Recognition Of Emotional Facial Expressions Research Articles

Evidence of impaired facial emotion recognition in mild Alzheimer’s disease: A mathematical approach and application

Objectives: The first objective of this paper is to show the improved binary outcomes resulting from using MARIE as a diagnostic instrument that allows valid and reliable visual recognition of facial emotional expressions (VRFEE) in an objective and quantitative manner. The second objective is to demonstrate mathematical modeling of binary responses that allow the measurement of categorical dimension, sensitivity, camber, equilibrium points, transition thresholds, etc. The final objective is to illustrate the use of this test for 1) testing a homogeneous sample of healthy young participants; and 2) applying this method to a sample of 12 participants with early Alz-heimer disease compared to a matched control sample of healthy elderly participants. Design: Transforming the binary outcomes of MARIE in mathematical variables (experiment 1), allowing verification of a disorder of VRFEE in early Alzheimer’s disease (experiment 2). Measures: Comparison of numerical variables and graphic representations of both samples. Results: The objective measurement of VRFEE is possible in a healthy population. The application of this methodology to a pathological population is also made possible. The results support the current literature. Conclusion: The combination of the mathematical method with the diagnostic instrument MARIE shows its power and ease of use in clinical practice and research. Its application in many clinical conditions and in clinical research can be useful for understanding brain function. This method improves 1) the inter-examiner comparison and standardizes the quantification of VRFEE for use by multiple researchers; 2) the follow-up of a sample over time; 3) the comparison of two or more samples. This method is already available in clinical work for refining the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in our department.

P-301 - Recognition of emotional facial expressions and broad autism phenotype in parents of austistic spectrum disorder

Autism spectrum disorder is a neuropsychiatric disorder defined by the presence of social deficits, communication abnormalities, stereotyped or repetitive behaviours. A number of family and twin studies have suggested that a behavioral phenotype that is qualitatively similar to but more broadly defined than that which defines autism occurs more commonly in relatives of autistic individuals than in the general population. In this research, relation between broad autism phenotype and impairment of facial expression of emotion were studied. Seventy-two parents who had a child with a diagnosis of DSM-IV Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 38 parents who had a typically developing child and without family history of ASD were included. The parents were assessed for broad autism phenotype by Autism-Spectrum Quotient (ASQ) and Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) and for impairment in the recognition of facial expressions by Emotion Recognition Test. Student's t-test was used to evaluate the differences between the two groups. Results had compared by using ANOVA and ANCOVA. The social skill and aloofness scores of parents with autistic children was found significantly higher than healthy group (p < 0.05). Parents of children with autism performed less well than controls on accuracy of surprise facial expressions. Parents of children with autism seem to have higher risk for social interaction features than others. Parents of children with autism may have more problems with recognition of facial expressions.

Supplemental Material for Age-Related Decrease in Recognition of Emotional Facial and Prosodic Expressions

Supplemental Material for Age-Related Decrease in Recognition of Emotional Facial and Prosodic Expressions

Age-related decrease in recognition of emotional facial and prosodic expressions.

The recognition of nonverbal emotional signals and the integration of multimodal emotional information are essential for successful social communication among humans of any age. Whereas prior studies of age dependency in the recognition of emotion often focused on either the prosodic or the facial aspect of nonverbal signals, our purpose was to create a more naturalistic setting by presenting dynamic stimuli under three experimental conditions: auditory, visual, and audiovisual. Eighty-four healthy participants (women = 44, men = 40; age range 20-70 years) were tested for their abilities to recognize emotions either mono- or bimodally on the basis of emotional (happy, alluring, angry, disgusted) and neutral nonverbal stimuli from voice and face. Additionally, we assessed visual and auditory acuity, working memory, verbal intelligence, and emotional intelligence to explore potential explanatory effects of these population parameters on the relationship between age and emotion recognition. Applying unbiased hit rates as performance measure, we analyzed data with linear regression analyses, t tests, and with mediation analyses. We found a linear, age-related decrease in emotion recognition independent of stimulus modality and emotional category. In contrast, the improvement in recognition rates associated with audiovisual integration of bimodal stimuli seems to be maintained over the life span. The reduction in emotion recognition ability at an older age could not be sufficiently explained by age-related decreases in hearing, vision, working memory, and verbal intelligence. These findings suggest alterations in social perception at a level of complexity beyond basic perceptional and cognitive abilities.

