Processing Of Facial Emotional Expressions Research Articles

Mediating effect of amygdala activity on response to fear vs. happiness in youth with significant levels of irritability and disruptive mood and behavior disorders.

Irritability, characterized by a tendency to exhibit increased anger, is a common clinical problem in youth. Irritability is a significant clinical issue in youth with various psychiatric diagnoses, especially disruptive behavior, and mood disorders (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, and Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder). Although there have been previous studies focusing on functional alteration in the amygdala related to irritability, there is no comprehensive model between emotional, neuronal, and behavioral characteristics. Using an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) procedure, we investigated the relationships between behavioral irritability, selective impairments in processing facial emotions and the amygdala neural response in youth with increased irritability. Fifty-nine youth with disruptive mood and behavior disorder completed a facial expression processing task with an event-related fMRI paradigm. The severity of irritability was evaluated using the Affective Reactivity Index. In the result of behavioral data, irritability, and reaction time (RT) differences between interpreting negative (fear) and positive (happiness) facial expressions were positively correlated. In the fMRI result, youth showed higher activation in the right cingulate gyrus, bilateral cerebellum, right amygdala, right precuneus, right superior frontal gyrus, right middle occipital gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus, during the happiness condition vs. fear condition. No brain region exhibited greater activation in the fear than in the happiness conditions. In the result of the mediator analysis, increased irritability was associated with a longer RT toward positive vs. negative facial expressions. Irritability was also positively associated with the difference in amygdala blood oxygen level-dependent responses between the two emotional conditions (happiness > fear). This difference in amygdala activity mediated the interaction between irritability and the RT difference between negative and positive facial expressions. We suggest that impairment in the implicit processing of facial emotional expressions with different valences causes distinct patterns of amygdala response, which correlate with the level of irritability. These results broaden our understanding of the biological mechanism of irritability at the neural level and provide information for the future direction of the study.

Facing Uncertainty: Interpretation of Ambiguous Emotional Faces in Childhood Social Anxiety Disorder

ABSTRACT Objective The current study examined whether children with a social anxiety disorder (SAD) demonstrate divergent facial emotion processing and a disorder-specific negative interpretation bias in the processing of facial emotional expressions. This study aimed to overcome previous study limitations by including both a nonsocially anxious control group and a healthy control group to examine whether childhood SAD is characterized by a general emotion labeling deficit, and/or by a negative interpretation bias, indicated by systematic misclassifications, or a lower threshold for recognizing threatening emotions. Method Participants were 132 children aged 7–12 years (M age = 9.15; 45.5% female). Children with SAD (n = 42) were compared to children with other, nonsocial, anxiety disorders (n = 40) and healthy control children (n = 50) on a novel facial emotion recognition task. Children judged ambiguous happy/neutral, angry/neutral and fear/neutral faces that were morphed at different intensities (10%, 30%, 50%, 70%). Results Children with SAD did not differ from other groups in their accuracy of identifying emotions. They did not show systematic misclassifications or a heightened sensitivity to negative, threatening faces either. Rather, children with nonsocial anxiety disorders showed a generally heightened sensitivity to emotional faces. Conclusions The current study does not provide evidence for a general deficit in labeling of emotional faces in childhood SAD. Childhood SAD was not characterized by an interpretation bias in processing emotional faces. Children with nonsocial anxiety disorders may benefit from assistance in accurately interpreting the degree of emotionality in interpersonal situations.

A Systematic Review of the Role of Oxytocin, Cortisol, and Testosterone in Facial Emotional Processing.

