Processing Of Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Double attention bias for positive and negative emotional faces in clinical depression: Evidence from an eye-tracking study

Background and objectivesAccording to cognitive models, attentional biases in depression play key roles in the onset and subsequent maintenance of the disorder. The present study examines the processing of emotional facial expressions (happy, angry, and sad) in depressed and non-depressed adults. MethodsSixteen unmedicated patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and 34 never-depressed controls (ND) completed an eye-tracking task to assess different components of visual attention (orienting attention and maintenance of attention) in the processing of emotional faces. ResultsCompared to ND, participants with MDD showed a negative attentional bias in attentional maintenance indices (i.e. first fixation duration and total fixation time) for sad faces. This attentional bias was positively associated with the severity of depressive symptoms. Furthermore, the MDD group spent a marginally less amount of time viewing happy faces compared with the ND group. No differences were found between the groups with respect to angry faces and orienting attention indices. LimitationsThe current study is limited by its cross-sectional design. ConclusionsThese results support the notion that attentional biases in depression are specific to depression-related information and that they operate in later stages in the deployment of attention.

Emotional content modulates response inhibition and perceptual processing.

In this study, event-related potentials were used to investigate the effect of emotion on response inhibition. Participants performed an emotional go/no-go task that required responses to human faces associated with a "go" valence (i.e., emotional, neutral) and response inhibition to human faces associated with a "no-go" valence. Emotional content impaired response inhibition, as evidenced by decreased response accuracy and N2 amplitudes in no-go trials. More importantly, emotional expressions elicited larger N170 amplitudes than neutral expressions, and this effect was larger in no-go than in go trials, indicating that the perceptual processing of emotional expression had priority in inhibitory trials. In no-go trials, correlation analysis showed that increased N170 amplitudes were associated with decreased N2 amplitudes. Taken together, our findings suggest that emotional content impairs response inhibition due to the prioritization of emotional content processing.

Effect of specific psychotherapy for chronic depression on neural Responses to emotional faces

BackgroundNeurofunctional deficits in chronic depression (CD) have been understudied. Specifically there is no known published study of the effects of a specialized psychotherapy for CD (CBASP) on neurofunctional deficits. MethodsTen patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of CD received a 12 week specialised psychotherapy (CBASP). Controls were healthy matched volunteers. All subjects participated in a prospective study with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at baseline and after 12 weeks. During the fMRI scans, subjects performed an implicit and explicit emotional processing task while watching dynamic displays of neutral, positive (happy) and negative (fearful and sad) facial expressions. Effects of treatment were analyzed in a repeated measures design. The analysis was restricted to two anatomically defined regions of interest (ROI): the amygdala and the cingulum. Results60% of patients responded to treatment. Patients with CD reported increased arousal to negative emotional expressions. They also showed an increase in left amygdala reactivity during implicit processing of emotional expressions following psychotherapy. We found no significant effect for the cingulum. LimitationsThe main limitation of our study is the small sample size. Due to the lack of a control group it is also unclear whether the demonstrated effect is specific to the psychotherapy used in this study. ConclusionsFor the first time our study demonstrates an effect of CBASP on neural processing of facial emotions in CD. It therefore adds to the growing evidence supporting this treatment.

Task Difficulty and Response Complexity Modulate Affective Priming by Emotional Facial Expressions

In this study we used an affective priming task to address the issue of whether the processing of emotional facial expressions occurs automatically independent of attention or attentional resources. Participants had to attend to the emotion expression of the prime face, or to a nonemotional feature of the prime face, the glasses. When participants attended to glasses (emotion unattended), they had to report whether the face wore glasses or not (the glasses easy condition) or whether the glasses were rounded or squared (the shape difficult condition). Affective priming, measured on valence decisions on target words, was mainly defined as interference from incongruent rather than facilitation from congruent trials. Significant priming effects were observed just in the emotion and glasses tasks but not in the shape task. When the key-response mapping increased in complexity, taxing working memory load, affective priming effects were reduced equally for the three types of tasks. Thus, attentional load and working memory load affected additively to the observed reduction in affective priming. These results cast some doubts on the automaticity of processing emotional facial expressions.

Sex differences in the rapid detection of emotional facial expressions.