Cognición social en adictos a opiáceos

INTRODUCTION. Research on the emotional and social disorders associated with drug addiction has been very limited. AIM. To assess different components of social cognition: perception of emotional expressions, emotional-social intelligence, and empathy, in a sample of opiate addicts in a methadone maintenance program (MMP). SUBJECTS AND METHODS. Eighteen opiate addicts MMP and eighteen healthy controls participated. The test of emotional facial expression recognition, the TMMS-24, the EQ-i Bar-On, and Greene moral dilemmas were applied to each subject. RESULTS. The utilitarian response rate in impersonal moral dilemmas was significantly higher in the group of opiate dependents than in the control group. In the general and factorial social-emotional intelligence, opiate dependent group had significantly lower scores than the control group. However, they had worse facial expression recognition, nor worse scores on all three dimensions of emotional intelligence as measured by the TMMS-24. CONCLUSIONS. The opiate addicts not show a generalized deficit of social cognition, however obtain lower emotional-social intelligence quotient, and differ in empathy measured by moral judgments.

Haptic object perception: spatial dimensionality and relation to vision

Enabled by the remarkable dexterity of the human hand, specialized haptic exploration is a hallmark of object perception by touch. Haptic exploration normally takes place in a spatial world that is three-dimensional; nevertheless, stimuli of reduced spatial dimensionality are also used to display spatial information. This paper examines the consequences of full (three-dimensional) versus reduced (two-dimensional) spatial dimensionality for object processing by touch, particularly in comparison with vision. We begin with perceptual recognition of common human-made artefacts, then extend our discussion of spatial dimensionality in touch and vision to include faces, drawing from research on haptic recognition of facial identity and emotional expressions. Faces have often been characterized as constituting a specialized input for human perception. We find that contrary to vision, haptic processing of common objects is impaired by reduced spatial dimensionality, whereas haptic face processing is not. We interpret these results in terms of fundamental differences in object perception across the modalities, particularly the special role of manual exploration in extracting a three-dimensional structure.

Impact of antisocial and psychopathic traits on emotional facial expression recognition in alcohol abusers

ABSTRACTAs there are independent reports that alcohol dependence and antisocial personality pathology (particularly psychopathy) are associated with impaired face affect recognition, we examined the relationship between antisocial personality traits and face affect recognition in 23 detoxified inpatient alcohol abusers and 26 healthy controls. All participants were rated on the Antisocial Personality Questionnaire (APQ), and the alcohol abuse sample was rated on the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version. A computerized face affect recognition task was used to assess the six basic emotions. Overall, alcohol abusers were significantly worse than healthy controls at recognizing emotional facial expression, particularly anger and sadness. Recognition of disgust was negatively correlated with psychopathy (particularly the social deviance factor) and with several subscales of the impulsivity/hostility factor on the APQ. Fear recognition was also negatively correlated with a number of APQ subscales within the impulsive/hostility factor. Our findings point to the importance of assessing co‐morbid antisocial personality pathology in studies looking at face affect recognition deficits in substance abusers. The work also suggests that the interpersonal difficulties seen in some alcohol abusers may be related to impairments in emotional information that are primarily due to co‐morbid personality pathology. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Social Cognition Impairments in Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to attribute independent mental states to self and others to explain and predict behavior. Impairment of ToM is well established in developmental pathologies. In neurological populations, investigation of ToM is still rare but data suggest that ToM impairment could contribute to behavioral and social disturbances. In addition to neurological signs, multiple sclerosis (MS) presents with disorders of cognition and behavior directly related to brain damage. The aim of this study was to assess ToM abilities and recognition of facial emotional expression in adults with MS. We compared 64 patients with relapsing MS and 30 matched healthy controls on three levels of ToM tasks, a facial emotion recognition task, and a neuropsychological assessment. MS patients performed significantly worse than controls in emotion recognition and all ToM tasks (p < .02). These deficits were not correlated with demographic variables or neuropsychological test performance. These findings underscore the importance of assessing ToM and facial recognition in MS, as dysfunction in these areas may impact upon social interaction and, thus, impair quality of life for both patients with MS and their families.

