convert different expressions into neutral expressions (i.e., expression removal), take the residual images as the output, learn the expression components in the process, and realize the classification of expressions. Through sufficient ablation experiments, we have proved that various improvements added on the network have obvious effects. Experimental comparisons on two benchmarks CK+ and MMI demonstrate that our proposed ERR-Net surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.

Facial expressions in adolescent-parent interactions and mental health: A proof-of-concept study.

Parent-child relationships are hotbeds of emotion and play a key role in mental health. The present proof-of-concept study examined facial expressions of emotion during adolescent-parent interactions and links with internalizing mental health symptoms. Neutral, negative, and positive facial expressions were objectively measured in 28 parent-adolescent dyads during three 10-min dyadic interactions. Internalizing mental health symptoms were measured using anxiety and depressive symptom questionnaires. Data were analyzed using actor-partner interdependence modeling. Results revealed that higher levels of (a) adolescents' neutral facial expressions as well as (b) parents' negative facial expressions were associated with higher levels of adolescents' mental health symptoms. Findings did not support a robust link between (c) positive expressions and mental health symptoms. Together, these results demonstrate the utility of facial expressions of emotion during parent-child interactions as behavioral correlates of adolescents' internalizing mental health symptoms, highlight the need for replication with larger samples, and suggest directions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Effects of lip and eye color on the emotion categorization of facial expressions

AbstractThis study examined whether people's ability to recognize facial expressions is affected by manipulating the color of their lips or eyes. Participants comprised 100 Chinese adolescents (mean age = 13.79 years, SD = 1.06). The stimuli consisted of happy, neutral, and sad facial expressions, which were manipulated to have different lip or eye colors. Participants reacted to the images by indicating their perceived emotion. Performance speed and accuracy were assessed during the experiment. Results indicated that for happy and neutral expressions, the use of color significantly reduced reaction times, while the accuracy remained unchanged. Conversely, for sad expressions, reaction time was not affected by color, but all color categories exhibited reduced accuracy.

Preschoolers Can Match the Facial and Bodily Emotional Expressions: A Behavior and Eye-Tracking Study

The preschool age is an important period in the development of children’s emotional abilities. The face and body are both vital carriers of emotional information and adults readily match the emotional cues coming from these two modalities. However, it is unknown whether preschoolers have this ability or not. In the current study, 36 preschoolers (22 boys, aged 44–73 months old) participated in an emotional facial and bodily matching test including angry, happy, and neutral expressions (Experiment 1) and an eye-tracking experiment (Experiment 2). The results show that: (1) preschoolers can accurately match three categories of facial and bodily expressions of emotion (all matching rates were above 93% in Experiment 1); (2) robust emotional matching was observed across conditions in Experiment 2. That is, the eye-tracking indexes including the total fixation duration, the first fixation duration, and the fixation count, all indicated that the preschoolers more thoroughly processed bodily expressions of emotion which were congruent to the facial expressions compared to incongruent bodily expressions of emotion. This study shows that the ability to match facial and bodily expressions of emotion develops at an early age. Preschool children have already reached a high level of this ability.

Attention toward emotions is modulated by familiarity with the expressor: A comparison between bonobos and humans.

Why can humans be intolerant of, yet also be empathic toward strangers? This cardinal question can be tackled by studying emotions in our closest living relatives, bonobos. Their striking xenophilic tendencies make them an interesting model for reconstructing the socioemotional capacities of the last common ancestor of hominids. Within two dot-probe studies, we compared bonobos' and humans' attention toward scenes depicting familiar (kith and kin) or unfamiliar individuals with emotional or neutral expressions. Results show that the attention of bonobos is biased toward emotional scenes depicting unfamiliar bonobos, but not toward emotional groupmates (Study 1). In contrast, Study 2 shows that human attention is biased toward emotional rather than neutral expressions of family and friends, but not toward unfamiliar others. On the one hand, our results show that an attentional bias toward emotions is a shared phenomenon between humans and bonobos, but on the other, both species have their own unique evolutionarily informed biases. These findings support previously proposed adaptive explanations for xenophilia in bonobos that potentially biases them toward emotional expressions of unfamiliar conspecifics, and parochialism in humans, which makes them sensitive to the emotional expressions of close others. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing the influence of emotional expressions on perceptual sensitivity to faces overcoming interocular suppression.

Detecting faces and identifying their emotional expressions are essential for social interaction. The importance of expressions has prompted suggestions that some emotionally relevant facial features may be processed unconsciously, and it has been further suggested that this unconscious processing yields preferential access to awareness. Evidence for such preferential access has predominantly come from reaction times in the breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) paradigm, which measures how long it takes different stimuli to overcome interocular suppression. For instance, it has been claimed that fearful expressions break through suppression faster than neutral expressions. However, in the bCFS procedure, observers can decide how much information they receive before committing to a report, so although their responses may reflect differential detection sensitivity, they may also be influenced by differences in decision criteria, stimulus identification, and response production processes. Here, we employ a procedure that directly measures sensitivity for both face detection and identification of facial expressions, using predefined exposure durations. We apply diverse psychophysical approaches-forced-choice localization, presence/absence detection, and staircase-based threshold measurement; across six experiments, we find that emotional expressions do not alter detection sensitivity to faces as they break through CFS. Our findings constrain the possible mechanisms underlying previous findings: faster reporting of emotional expressions' breakthrough into awareness is unlikely to be due to the presence of emotion affecting perceptual sensitivity; the source of such effects is likely to reside in one of the many other processes that influence response times. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Internet-based identification of anxiety in university students using text and facial emotion analysis