BackgroundPrevious studies have shown that females and males differ in the processing of emotional facial expressions including the recognition of emotion, and that emotional facial expressions are detected more rapidly than are neutral expressions. However, whether the sexes differ in the rapid detection of emotional facial expressions remains unclear.Methodology/Principal FindingsWe measured reaction times (RTs) during a visual search task in which 44 females and 46 males detected normal facial expressions of anger and happiness or their anti-expressions within crowds of neutral expressions. Anti-expressions expressed neutral emotions with visual changes quantitatively comparable to normal expressions. We also obtained subjective emotional ratings in response to the facial expression stimuli. RT results showed that both females and males detected normal expressions more rapidly than anti-expressions and normal-angry expressions more rapidly than normal-happy expressions. However, females and males showed different patterns in their subjective ratings in response to the facial expressions. Furthermore, sex differences were found in the relationships between subjective ratings and RTs. High arousal was more strongly associated with rapid detection of facial expressions in females, whereas negatively valenced feelings were more clearly associated with the rapid detection of facial expressions in males.ConclusionOur data suggest that females and males differ in their subjective emotional reactions to facial expressions and in the emotional processes that modulate the detection of facial expressions.

Neural responses to emotional expression information in high- and low-spatial frequency in autism: evidence for a cortical dysfunction

Despite an overall consensus that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) entails atypical processing of human faces and emotional expressions, the role of neural structures involved in early facial processing remains unresolved. An influential model for the neurotypical brain suggests that face processing in the fusiform gyrus and the amygdala is based on both high-spatial frequency (HSF) information carried by a parvocellular pathway, and low-spatial frequency (LSF) information separately conveyed by a magnocellular pathway. Here, we tested the fusiform gyrus and amygdala sensitivity to emotional face information conveyed by these distinct pathways in ASD individuals (and matched Controls). During functional Magnetical Resonance Imaging (fMRI), participants reported the apparent gender of hybrid face stimuli, made by merging two different faces (one in LSF and the other in HSF), out of which one displayed an emotional expression (fearful or happy) and the other was neutral. Controls exhibited increased fusiform activity to hybrid faces with an emotional expression (relative to hybrids composed only with neutral faces), regardless of whether this was conveyed by LSFs or HSFs in hybrid stimuli. ASD individuals showed intact fusiform response to LSF, but not HSF, expressions. Furthermore, the amygdala (and the ventral occipital cortex) was more sensitive to HSF than LSF expressions in Controls, but exhibited an opposite preference in ASD. Our data suggest spared LSF face processing in ASD, while cortical analysis of HSF expression cues appears affected. These findings converge with recent accounts suggesting that ASD might be characterized by a difficulty in integrating multiple local information and cause global processing troubles unexplained by losses in low spatial frequency inputs.

Emotional facial expression processing in depression: Data from behavioral and event-related potential studies

Behavioral literature investigating emotional processes in depressive populations (i.e., unipolar and bipolar depression) states that, compared to healthy controls, depressive subjects exhibit disrupted emotional processing, indexed by lower performance and/or delayed response latencies. The development of brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), provided the possibility to visualize the brain regions engaged in emotional processes and how they fail to interact in psychiatric diseases. However, fMRI suffers from poor temporal resolution and cognitive function involves various steps and cognitive stages (serially or in parallel) to give rise to a normal performance. Thus, the origin of a behavioral deficit may result from the alteration of a cognitive stage differently situated along the information-processing stream, outlining the importance of access to this dynamic "temporal" information. In this paper, we will illustrate, through depression, the role that should be attributed to cognitive event-related potentials (ERPs). Indeed, owing to their optimal temporal resolution, ERPs can monitor the neural processes engaged in disrupted cognitive function and provide crucial information for its treatment, training of the impaired cognitive functions and guidelines for clinicians in the choice and monitoring of appropriate medication for the patient.

Neural correlates of emotion perception depending on culture and gaze direction

A person’s cultural background as well as their gaze direction have been identified as relevant factors that influence the behavioural and neural processing of emotional expressions. However, research on their combined influence is sparse. Here, we manipulated the cultural background and gaze direction of emotion-encoders to investigate the interaction of both factors during the neural processing of emotions. Stimuli consisted of short video sequences showing faces that displayed either direct or averted gaze, expressed either anger or happiness, and represented either cultural in-group (European faces) or cultural out-group members (Asian faces). While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, a group of German participants rated the stimuli with respect to their valence. Results revealed that when anger was expressed with direct gaze, more activation was found in the dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices in response to cultural out-group compared to in-group members. However, when anger was expressed with averted gaze, activity increased in the amygdala and the striatum in response to cultural in-group compared to out-group members. With respect to happiness, enhanced neural activation in medial and lateral prefrontal cortical areas was associated with the processing of cultural in-group compared to out-group members expressing happiness with direct gaze. These findings indicate a complex interplay between culture, gaze direction and the valence of emotions.