Emotional intelligence and facial expression recognition in junior high school and elementary school students

Emotional intelligence and facial expression recognition in junior high school and elementary school students

Les effets de l’ingestion aiguë d’alcool sur le jugement d’expressions faciales émotionnelles spontanées et dynamiques

This study is interested in the link between acute alcohol consumption and the perception of dynamic and spontaneous emotional facial expressions (EFE). The noxious effects of alcohol on EFE recognition are now well demonstrated ( Attwood et al., 2009a). Studies showed that alcohol drinking impairs the judgment of facial expressions, especially of negative ones (EFE of anger and disgust notably). However, such effects have been observed for the judgment of artificial material (static/posed/morphed/EFE). Yet, everyday EFE are far from the archetypes used in the lab. Therefore, the present study aims at completing previous observations, this time for the identification of dynamic and spontaneous EFE. Dynamic and spontaneous EFE of amusement, interest, irritation, anxiety, and neutral were judged by 63 normal male drinkers. Buck et al.’s (1972) paradigm was adopted since it is recommended for the study of nonverbal behavior in the process of communication ( Buck, 1990; Wagner, 1990; Wagner et al., 1986; Zuckerman et al., 1976). The emotion to be identified is the one self-reported by the EFE sender. On the pretext of tasting drinks, participants were randomly assigned to one out of six experimental conditions. Two conditions are concerned with the nature of the drink (alcohol or non-alcohol drink). Three other conditions relate to the participant's experimentally manipulated belief regarding the nature of the drink (non-alcohol drink, slight alcohol drink, hard alcohol drink). Results confirm the emotion identification impairment due to alcohol usually noted, thus showing that the effects of alcohol are also observed for the perception of spontaneous and natural facial expressions. Indeed, the comparison of participants who drank alcoholic drinks versus those who did not drink alcohol shows that the formers identify less well emotions than the latter. Moreover, results show that beliefs do not play a role in this deficit since participants’ identification errors are not linked to the belief they hold regarding the nature of the drink (with/without alcohol). Finally, the confusion matrix analysis brings to light the existence of recurrent confusions amongst alcoholized participants, confusions that do not appear amongst sober participants. Thus, results show that, to the exception of EFE of amusement, participants who drank alcohol recurrently assess stimuli as displaying anxiety. To conclude, it comes out that acute alcohol drinking alters the capacity to accurately identify spontaneous emotions expressed by faces, which capacity is essential to the smooth unfolding of human interactions.

Cognitive Computation Special Issue on Cognitive Behavioural Systems

Cognitive processes, such as inference, categorization, and memory, are not independent from their physical instantiations. Individuals’ choices, perception, and actions emerge and are dynamically affected and enhanced by the interaction between sensory-motor systems and the inhabited environment that includes the organizational, cultural, and physical context). This interplay brings up instantiations of cognitive behavioural systems. The above considerations led to the idea to dedicate a special issue of Cognitive Computation to this topic, with the aims to initiate a discussion on what has been achieved to-date and look at future perspectives. The volume originated in the European Science Foundation (ESF) Research Network COST Action 2102: Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (www.cost.esf.org/domains_actions/ict/Actions/2102) funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST, www.cost.esf.org). COST is an European instrument funded by the ESF supporting cooperation among scientists and researchers across Europe, allowing the coordination of nationally-funded research on a European level, increasing the mobility of Early Stage Researchers and fostering the establishment of scientific excellence in nine key domains, including Information Communication Technology (ICT)—of which COST Action 2102 is part of. The main objective of COST 2102 was to develop an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and nonverbal communication signals originating in spontaneous body-to-body interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of automatically perceiving and distinguishing human emotional states. Researchers involved in COST 2102 are convinced emotions drive our daily life and that research in HumanMachine Interaction cannot continue to neglect this aspect of human behaviour in developing future communication systems. Several key aspects were considered, such as the integration of the developed algorithms and procedures for application in telecommunications, and for the recognition of emotional states, gestures, speech and facial expressions—in anticipation of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services. The Action profited from two former COST Actions (COST 277 and COST 278) that identified new appropriate mathematical models and algorithms to drive the implementation of the next generation of telecommunication services such as remote health monitoring systems, interactive dialogue systems, and intelligent avatars. A. Esposito (&) Department of Psychology and IIASS, Second University of Naples, Naples, Italy e-mail: iiass.annaesp@tin.it

Bringing an Ecological Perspective to the Study of Aging and Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions: Past, Current, and Future Methods

Older adults perform worse on traditional tests of emotion recognition accuracy than do young adults. In this paper, we review descriptive research to date on age differences in emotion recognition from facial expressions, as well as the primary theoretical frameworks that have been offered to explain these patterns. We propose that this is an area of inquiry that would benefit from an ecological approach in which contextual elements are more explicitly considered and reflected in experimental methods. Use of dynamic displays and examination of specific cues to accuracy, for example, may reveal more nuanced age-related patterns and may suggest heretofore unexplored underlying mechanisms.

