Social Emotion Perception Research Articles

Distinct neural correlates of accuracy and bias in the perception of facial emotion expressions

ABSTRACT We investigated neural correlates of Emotion Recognition Accuracy (ERA) using the Assessment of Contextualized Emotions (ACE). ACE infuses context by presenting emotion expressions in a naturalistic group setting and distinguishes between accurately perceiving intended emotions (signal), and bias due to perceiving additional, secondary emotions (noise). This social perception process is argued to induce perspective taking in addition to pattern matching in ERA. Thirty participants were presented with an fMRI-compatible adaptation of the ACE consisting of blocks of neutral and emotional faces in single and group-embedded settings. Participants rated the central character’s expressions categorically or using scalar scales in consequent fMRI scans. Distinct brain activations were associated with the perception of emotional vs. neutral faces in the four conditions. Moreover, accuracy and bias scores from the original ACE task performed on another day were associated with brain activation during the scalar (vs. categorical) condition for emotional (vs. neutral) faces embedded in group. These findings suggest distinct cognitive mechanisms linked to each type of emotional rating and highlight the importance of considering cognitive bias in the assessment of social emotion perception.

Clinical Accommodations for Children With Co-Occurring Developmental Language Disorder and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are two of the most prevalent disorders in school-age children and are likely to be co-occurring. However, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) may receive limited training regarding strategies for capitalizing on strengths and accommodating the needs of children with ADHD relating to challenges in attention, working memory, behavioral inhibition, and self-regulation in the clinical setting. Therefore, in this tutorial, we describe how the cognitive profile of children with DLD and ADHD may present in the therapy room and review strategies for adapting therapeutic approaches to fit the needs of children with ADHD neurotypes. Method: This tutorial includes a review of research related to linguistic, cognitive, and behavioral differences in children with co-occurring DLD and ADHD. Strategies for accommodations in the therapy room are discussed, and we present a case study to demonstrate how these accommodations can be implemented. Conclusions: SLPs can enhance the effectiveness of therapy for children with co-occurring DLD and ADHD with an awareness of the struggles that children with DLD and ADHD experience in the therapy room. Providing these children with the appropriate accommodations can alleviate difficulties due to neurodivergent traits related to working memory, sustaining and shifting attention, social–emotional perception, behavioral inhibition, and self-regulation that occur along with linguistic difficulties.

Infusing Context Into Emotion Perception Impacts Emotion Decoding Accuracy.

. The accurate decoding of facial emotion expressions lies at the center of many research traditions in psychology. Much of this research, while paying lip service to the importance of context in emotion perception, has used stimuli that were carefully created to be deprived of contextual information. The participants' task is to associate the expression shown in the face with a correct label, essentially changing a social perception task into a cognitive task. In fact, in many cases, the task can be carried out correctly without engaging emotion recognition at all. The present article argues that infusing context in emotion perception does not only add an additional source of information but changes the way that participants approach the task by rendering it a social perception task rather than a cognitive task. Importantly, distinguishing between accuracy (perceiving the intended emotions) and bias (perceiving additional emotions to those intended) leads to a more nuanced understanding of social emotion perception. Results from several studies that use the Assessment of Contextual Emotions demonstrate the significance and social functionality of simultaneously considering emotion decoding accuracy and bias for social interaction in different cultures, their key personality and societal correlates, and their function for close relationships processes.

EEG-based approach for recognizing human social emotion perception

Social emotion perception plays an important role in our daily social interactions and is involved in the treatments for mental disorders. Hyper-scanning technique enables to measure brain activities simultaneously from two or more persons, which was employed in this study to explore social emotion perception. We analyzed the recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) to explore emotion perception in terms of event related potential (ERP) and phase synchronization, and classified emotion categories based on convolutional neural network (CNN). The results showed that (1) ERP was significantly different among four emotion categories (i.e., anger, disgust, neutral, and happy), but there was no significant difference for ERP in the comparison of rating orders (the order of rating actions of the paired participants); (2) the intra-brain phase lag index (PLI) was higher than the inter-brain PLI but its number of connections exhibiting significant difference was less in all typical frequency bands (from delta to gamma); (3) the emotion classification accuracy of inter-PLI-Conv outperformed that of intra-PLI-Conv for all cases of using each frequency band (five frequency bands totally). In particular, the classification accuracies averaged across all participants in the alpha band were 65.55% and 50.77% (much higher than the chance level) for the inter-PLI-Conv and intra-PLI-Conv, respectively. According to our results, the emotion category of happiness can be classified with a higher performance compared to the other categories.