BackgroundAnxiety in university students can lead to poor academic performance and even dropout. The Adult Manifest Anxiety Scale (AMAS-C) is a validated measure designed to assess the level and nature of anxiety in college students. ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to provide internet-based alternatives to the AMAS-C in the automated identification and prediction of anxiety in young university students. Two anxiety prediction methods, one based on facial emotion recognition and the other on text emotion recognition, are described and validated using the AMAS-C Test Anxiety, Lie and Total Anxiety scales as ground truth data. MethodsThe first method analyses facial expressions, identifying the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise) and the neutral expression, while the students complete a technical skills test. The second method examines emotions in posts classified as positive, negative and neutral in the students' profile on the social network Facebook. Both approaches aim to predict the presence of anxiety. ResultsBoth methods achieved a high level of precision in predicting anxiety and proved to be effective in identifying anxiety disorders in relation to the AMAS-C validation tool. Text analysis-based prediction showed a slight advantage in terms of precision (86.84 %) in predicting anxiety compared to face analysis-based prediction (84.21 %). ConclusionsThe applications developed can help educators, psychologists or relevant institutions to identify at an early stage those students who are likely to fail academically at university due to an anxiety disorder.

Deepfake smiles matter less—the psychological and neural impact of presumed AI-generated faces

High-quality AI-generated portraits (“deepfakes”) are becoming increasingly prevalent. Understanding the responses they evoke in perceivers is crucial in assessing their societal implications. Here we investigate the impact of the belief that depicted persons are real or deepfakes on psychological and neural measures of human face perception. Using EEG, we tracked participants’ (N = 30) brain responses to real faces showing positive, neutral, and negative expressions, after being informed that they are either real or fake. Smiling faces marked as fake appeared less positive, as reflected in expression ratings, and induced slower evaluations. Whereas presumed real smiles elicited canonical emotion effects with differences relative to neutral faces in the P1 and N170 components (markers of early visual perception) and in the EPN component (indicative of reflexive emotional processing), presumed deepfake smiles showed none of these effects. Additionally, only smiles presumed as fake showed enhanced LPP activity compared to neutral faces, suggesting more effortful evaluation. Negative expressions induced typical emotion effects, whether considered real or fake. Our findings demonstrate a dampening effect on perceptual, emotional, and evaluative processing of presumed deepfake smiles, but not angry expressions, adding new specificity to the debate on the societal impact of AI-generated content.

The effect of aging and emotions on time processing

BackgroundTime perception is an automatic process that can be influenced by intrinsic and extrinsic factors.AimsThis study aimed to investigate the effect of age and emotions on the ability to keep track of short suprasecond intervals.MethodsYounger adults (N = 108, age range: 18–35) and older adults (N = 51, age range: 65–87) were asked to reproduce, bisect, or double the duration of facial stimuli randomly presented for 1500, 3000, and 4500 ms. The experiment included facial stimuli with positive, negative, or neutral expressions.ResultsThe participants across age correctly reproduced intervals but overestimated and underestimated them when asked to bisect and double the intervals, respectively. Overall, when faces were presented with a positive or negative expression, an overestimation of time intervals emerged compared to faces with neutral expressions. Emotions had a greater effect on older adults, who showed a greater overestimation of positive facial expressions and an underestimation of sad, but not angry, facial expressions.DiscussionThe results provide evidence that time perception is influenced by age and emotions, with older adults showing a greater effect of emotions on time processing.ConclusionThe study suggests an interaction among time processing, age, and emotions, highlighting an automatic relationship among these domains, often considered independent.

Does patient behaviour drive physicians to practice defensive medicine? Evidence from a video experiment

ObjectiveBy manipulating patients’ critical attitude in a video experiment, we examined whether physicians are more intended to perform defensive acts because of a higher perceived liability risk in Belgium.MethodsWe assigned 85 practicing gynaecologists/obstetricians and orthopaedists randomly to four hypothetical video consultations, in which the patients show either a critical attitude (i.e., getting ahead of the facts, showing distrust) or a non-critical attitude (i.e., displaying more neutral questions and expressions). We asked the physicians about the care they would administer in the presented cases and the expected likelihood that the patient would sue the physician in case of a medical incident.ResultsBy manipulating patients’ verbal critical attitude (which indicates patients’ intention to take further steps), while keeping constant physician’s communication, patients’ clinical situation, preferences, and non-verbal behaviour in the videos, we were able to discover differential treatment styles driven by physicians’ perceived liability risk among patients with a different critical attitude. We found that physicians perform 17 percentage points more defensive acts (e.g., surgeries and diagnostic tests that are not medically necessary) when experiencing a high liability risk.ConclusionsOur results show that patients’ critical attitude drives physicians’ perceived liability risk and consequent defensive behaviour among obstetricians/gynaecologists and orthopaedists.