The functional correlates of face perception and recognition of emotional facial expressions as evidenced by fMRI

Recognition and processing of emotional facial expression are crucial for social behavior and employ higher-order cognitive and visual working processes. In neuropsychiatric disorders, impaired emotion recognition most frequently concerned three specific emotions, i.e., anger, fear, and disgust. As incorrect processing of (neutral) facial stimuli per se might also underlie deficits in the recognition of emotional facial expressions, we aimed to assess all these aspects in one experiment. We therefore report here a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm for parallel assessment of the neural correlates of both the recognition of neutral faces and the three clinically most relevant emotions for future use in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders. FMRI analyses were expanded through comparisons of the emotional conditions with each other. The differential insights resulting from these two analyses strategies are compared and discussed. 30 healthy participants (21 F/9 M; age 36.3±14.3, 17–66years) underwent fMRI and behavioral testing for non-emotional and emotional face recognition. Recognition of neutral faces elicited activation in the fusiform gyri. Processing angry faces led to activation in left middle and superior frontal gyri and the anterior cingulate cortex. There was considerable heterogeneity regarding the fear versus neutral contrast, resulting in null effects for this contrast. Upon recognition of disgust, activation was noted in bilateral occipital, in the fronto-orbital cortex and in the insula. Analyzing contrasts between emotional conditions showed similar results (to those of contrasting with reference conditions) for separated emotional network patterns. We demonstrate here that our paradigm reproduces single aspects of separate previous studies across a cohort of healthy subjects, irrespective of age. Our approach might prove useful in future studies of patients with neurologic disorders with potential effect on emotion recognition.

Early processing of emotional faces in children with autism: An event-related potential study

Social deficits are one of the most striking manifestations of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Among these social deficits, the recognition and understanding of emotional facial expressions has been widely reported to be affected in ASDs. We investigated emotional face processing in children with and without autism using event-related potentials (ERPs). High-functioning children with autism ( n = 15, mean age = 10.5 ± 3.3 years) completed an implicit emotional task while visual ERPs were recorded. Two groups of typically developing children (chronological age-matched and verbal equivalent age-matched [both ns = 15, mean age = 7.7 ± 3.8 years]) also participated in this study. The early ERP responses to faces (P1 and N170) were delayed, and the P1 was smaller in children with autism than in typically developing children of the same chronological age, revealing that the first stages of emotional face processing are affected in autism. However, when matched by verbal equivalent age, only P1 amplitude remained affected in autism. Our results suggest that the emotional and facial processing difficulties in autism could start from atypicalities in visual perceptual processes involving rapid feedback to primary visual areas and subsequent holistic processing.

Recognition of facial expressions of emotions by 3-year-olds.

Very few large-scale studies have focused on emotional facial expression recognition (FER) in 3-year-olds, an age of rapid social and language development. We studied FER in 808 healthy 3-year-olds using verbal and nonverbal computerized tasks for four basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). Three-year-olds showed differential performance on the verbal and nonverbal FER tasks, especially with respect to fear. That is to say, fear was one of the most accurately recognized facial expressions as matched nonverbally and the least accurately recognized facial expression as labeled verbally. Sex did not influence emotion-matching nor emotion-labeling performance after adjusting for basic matching or labeling ability. Three-year-olds made systematic errors in emotion-labeling. Namely, happy expressions were often confused with fearful expressions, whereas negative expressions were often confused with other negative expressions. Together, these findings suggest that 3-year-olds' FER skills strongly depend on task specifications. Importantly, fear was the most sensitive facial expression in this regard. Finally, in line with previous studies, we found that recognized emotion categories are initially broad, including emotions of the same valence, as reflected in the nonrandom errors of 3-year-olds.

Speed and accuracy of facial expression classification in avoidant personality disorder: A preliminary study.