Uncinate fasciculus white matter connectivity related to impaired social perception and cross-sectional and longitudinal symptoms in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis

Dysfunctional social-emotional perception in patients with schizophrenia can result in adverse clinical symptoms and poorer long-term outcomes. The white matter tracts that interact among a number of brain regions have an important role to play. However, few neuroimaging studies focus on the effects of white matter connectivity on social-emotional perception in schizophrenia and its impact on patients’ clinical symptoms and long-term outcomes.Forty-one patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis and 42 healthy controls underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging. The white matter fractional anisotropy values of the emotion recognition areas, the bilateral anterior thalamic radiation, inferior longitudinal fasciculus, cingulum bundle, superior longitudinal fasciculus, and uncinate fasciculus were compared between patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis and healthy controls. Social-emotional perception levels and symptom severity at baseline and after 1 year were examined.A group analysis showed that white matter connectivity was significantly lower in the bilateral anterior thalamic radiation, cingulum bundle, right inferior longitudinal fasciculus, and uncinate fasciculus of patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis compared to the healthy controls. Contrastingly, a correlation analysis revealed that larger right uncinate fasciculus fractional anisotropy values were associated with lower social-emotional perception levels in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis. Additionally, the white matter fractional anisotropy values of the right uncinate fasciculus showed a significant positive correlation with the severity of positive symptoms at baseline and with poor outcomes after 1 year.The findings of the present study suggest that impaired social-emotional perception in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis is associated with larger white matter connectivity of the uncinate fasciculus, which is also associated with more severe symptoms at baseline and after 1-year. These results suggest that the uncinate fasciculus could affect the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

Signal and Noise in the Perception of Facial Emotion Expressions: From Labs to Life.

Human interactions are replete with emotional exchanges, and hence, the ability to decode others' emotional expressions is of great importance. The present research distinguishes between the emotional signal (the intended emotion) and noise (perception of secondary emotions) in social emotion perception and investigates whether these predict the quality of social interactions. In three studies, participants completed laboratory-based assessments of emotion recognition ability and later reported their perceptions of naturally occurring social interactions. Overall, noise perception in the recognition task was associated with perceiving more negative emotions in others and perceiving interactions more negatively. Conversely, signal perception of facial emotion expressions was associated with higher quality in social interactions. These effects were moderated by relationship closeness in Greece but not in Germany. These findings suggest that emotion recognition as assessed in the laboratory is a valid predictor of social interaction quality. Thus, emotion recognition generalizes from the laboratory to everyday life.

Dysfunction of the frontolimbic region during swear word processing in young adolescents with Internet gaming disorder.

Although the Internet is an important tool in our daily life, the control of Internet use is necessary to address difficult problems. This study set out with the aim of assessing the cognitive control of affective events in Internet gaming disorder (IGD) and has examined the influence of IGD on neural activities with regard to swear words in young adolescents. We demonstrated the differences between adolescents with IGD and healthy control adolescents (HC) with respect to swear, negative and neutral word conditions. Swear words induced more activation in regions related to social interaction and emotional processing such as the superior temporal sulcus, right temporoparietal junction and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) when compared with negative words. In this study, adolescents with IGD exhibited reduced activation in the right OFC related to cognitive control and in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) related to social rejection during the swear word condition. In addition, adolescents with IGD were negatively correlated with activity in the right amygdala toward swear words, indicating the important role of the amygdala in the control of aggression in adolescents with IGD. These findings enhance our understanding of social–emotional perception in adolescents with IGD.