Simple SummaryThe scientific community has paid special attention to facial emotional expression due to its importance in human surveillance as a communication tool. Humans need decoding abilities to understand the meaning of facial expressions and act accordingly. This ability is partly regulated by biochemical signals such as hormones, and it is of growing interest in understanding the role played by specific hormones such as oxytocin, cortisol, and testosterone. To date, there is a gap in the scientific literature summarizing how the manipulation of endogenous levels of oxytocin, cortisol, and testosterone through the exogenous administration of these hormones affects the processing of facial emotional expressions during adulthood in healthy and clinical populations of both genders. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review to summarize the evidence about how these three hormones influence facial emotional processing, paying special attention to studies that employed robust research designs (e.g., randomized, single- or double-blind, and/or placebo-controlled). The results obtained did not present a consistent pattern of association between the variables. In any case, these hormones slightly influenced facial emotion processing, but it is obviously extremely difficult to establish a direct association. To correctly understand the hormones’ influence, it is necessary to consider other factors such as the emotional valence and the participants’ gender, among others, which played an important role.A topic of interest is the way decoding and interpreting facial emotional expressions can lead to mutual understanding. Facial emotional expression is a basic source of information that guarantees the functioning of other higher cognitive processes (e.g., empathy, cooperativity, prosociality, or decision-making, among others). In this regard, hormones such as oxytocin, cortisol, and/or testosterone have been found to be important in modifying facial emotion processing. In fact, brain structures that participate in facial emotion processing have been shown to be rich in receptors for these hormones. Nonetheless, much of this research has been based on correlational designs. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have tried to carry out controlled laboratory manipulation of these hormones by administering synthetic forms of these hormones. The main objective of this study was to carry out a systematic review of studies that assess whether manipulation of these three hormones effectively promotes significant alterations in facial emotional processing. To carry out this review, PRISMA quality criteria for reviews were followed, using the following digital databases: PsycINFO, PubMed, Dialnet, Psicodoc, Web of Knowledge, and the Cochrane Library, and focusing on manuscripts with a robust research design (e.g., randomized, single- or double-blind, and/or placebo-controlled) to increase the value of this systematic review. An initial identification of 6340 abstracts and retrieval of 910 full texts led to the final inclusion of 101 papers that met all the inclusion criteria. Only about 18% of the manuscripts included reported a direct effect of hormone manipulation. In fact, emotional accuracy seemed to be enhanced after oxytocin increases, but it diminished when cortisol and/or testosterone increased. Nonetheless, when emotional valence and participants’ gender were included, hormonal manipulation reached significance (in around 53% of the articles). In fact, these studies offered a heterogeneous pattern in the way these hormones altered speed processing, attention, and memory. This study reinforces the idea that these hormones are important, but not the main modulators of facial emotion processing. As our comprehension of hormonal effects on emotional processing improves, the potential to design good treatments to improve this ability will be greater.

Brain response to facial expressions in adults with adolescent ADHD

The symptoms of ADHD tend to have continuity to adulthood even though the diagnostic criteria were no longer fulfilled. The aim of our study was to find out possible differences in BOLD signal in the face-processing network between adults with previous ADHD (pADHD, n = 23) and controls (n = 29) from the same birth cohort when viewing dynamic facial expressions. The brain imaging was performed using a General Electric Signa 1.5 Tesla HDX. Dynamic facial expression stimuli included happy and fearful expressions. The pADHD group demonstrated elevated activity in the left parietal area during fearful facial expression. The Network Based Statistics including multiple areas demonstrated higher functional connectivity in attention related network during visual exposure to happy faces in the pADHD group. Conclusions: We found differences in brain responses to facial emotional expressions in individuals with previous ADHD compared to control group in a number of brain regions including areas linked to processing of facial emotional expressions and attention. This might indicate that although these individuals no longer fulfill the ADHD diagnosis, they exhibit overactive network properties affecting facial processing.

Emotion in motion: Facial dynamics affect infants' neural processing of emotions.

Research investigating the early development of emotional processing has focused mainly on infants' perception of static facial emotional expressions, likely restricting the amount and type of information available to infants. In particular, the question of whether dynamic information in emotional facial expressions modulates infants' neural responses has been rarely investigated. The present study aimed to fill this gap by recording 7-month-olds' event-related potentials to static (Study 1) and dynamic (Study 2) happy, angry, and neutral faces. In Study 1, happy faces evoked a faster right-lateralized negative central (Nc) component compared to angry faces. In Study 2, both happy and angry faces elicited a larger right-lateralized Nc compared to neutral faces. Irrespective of stimulus dynamicity, a larger P400 to angry faces was associated with higher scores on the Negative Affect temperamental dimension. Overall, results suggest that 7-month-olds are sensitive to facial dynamics, which might play a role in shaping the neural processing of facial emotional expressions. Results also suggest that the amount of attentional resources infants allocate to angry expressions is associated to their temperamental traits. These findings represent a promising avenue for future studies exploring the neurobiological processes involved in perceiving emotional expressions using dynamic stimuli.

