Processing Of Angry Facial Expressions Research Articles

Affective touch during the processing of angry facial expressions: an event-related potential study

It has been shown that affective touch can have stress-buffering effects. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated whether affective touch can reduce emotional distress and associated late positivity while viewing angry facial expressions. A total of 122 females (mean age = 23 years) were randomly assigned to one of three groups to either receive slow/soft brushing of their forearm (affective touch), fast brushing (nonaffective touch), or no touch while viewing images depicting angry and neutral facial expressions. The participants rated their affective state (valence, arousal) before and after the experiment. They also rated the perceived intensity of the angry facial expressions and the pleasantness of touch during the experiment. Components of the Late Positive Potential (LPP) in response to the images that are associated with stimulus significance, attention allocation, and emotion regulation (early LPP: 400–1000 ms; late LPP: 1000–3000 ms) were extracted for a frontal and a centroparietal cluster. Affective touch was associated with reduced amplitudes of the late LPP in the frontal cluster but did not affect centroparietal LPPs (early, late). Affective touch was rated as more pleasant than nonaffective touch but did not change reported valence, arousal, and perceived anger intensity. In conclusion, affective touch modulated a neural indicator of stimulus significance but did not influence self-report measures. More naturalistic touch settings might enhance the effects.

Brain activation during processing of angry facial expressions in patients with alcohol dependency.

BackgroundAlcoholism is associated with abnormal anger processing. The purpose of this study was to investigate brain regions involved in the evaluation of angry facial expressions in patients with alcohol dependency.MethodsBrain blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) responses to angry faces were measured and compared between patients with alcohol dependency and controls.ResultsDuring intensity ratings of angry faces, significant differences in BOLD were observed between patients with alcohol dependency and controls. That is, patients who were alcohol-dependent showed significantly greater activation in several brain regions, including the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC).ConclusionsFollowing exposure to angry faces, abnormalities in dACC and MPFC activation in patients with alcohol dependency indicated possible inefficiencies or hypersensitivities in social cognitive processing.

Effect of gender on processing threat-related stimuli in patients with panic disorder: sex does matter

Several studies have shown that female and male subjects process emotions differently. As women appear to be especially sensitive and responsive to negative and threatening stimuli, gender-specific emotional processing might be an important factor contributing to the increased likelihood of women compared to men to develop anxiety disorders, e.g. panic disorder (PD). In this study, gender-specific neural activation during facial emotion processing was investigated in 20 PD patients (12 women, 8 men) by functional magnetic resonance imaging. Overall, significantly stronger activation, encompassing the amygdala, prefrontal, temporal, and occipital cortical areas, basal ganglia, and thalamus, was observed in women than in men during the processing of angry, fearful, or neutral but not happy facial expressions. Additionally, functional connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortical areas and thalamus during the processing of angry facial expressions was significantly stronger in women than in men. These results emphasize gender as an important variable in neural activation patterns of emotional processing and may help to further elucidate the biological substrate of gender-specific susceptibility for PD.

Asymmetrical transcallosal inhibition predicts attentional bias towards angry facial expressions

The selective processing of angry facial expressions is believed to arise from frontal brain asymmetries. A relative dominant left-to-right frontal cortex is associated with increased levels of anger and aggressive behavior. The aim of the present study was to evaluate whether the relation between frontal brain asymmetries and anger can be explained in terms of differences in functional interhemispheric connectivity.

Effects of acute alcohol consumption on processing of perceptual cues of emotional expression

Alcohol consumption has been associated with increases in aggressive behaviour. However, experimental evidence of a direct association is equivocal, and mechanisms that may underlie this relationship are poorly understood. One mechanism by which alcohol consumption may increase aggressive behaviour is via alterations in processing of emotional facial cues. We investigated the effects of acute alcohol consumption on sensitivity to facial expressions of emotion. Participants attended three experimental sessions where they consumed an alcoholic drink (0.0, 0.2 or 0.4 g/kg), and completed a psychophysical task to distinguish expressive from neutral faces. The level of emotion in the expressive face varied across trials the threshold at which the expressive face was reliably identified and measured. We observed a significant three-way interaction involving emotion, participant sex and alcohol dose. Male participants showed significantly higher perceptual thresholds for sad facial expressions compared with female participants following consumption of the highest dose of alcohol. Our data indicate sex differences in the processing of facial cues of emotional expression following alcohol consumption. There was no evidence that alcohol altered the processing of angry facial expressions. Future studies should examine effects of alcohol expectancy and investigate the effects of alcohol on the miscategorisation of emotional expressions.