Task relevance regulates the interaction between reward expectation and emotion

In the present study, we investigated the impact of reward expectation on the processing of emotional facial expression using a cue-target paradigm. A cue indicating the reward condition of each trial (incentive vs. non-incentive) was followed by the presentation of a picture of an emotional face, the target. Participants were asked to discriminate the emotional expression of the target face in Experiment 1, to discriminate the gender of the target face in Experiment 2, and to judge a number superimposed on the center of the target face as even or odd in Experiment 3, rendering the emotional expression of the target face as task relevant in Experiment 1 but task irrelevant in Experiments 2 and 3. Faster reaction times (RTs) were observed in the monetary incentive condition than in the non-incentive condition, demonstrating the effect of reward on facilitating task concentration. Moreover, the reward effect (i.e., RTs in non-incentive conditions versus incentive conditions) was larger for emotional faces than for neutral faces when emotional expression was task relevant but not when it was task irrelevant. The findings suggest that top-down incentive motivation biased attentional processing toward task-relevant stimuli, and that task relevance played an important role in regulating the influence of reward expectation on the processing of emotional stimuli.

Brain lateralization of holistic versus analytic processing of emotional facial expressions

This study investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the role of the eye and the mouth regions in the recognition of facial happiness, anger, and surprise. To this end, face stimuli were shown in three formats (whole face, upper half visible, and lower half visible) and behavioral categorization, computational modeling, and ERP (event-related potentials) measures were combined. N170 (150–180ms post-stimulus; right hemisphere) and EPN (early posterior negativity; 200–300ms; mainly, right hemisphere) were modulated by expression of whole faces, but not by separate halves. This suggests that expression encoding (N170) and emotional assessment (EPN) require holistic processing, mainly in the right hemisphere. In contrast, the mouth region of happy faces enhanced left temporo-occipital activity (150–180ms), and also the LPC (late positive complex; centro-parietal) activity (350–450ms) earlier than the angry eyes (450–600ms) or other face regions. Relatedly, computational modeling revealed that the mouth region of happy faces was also visually salient by 150ms following stimulus onset. This suggests that analytical or part-based processing of the salient smile occurs early (150–180ms) and lateralized (left), and is subsequently used as a shortcut to identify the expression of happiness (350–450ms). This would account for the happy face advantage in behavioral recognition tasks when the smile is visible.

Maternal depressive symptoms and sensitivity are related to young children's facial expression recognition: The Generation R Study

A vast body of literature shows that maternal depression has long-term adverse consequences for children. However, only very few studies have documented the effect of maternal depression on children's ability to process emotional expressions and even fewer incorporated measures of observed maternal sensitivity to further tease apart whether it is the symptoms per se or the associated impact via maternal sensitivity that affects children's developing emotion-processing abilities. In a large community sample of Dutch preschoolers (N = 770), we examined independent and mediated effects of maternal depressive symptoms and sensitivity on children's ability to recognize emotional expressions using a nonverbal and a verbal task paradigm. Maternal depressive symptoms predicted less accurate emotion labeling in children, while maternal sensitivity was associated with more accurate emotion matching, especially for sadness and anger. Maternal sensitivity did not mediate the observed associations between mothers' depressive symptoms and children's emotion recognition, and effects were similar for boys and girls. Given that maternal depressive symptoms and sensitivity affected nonoverlapping areas of young children's emotion recognition, prevention and intervention efforts should focus on both alleviating maternal depressive symptoms and improving maternal sensitivity at the same time in order to maximize benefit.

Common network for the processing of dynamic emotional bodies contains information to discriminate individual basic emotions

Common network for the processing of dynamic emotional bodies contains information to discriminate individual basic emotions

Distinct temporal processing of task-irrelevant emotional facial expressions.