Probing prefrontal cortex hemodynamic alterations during facial emotion recognition for major depression disorder through functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Objective. A serious issue in psychiatric practice is a lack of specific, objective biomarker to assist clinicians in establishing differential diagnosis and improving individualized treatment. Major depression disorder (MDD) is characterized by poorer ability in processing of facial emotional expressions. Approach. Applying a portable neuroimaging system using near-infrared spectroscopy, we investigated the prefrontal cortex hemodynamic activation changes during facial emotion recognition and rest periods for 27 MDD patients compared with 24 healthy controls (HC). Main results. The hemodynamic changes in the left prefrontal cortex for the MDD group showed significant differences in the median values and the Mayer wave power ratios of the oxygenated hemoglobin (oxy-Hb) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (deoxy-Hb) during the emotional face recognition compared with the HC subjects, indicating the abnormal oxidative metabolism and weaker local hemodynamic oscillations for the MDD. The mean cross wavelet coefficients and the average wavelet coherence coefficient between oxy-Hb and deoxy-Hb over the left prefrontal cortex, and also between the bilateral oxy-Hb in the MDD patients were significantly lower than the HC group, demonstrating abnormal locally functional connectivity over the left prefrontal cortex, and the inter-hemispheric connection between the bilateral prefrontal cortices. Significance. These results suggested that the hemodynamic changes over the left prefrontal cortex and between the bilateral prefrontal cortices detected by fNIRS could provide reliable predictors for the diagnosis of the depression in clinic, and also supported the rationale for use of transcranial magnetic stimulation over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to restore excitability of prefrontal cortex that exhibits diminished regulation of emotion-generative systems in the MDD patients.

The role of the cerebellum in explicit and incidental processing of facial emotional expressions: A study with transcranial magnetic stimulation

Growing evidence suggests that the cerebellum plays a critical role in non-motor functions, contributing to cognitive and affective processing. In particular, the cerebellum might represent an important node of the “limbic” network, underlying not only emotion regulation but also emotion perception and recognition. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to shed further light on the role of the cerebellum in emotional perception by specifically testing cerebellar contribution to explicit and incidental emotional processing. In particular, in three different experiments, we found that TMS over the (left) cerebellum impaired participants’ ability to categorize facial emotional expressions (explicit task) and to classify the gender of emotional faces (incidental emotional processing task), but not the gender of neutral faces. Overall, our results indicate that the cerebellum is involved in perceiving the emotional content of facial stimuli, even when this is task irrelevant.

Event-Related Potentials of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing of Emotional Faces.

Introduction:Emotional stimulus is processed automatically in a bottom-up way or can be processed voluntarily in a top-down way. Imaging studies have indicated that bottom-up and top-down processing are mediated through different neural systems. However, temporal differentiation of top-down versus bottom-up processing of facial emotional expressions has remained to be clarified. The present study aimed to explore the time course of these processes as indexed by the emotion-specific P100 and late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential (ERP) components in a group of healthy women.Methods:Fourteen female students of Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran aged 18–30 years, voluntarily participated in the study. The subjects completed 2 overt and covert emotional tasks during ERP acquisition.Results:The results indicated that fearful expressions significantly produced greater P100 amplitude compared to other expressions. Moreover, the P100 findings showed an interaction between emotion and processing conditions. Further analysis indicated that within the overt condition, fearful expressions elicited more P100 amplitude compared to other emotional expressions. Also, overt conditions created significantly more LPP latencies and amplitudes compared to covert conditions.Conclusion:Based on the results, early perceptual processing of fearful face expressions is enhanced in top-down way compared to bottom-up way. It also suggests that P100 may reflect an attentional bias toward fearful emotions. However, no such differentiation was observed within later processing stages of face expressions, as indexed by the ERP LPP component, in a top-down versus bottom-up way. Overall, this study provides a basis for further exploring of bottom-up and top-down processes underlying emotion and may be typically helpful for investigating the temporal characteristics associated with impaired emotional processing in psychiatric disorders.

P.1.i.002 - White matter neural correlates associated with anxiety sensitivity in panic disorder

Panic Disorder (PD) is mainly characterized by recurrent unexpected panic attacks. Although the presence of emotional functioning deficits in PD is well established, their neuronal bases are still less known. Therefore, in this review, we aim to summarize the available functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies investigating the neural correlates associated with the processing of facial emotional expressions in patients with PD.A comprehensive search on PubMed was performed and 10 fMRI studies meeting our inclusion criteria were included in this review.The majority of the studies reported selective deficits in key brain regions within the prefronto-limbic network in PD patients. Specifically, a mixed picture of hyperactivation and hypoactivation patterns were observed in limbic regions, including the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), as well as in areas within the prefrontal cortex (PFC), either during negative or positive valenced stimuli, as compared to healthy controls (HC) or other anxiety disorders. Limitations: The limited number of studies and the clinical and methodological heterogeneity make it difficult to draw definite conclusions on the neural mechanism of emotional processing associated with PD.Although the results of the available evidence suggest the presence of selective dysfunctions in regions within the cortico-limbic network in PD patients during processing of emotional stimuli, the direction of these abnormalities is still unclear. Therefore, future larger and more homogeneous studies are needed to elucidate the neural mechanisms underpinning the emotional processing dysfunctions often observed in PD patients.