Psychophysiological correlates of face processing in social phobia

Social phobia has been associated with abnormal processing of angry faces, which directly signal disapproval—a situation that social phobics fear. This study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of emotional face processing in socially phobic and non-phobic individuals. Subjects identified either the gender (modified emotional Stroop task) or the expression of angry, happy, or neutral faces. Social phobics showed no deviations from controls in reaction times, heart rates, P1, or P2 amplitudes in response to angry faces, although elevated FSS scores were associated with higher P1 amplitudes in social phobic persons. In addition, social phobic persons showed enhanced right temporo-parietal N170 amplitudes in response to angry faces in the emotion identification task. Furthermore, higher scores on the Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) were associated as a trend with larger N170 amplitudes in response to angry faces in the emotion identification task. Thus, the present results suggest that social phobics show abnormalities in the early visual processing of angry faces, as reflected by the enhanced right-hemispheric N170 when the emotion of the angry face was the focus of attention, while behavioral responses and heart rates showed no evidence for preferred processing of angry facial expressions.

Eye contact influences neural processing of emotional expressions in 4-month-old infants.

Eye gaze is a fundamental component of human communication. During the first post-natal year, infants rapidly learn that the gaze of others provides socially significant information. In addition, infants are sensitive to several emotional expressions. However, little is known regarding how eye contact influences the way the infant brain processes emotional expressions. We measured 4-month-old infants' brain electric activity to assess neural processing of faces displaying neutral, happy and angry emotional expressions when accompanied by direct and averted eye gaze. The results show that processing of angry facial expressions was influenced by eye gaze. In particular, infants showed enhanced neural processing of angry expressions when these expressions were accompanied by direct eye gaze. These results show that by 4 months of age, the infant detects angry emotional expressions, and the infant brain processes their relevance to the self.

Functionally dissociated aspects in anterior and posterior electrocortical processing of facial threat

The angry facial expression is an important socially threatening stimulus argued to have evolved to regulate social hierarchies. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the involvement and temporal dynamics of the frontal and parietal regions in the processing of angry facial expressions. Angry, happy and neutral faces were shown to eighteen healthy right-handed volunteers in a passive viewing task. Stimulus-locked ERPs were recorded from the frontal and parietal scalp sites. The P200, N300 and early contingent negativity variation (eCNV) components of the electric brain potentials were investigated. Analyses revealed statistical significant reductions in P200 amplitudes for the angry facial expression on both frontal and parietal electrode sites. Furthermore, apart from being strongly associated with the anterior P200, the N300 showed to be more negative for the angry facial expression in the anterior regions also. Finally, the eCNV was more pronounced over the parietal sites for the angry facial expressions. The present study demonstrated specific electrocortical correlates underlying the processing of angry facial expressions in the anterior and posterior brain sectors. The P200 is argued to indicate valence tagging by a fast and early detection mechanism. The lowered N300 with an anterior distribution for the angry facial expressions indicates more elaborate evaluation of stimulus relevance. The fact that the P200 and the N300 are highly correlated suggests that they reflect different stages of the same anterior evaluation mechanism. The more pronounced posterior eCNV suggests sustained attention to socially threatening information.

Reductions in phenomenological, physiological and attentional indices of depressive mood after 2 Hz rTMS over the right parietal cortex in healthy human subjects

Research into emotion and emotional disorders by repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has largely been restricted to the prefrontal regions. There is, however, also evidence for the parietal cortex being implicated in emotional (dys-)functioning. Here we used rTMS to investigate a role of the right parietal cortex in depression. In a placebo-controlled design, 2 Hz rTMS at 90% of the individual motor threshold (MT) was applied over the right parietal cortex of eight healthy subjects for 20 min continuously. Effects on mood, autonomic activity and motivated attention were investigated. Significant reductions in depressive mood were observed immediately following and 30 min after stimulation. Moreover, these findings were objectified by a concurring pattern of autonomically mediated changes in the attentional processing of angry facial expressions. These data suggest a role for the right parietal cortex in affective brain circuits regulating phenomenological, physiological and attentional aspects of depressive functioning.