There is an ongoing debate concerning the extent to which emotional faces automatically attract attention. Using a single-target Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) methodology, it has been found that presentation of task-irrelevant positive or negative emotionally salient stimuli (e.g., negative scenes or erotic pictures) results in a temporary inability to process target stimuli (emotion-induced blindness). In the present study, we sought to examine emotion-induced blindness effects for negative (angry) and positive (happy) facial expressions. Interestingly, task-irrelevant emotional facial expressions facilitated, rather than impaired, target detection when presented in close temporal proximity of the target. Similar facilitation effects were absent for neutral faces or rotated neutral faces that were both included as control stimuli. These results indicate a distinct temporal processing of emotional facial expressions, which accords well with the signal value of emotional expressions in interpersonal situations.

Age-related changes in attentional control across adolescence: how does this impact emotion regulation capacities?

This study set out to establish the novel use of the go/no-go Overlap task for investigating the role of attentional control capacities in the processing of emotional expressions across different age-groups within adolescence: at the onset of adolescence (11–12 year-olds) and toward the end of adolescence (17–18 year-olds). We also looked at how attentional control in the processing of fearful, happy, and neutral expressions relates to individual differences in trait anxiety in these adolescent groups. We were able to show that younger adolescents, but not older adolescents had more difficulties with attention control in the presence of all faces, but particularly in the presence of fearful faces. Moreover, we found that across all groups, adolescents with higher trait anxiety exhibited attentional avoidance of all faces, which facilitated relatively better performance on the primary task. These differences in reaction time emerged in the context of comparable accuracy level in the primary task across age-groups. Our results contribute to our understanding of how attentional control abilities to faces but in particular fearful expressions may mature across adolescence. This may affect learning about the environment and the acquisition of behavioral response patterns in the social world.

Attentional Modulation of the Emotional Expression Processing Studied with ERPs and sLORETA

Recent ERP studies demonstrate that the processing of facial emotional expression can be modulated by attention. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neural correlates of attentional influence on the emotional expression processing at early stages. We recorded ERP responses to facial stimuli containing neutral versus emotional expression in two different conditions. The first task was to discriminate facial expressions, while the second task was to categorize face gender. Enhanced positivity at occipital and occipito-temporal locations between 110 and 170 ms poststimulus was elicited by facial stimuli presented in the expression task when compared to the gender task. This effect temporally overlapped with the P1 and N170 components, which reflect the early stages of face processing. To localize the sources of the brain activity underlying observed attentional modulation, we used Standardized Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomography. Enhanced activity within the extrastriate cortex for the expression task was obtained as the reflection of early ERP effect. Additionally, we found stronger activation within the superior temporal and the fusiform gyrus of the right hemisphere in the expression task when compared to the gender task. Our findings undoubtedly confirm that early stages of the emotional expression processing can be modified by top-down attention.

Monetary Incentives Modulate the Processing of Emotional Facial Expressions: An ERP Study

It is widely reported that monetary reward improves performance of cognitive tasks, such as spatial orienting, visual search, and conflict control by increasing task concentration and engagement. The current study used event-related potentials(ERPs) technique to investigate the impact of monetary reward on the discrimination of emotional facial expressions. Participants were asked to discriminate a happy, neutral, or angry face presented at the center of the computer screen, which was preceded by a monetary incentive or a non-incentive cue, and was followed by a feedback stimulus regarding the fastness and correctness of the response. Participants were informed that they would gain additional monetary reward if their reaction times(RTs) on incentive trials meet certain criteria. Behavioral results showed that RTs to emotional faces were generally faster than to neutral faces, and RTs in incentive trials were faster than that in non-incentive trials. Cue-elicited ERPs were modulated by monetary incentive, such that incentive cue elicited larger P1(130~200 ms), P2(200~300 ms), and P300(300~600 ms) amplitude than the non-incentive cue. Target-elicited occipito-temporal P1, N170 and frontal-central N300 amplitudes were modulated by reward anticipation, such that target elicited more positively-going ERPs in incentive condition than that in non-incentive condition. Early P1, N170 and VPP amplitudes were not affected by emotional facial expressions. The neural processes involved in processing emotional faces(happy, angry) and neutral faces diverged 300 ms after stimulus onset. Results showed more positive N300 in emotional conditions than in neutral conditions. Additionally, the amplitude of N300 was influenced by both reward anticipation and emotional valence. While the positive emotion processing effect was not modulated by reward anticipation, the negative emotion processing effect and negative bias effect for the N300 component were larger in incentive condition than in non-incentive condition. These results suggested an impact of reward anticipation on the processing of upcoming emotional facial expressions. Motivational factors may modulate the distribution of attentional resources, which then bias the processing of negative emotion.