The impact of postpartum depression and anxiety disorders on children's processing of facial emotional expressions at pre-school age.

To enhance understanding of impaired socio-emotional development in children of postpartum depressed or anxious mothers, this longitudinal study addressed the question of whether maternal postpartum depression and anxiety disorders result in deficits in children's processing of facial emotional expressions (FEEs) at pre-school age. Thirty-two mothers who had fulfilled Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV) criteria for postpartum depression and/or anxiety disorder and their pre-school aged children were tested for FEE processing abilities and compared to a healthy control group (n = 29). Child assessments included separate tasks for emotion recognition and emotion labelling. Mothers completed an emotion recognition test as well as the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis I Disorders I (SCID-I). Children of postpartum depressed and/or anxious mothers performed significantly worse than control children at labelling, but not at recognizing facial expressions of basic emotions. Emotion labelling at pre-school age was predicted by child age and maternal postpartum mental health, but neither current maternal mental health nor current maternal emotion recognition was associated with child FEE processing. Results point to a specific importance of early social experiences for the development of FEE labelling skills. However, further studies involving sensitive measures of emotion recognition are needed to determine if there might also exist subtle effects on FEE recognition.

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.

An index of prenatal steroid exposure predicts adult face perception skills

Face perception skills are fundamental to social cognition, yet they vary markedly across individuals. This diversity has stimulated controversy over the relative contributions of genetic factors, prenatal environment, and postnatal experience to face perception. Recent twin studies have found that face perception is heritable, highlighting the potential for substantial prenatal determination of these skills. In contrast, previous work on potential influences of the prenatal hormonal environment on social cognition have found no association between 2D:4D, a marker for prenatal androgen exposure, and processing of facial emotional expressions, apparently precluding a major role for prenatal hormones in governing face perception. We propose that substantial predictive relationships between 2D:4D and face perception may have been masked in previous work because the task employed required both face perception and processing of others' emotions, the latter component being greatly influenced by circulating hormones in adults. To assess prenatal hormone influences on face perception without requiring emotion processing, we related 2D:4D to the face inversion effect (FIE), a measure of the recruitment of specialist face processes to visual perception. The magnitude of the resulting predictive relationship (r = .52) compared surprisingly well with that found between identical twins' face perception (rs = .27-.61), suggesting that mechanisms of 2D:4D may account for a substantial proportion of perinatal influences on face processing. Furthermore, we employed 2D:4D as a common scale to map individual differences in the FIE onto prenatal testosterone:estrogen ratios, assayed by Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen, Raggatt, Knickmeyer, and Manning (Early Human Development 77:23-28, 2004). The substantial overlap between the two data sets further implicates prenatal steroids in adult face perception skills.

The cortical processing of facial emotional expression is associated with social cognition skills and executive functioning: A preliminary study

Several lines of experimental evidence support an association between facial processing and social cognition, but no direct link between cortical markers of facial processing and complex cognitive processes has been reported until now. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that cortical electrophysiological markers for the processing of facial emotion are associated with individual differences in executive and social cognition skills. We tested for correlations between the amplitude of event-related potentials (N170) in a dual valence task and participants’ scores on three neuropsychological assessments (general neuropsychology, executive functioning, and social cognition). N170 was modulated by the stimulus type (face versus word) and the valence of faces (positive versus negative). The neural source of N170 was estimated to be the fusiform gyrus. Robust correlations were found between neuropsychological markers and measures of facial processing. Social cognition skills (as measured by three tests: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, the Faux Pas test, and the Iowa Gambling Task) correlated with cortical measures of emotional discrimination. Executive functioning ability also correlated with the cortical discrimination of complex emotional stimuli. Our findings suggest that the cortical processing of facial emotional expression is associated with social cognition skills.

The effects of reality distortion syndrome on salient stimuli processing in patients with schizophrenia: An fMRI study

Schizophrenia is associated with interpersonal difficulties related to impairments in the processing of facial emotional expressions. The aim of the present study was to identify brain regions associated with reality distortion syndrome reduction in a group of patients with schizophrenia during processing of emotionally salient stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure cerebral blood oxygenation changes during an implicit emotional task in 11 patients with schizophrenia, who were scanned twice with an interval of 6–8 weeks. We found that reality distortion syndrome reduction was associated with increases in the activation of the affective division of the anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortices. Our findings may indicate that changes in the activation of these regions during processing of emotionally salient stimuli may represent neural markers of patients' symptomatic improvement.