Self-rated social-emotional perception and its neurophysiologic and cardiac correlates while viewing a film showing the suffering of other people

Using electroencephalographic (EEG) and cardiac measures, the study examined relevant mechanisms that may explain individual differences in self-rated emotion perception (i.e., the propensity of perceiving the emotional states of other persons in everyday life). Healthy women (n = 122) were confronted with film scenes showing the suffering of other people. Functional coupling between prefrontal and posterior cortices, measured by EEG coherences, more strongly decreased in individuals higher on emotion perception. This finding suggests that the propensity to loosen prefrontal inhibitory control on posterior cortical areas involved in basic processes of emotion perception is associated with higher susceptibility to social-emotional information and, therefore, with higher scores on self-rated emotion perception. In addition, higher self-rated perception of other persons' emotions was related to more pronounced cardiac responses to the observation of horrifying events occurring to people in the film which indicate enhanced attention and heightened perceptual processing

Neural Substrates of Social Emotion Regulation: A fMRI Study on Imitation and Expressive Suppression to Dynamic Facial Signals

Emotion regulation is crucial for successfully engaging in social interactions. Yet, little is known about the neural mechanisms controlling behavioral responses to emotional expressions perceived in the face of other people, which constitute a key element of interpersonal communication. Here, we investigated brain systems involved in social emotion perception and regulation, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 healthy participants. The latter saw dynamic facial expressions of either happiness or sadness, and were asked to either imitate the expression or to suppress any expression on their own face (in addition to a gender judgment control task). fMRI results revealed higher activity in regions associated with emotion (e.g., the insula), motor function (e.g., motor cortex), and theory of mind (e.g., [pre]cuneus) during imitation. Activity in dorsal cingulate cortex was also increased during imitation, possibly reflecting greater action monitoring or conflict with own feeling states. In addition, premotor regions were more strongly activated during both imitation and suppression, suggesting a recruitment of motor control for both the production and inhibition of emotion expressions. Expressive suppression (eSUP) produced increases in dorsolateral and lateral prefrontal cortex typically related to cognitive control. These results suggest that voluntary imitation and eSUP modulate brain responses to emotional signals perceived from faces, by up- and down-regulating activity in distributed subcortical and cortical networks that are particularly involved in emotion, action monitoring, and cognitive control.

Deciphering the Neural Signature of Conversion Blindness

Deciphering the Neural Signature of Conversion Blindness

The neural substrates of social emotion perception and regulation are modulated by adult attachment style

Adult attachment style (AAS) refers to individual differences in the way people experience and regulate their social relationships and corresponding emotions. Based on developmental and psychological research, it has been hypothesized that avoidant attachment style (AV) entails deactivating strategies in social contexts, whereas anxious attachment style (AX) involves hyper vigilance and up-regulation mechanisms. However, the neural substrates of differences in social emotion regulation associated with AAS have not been systematically investigated. Here we used fMRI in 19 healthy adults to investigate the effect of AAS on the processing of pleasant or unpleasant social and nonsocial scenes. Participants were asked either to naturally attend (NAT), cognitively reappraise (REAP), or behaviorally suppress (ESUP) their emotional responses. Avoidantly attached participants showed increased prefrontal and anterior cingulate activation to social negative scenes when making spontaneous emotion judgments. They also exhibited persistent increases in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left amygdala activity for the same stimuli during reappraisal, as well as additional activation in supplementary motor area and ventral caudate during the suppression of social positive emotions. These results suggest that AV may imply less efficient reappraisal strategies to regulate social negative emotions, and lead to higher conflict or effortful control when suppression cannot be employed. In contrast, anxiously attached participants showed differential increases in the right amygdala and left parahippocampal cortex for social negative and positive stimuli, respectively, but only when making spontaneous emotion judgments. No effect of AX was found during down-regulation conditions. This suggests heightened arousal to negative information without difficulty in down-regulating emotions through cognitive re-evaluation or suppression. Taken together, these findings reveal for the first time the neural underpinnings of attachment-related differences in social emotion regulation.