The Interaction between the Processing of Facial Gender and Emotional Expression

In face cognition, facial gender and emotional expression have different processing mechanisms. The models of face cognition from Bruce Young(1986) and Haxby, Hoffman Gobbini(2000) focused on expression processing. However, there was little interpretation about the facial gender processing, and the relationship between gender and expression processing was not illustrated in those models. Although several studies suggest that gender and expression processing may interact with each other, there is still no direct evidence. We proposed that the effect of facial familiarity might had been neglected in previous studies using the Garner's paradigm. Meanwhile, the face adaption paradigm might provide a new way to examine the relationship between the facial gender and expression processing. The mechanisms of the interaction would also be discussed in this review.

EPA-0475 – Emotional processing in women with borderline personality disorder - preliminary findings

Introduction Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with aberrant processing of emotional facial expressions and emotional memory which may contribute to patients’ interpersonal difficulties. However, findings are conflicting and warrant further investigation. Aims To clarify whether patients with BPD show deficits in facial expression recognition and self-referent incidental memory. Objectives To examine facial expression recognition and/or in emotional categorization and recall of self-referent personality characteristics in a cohort of female patients with BPD in comparison with healthy controls. Methods 14 patients and 11 healthy controls were given a facial expression recognition task and a self-referent emotional categorization and recall task using positive and negative personality characteristics; both tasks were from the Emotional Test Battery (P1Vital, Oxford). Results BPD patients showed general impairment of facial expression recognition as reflected by increased response latency (F(1,23)=4.58, p=0.043). Examination of each emotion across different intensity levels revealed specific reduction in the sensitivity to happy expressions (F(1,23)=4.74, p=0.040). Patients also demonstrated reduced categorization accuracy for positive versus negative self-referent words (F(1,23)=5.15, p=0.033) and generally increased response latency on this task relative to controls (F(1,23)=4.46, p=0.046). This was associated with subsequent reduction in overall recall of these self-referent words in patients versus controls (F(1,23)=7.69, p=0.011). Conclusions These preliminary findings highlight deficits in facial expression recognition and emotional categorization and recall as potential biomarkers of BPD, which may contribute to patients interpersonal difficulties.

Neural processing of dynamic emotional facial expressions in psychopaths

Facial expressions play a critical role in social interactions by eliciting rapid responses in the observer. Failure to perceive and experience a normal range and depth of emotion seriously impact interpersonal communication and relationships. As has been demonstrated across a number of domains, abnormal emotion processing in individuals with psychopathy plays a key role in their lack of empathy. However, the neuroimaging literature is unclear as to whether deficits are specific to particular emotions such as fear and perhaps sadness. Moreover, findings are inconsistent across studies. In the current experiment, 80 incarcerated adult males scoring high, medium, and low on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning while viewing dynamic facial expressions of fear, sadness, happiness, and pain. Participants who scored high on the PCL-R showed a reduction in neuro-hemodynamic response to all four categories of facial expressions in the face processing network (inferior occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, and superior temporal sulcus (STS)) as well as the extended network (inferior frontal gyrus and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)), which supports a pervasive deficit across emotion domains. Unexpectedly, the response in dorsal insula to fear, sadness, and pain was greater in psychopaths than non-psychopaths. Importantly, the orbitofrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), regions critically implicated in affective and motivated behaviors, were significantly less active in individuals with psychopathy during the perception of all four emotional expressions.

Lateralized hybrid faces: Evidence of a valence-specific bias in the processing of implicit emotions

It is well known that hemispheric asymmetries exist for both the analyses of low-level visual information (such as spatial frequency) and high-level visual information (such as emotional expressions). In this study, we assessed which of the above factors underlies perceptual laterality effects with “hybrid faces”: a type of stimulus that allows testing for unaware processing of emotional expressions, when the emotion is displayed in the low-frequency information while an image of the same face with a neutral expression is superimposed to it. Despite hybrid faces being perceived as neutral, the emotional information modulates observers’ social judgements. In the present study, participants were asked to assess friendliness of hybrid faces displayed tachistoscopically, either centrally or laterally to fixation. We found a clear influence of the hidden emotions also with lateral presentations. Happy faces were rated as more friendly and angry faces as less friendly with respect to neutral faces. In general, hybrid faces were evaluated as less friendly when they were presented in the left visual field/right hemisphere than in the right visual field/left hemisphere. The results extend the validity of the valence hypothesis in the specific domain of unaware (subcortical) emotion processing.