Flawless visual short-term memory for facial emotional expressions

Facial emotions are important cues of human social interactions. Emotional expressions are continuously changing and thus should be monitored, memorized, and compared from time to time during social intercourse. However, it is not known how efficiently emotional expressions can be stored in short-term memory. Here we show that emotion discrimination is not impaired when the faces to be compared are separated by several seconds, requiring storage of fine-grained emotion-related information in short-term memory. Likewise, we found no significant effect of increasing the delay between the sample and the test face in the case of facial identity discrimination. Furthermore, a second experiment conducted on a large subject sample (N = 160) revealed flawless short-term memory for both facial emotions and facial identity also when observers performed the discrimination tasks only twice with novel faces. We also performed an fMRI experiment, which confirmed that discrimination of fine-grained emotional expressions in our experimental paradigm involved processing of high-level facial emotional attributes. Significantly stronger fMRI responses were found in a cortical network--including the posterior superior temporal sulcus--that is known to be involved in processing of facial emotional expression during emotion discrimination than during identity discrimination. These findings reveal flawless, high-resolution visual short-term memory for emotional expressions, which might underlie efficient monitoring of continuously changing facial emotions.

Preferential responses in amygdala and insula during presentation of facial contempt and disgust

Some authors consider contempt to be a basic emotion while others consider it a variant of disgust. The neural correlates of contempt have not so far been specifically contrasted with disgust. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the neural networks involved in the processing of facial contempt and disgust in 24 healthy subjects. Facial recognition of contempt was lower than that of disgust and of neutral faces. The imaging data indicated significant activity in the amygdala and in globus pallidus and putamen during processing of contemptuous faces. Bilateral insula and caudate nuclei and left as well as right inferior frontal gyrus were engaged during processing of disgusted faces. Moreover, direct comparisons of contempt vs. disgust yielded significantly different activations in the amygdala. On the other hand, disgusted faces elicited greater activation than contemptuous faces in the right insula and caudate. Our findings suggest preferential involvement of different neural substrates in the processing of facial emotional expressions of contempt and disgust.

Processing of facial emotional expression: spatio-temporal data as assessed by scalp event-related potentials.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in 10 adult volunteers, who were asked to view pictures of faces with different emotional expressions, i.e. fear, happiness, disgust, surprise and neutral expression [Ekman, P. & Friesen, W.V. (1975). Pictures of Facial Affect. Consulting Psychologist Press, Palo Alto, CA]. ERPs were recorded during two different tasks with the same stimuli. Firstly, subjects were instructed to pay attention to the gender of the faces by counting males or females. Secondly, they had to focus on facial expressions by counting faces who looked surprised. The classical scalp 'face-related potentials', i.e. a vertex-positive potential and a bilateral temporal negativity, were recorded 150 ms after the stimulus onset. Significant differences were found, firstly between late-latency ERPs to emotional faces and to neutral faces, between 250 and 550 ms of latency and, secondly, among the ERPs to the different facial expressions between 550 and 750 ms of latency. These differences appeared only during the expression discrimination task, not during the gender discrimination task. Topographic maps of these differences showed a specific right temporal activity related to each emotional expression, some particularities being observed for each expression. This study provides new data concerning the spatio-temporal features of facial expression processing, particularly a late-latency activity related to specific attention to facial expressions.

Lateralisation of perceptual processing of pro- and anti-social emotions displayed in chimeric faces

Previous studies using a restricted range of split field chimeric faces suggest that the processing of facial emotional expressions is a highly lateralised phenomenon. Two theories have emerged with regard to the role the two cerebral hemispheres play in this processing. The "right hemisphere" hypothesis (e.g. Borod, Koff, Lorch, & Nicholas, 1988) suggests that the right hemisphere plays a prominent role in the processing of both positive and negative facial expressions. In contrast, the "valence hypothesis" (e.g. Reuter-Lorenz & Davidson, 1981) proposes that, while the right hemisphere plays the major role in processing negative emotions, the left hemisphere has a special role for positive emotions. Using all six of the human "universal facial expressions" (Ekman &Friesen, 1971) we present evidence that, superimposed onto a left visual field advantage (right hemisphere specialisation) for emotional processing, there is a "left shift" (right visual field advantage) for pro- as opposed to anti-social expression. We propose that facial expressions that are likely to be related to approach for communicative purposes initiate a greater degree of left hemisphere involvement. As a consequence, we suggest that for future laterality studies, the six universal emotional expressions should be reconsidered using a pro- to anti-social dimension rather than positive and negative groupings.