The aim of this preliminary study was to examine whether individuals with avoidant personality disorder (APD) could be characterized by deficits in the classification of dynamically presented facial emotional expressions. Using a community sample of adults with APD (n = 17) and non-APD controls (n = 16), speed and accuracy of facial emotional expression recognition was investigated in a task that morphs facial expressions from neutral to prototypical expressions (Multi-Morph Facial Affect Recognition Task; Blair, Colledge, Murray, & Mitchell, 2001). Results indicated that individuals with APD were significantly more likely than controls to make errors when classifying fully expressed fear. However, no differences were found between groups in the speed to correctly classify facial emotional expressions. The findings are some of the first to investigate facial emotional processing in a sample of individuals with APD and point to an underlying deficit in processing social cues that may be involved in the maintenance of APD.

Retention of identity versus expression of emotional faces differs in the recruitment of limbic areas

Faces are multidimensional stimuli that convey information for complex social and emotional functions. Separate neural systems have been implicated in the recognition of facial identity (mainly extrastriate visual cortex) and emotional expression (limbic areas and the superior temporal sulcus). Working-memory (WM) studies with faces have shown different but partly overlapping activation patterns in comparison to spatial WM in parietal and prefrontal areas. However, little is known about the neural representations of the different facial dimensions during WM. In the present study 22 subjects performed a face-identity or face-emotion WM task at different load levels during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found a fronto-parietal-visual WM-network for both tasks during maintenance, including fusiform gyrus. Limbic areas in the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus demonstrated a stronger activation for the identity than the emotion condition. One explanation for this finding is that the repetitive presentation of faces with different identities but the same emotional expression during the identity-task is responsible for the stronger increase in BOLD signal in the amygdala. These results raise the question how different emotional expressions are coded in WM. Our findings suggest that emotional expressions are re-coded in an abstract representation that is supported at the neural level by the canonical fronto-parietal WM network.

Reduced recognition of fear and sadness in post-traumatic stress disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with impairments in emotional experience and expression. The current study examined the recognition of emotional facial expressions in PTSD patients and matched healthy controls, both in terms of accuracy and sensitivity. The task involved short video clips of a neutral face changing (morphing) into one of the six basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust and sadness). Clips differed in length, with short clips terminating at 20% of maximum emotional intensity, and the longest ones ending with a full-blown expression. We observed a specific impairment in the PTSD group for recognizing the emotions fear and sadness. This result was observed via a reduced accuracy and a decreased sensitivity for these emotions. We discuss the observed altered affective processing and its possible clinical implications.

Orbitofrontal volume reductions during emotion recognition in patients with major depression

Major depressive disorder is associated with both structural and functional alterations in the emotion regulation network of the central nervous system. The relation between structural and functional changes is largely unknown. Therefore, we sought to determine the relation between structural differences and functional alterations during the recognition of emotional facial expressions. We examined 13 medication-free patients with major depression and 15 healthy controls by use of structural T1-weighted high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and functional MRI during 1 session. We set the statistical threshold for the analysis of imaging data to p < 0.001 (uncorrected). As shown by voxel-based morphometry, depressed patients had reductions in orbitofrontal cortex volume and increases in cerebellar volume. Additionally, depressed patients showed increased activity during emotion recognition in the middle frontal cortex, caudate nucleus, precuneus and lingual gyrus. Within this cerebral network, the orbitofrontal volumes were negatively correlated in depressed patients but not in healthy controls with changes in blood oxygen level-dependent signal in the middle frontal gyrus, caudate nucleus, precuneus and supplementary motor area. Our results are limited by the relatively small sample size. This combined functional and structural MRI study provides evidence that the orbitofrontal cortex is a key area in major depression and that structural changes result in functional alterations within the emotional circuit. Whether these alterations in the orbitofrontal cortex are also related to persistent emotional dysfunction in remitted mental states and, therefore, are related to the risk of depression needs further exploration.

Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: neuropsychological and psychosocial correlates

Background There is evidence that facial emotion recognition is disturbed in schizophrenic patient’s [1] and is associate with other neurocognitive deficits [2]. Some evidence suggest that affect recognition is an important aspect of psychosocial functioning of patients with schizophrenia [3]. In this study we assessed recognition of facial emotional expression in schizophrenic patients and its relationship with selected clinical and neuropsychological variables as well as with social functioning.