Subtle Expressions Research Articles

Masked ambiguity – Emotion identification in schizophrenia and major depressive disorder

Both patients with schizophrenia and with a major depressive disorder (MDD) display deficits in identifying facial expressions of emotion during acute phases of their illness. However, specific deficit patterns have not yet been reliably demonstrated. Tasks that employ emotionally ambiguous stimuli have recently shown distinct deficit patterns in patients with schizophrenia compared to other mental disorders as well as healthy controls. We here investigate whether a task which uses an ambiguous Japanese (Noh) mask and a corresponding human stimulus generates distinctive emotion attribution patterns in thirty-two Caucasian patients with schizophrenia, matched MDD patients and healthy controls. Results show that patients with schizophrenia displayed reaction time disadvantages compared to healthy controls while identifying sadness and anger. MDD patients were more likely to label stimuli with basic compared to subtle emotional expressions. Moreover, they showed more difficulties assigning emotions to the human stimulus than to the Noh mask. IQ, age and cognitive functioning did not modulate these results. Because overall group differences were not observed, this task is not suitable for diagnosing patients. However, the subtle differences that did emerge might give therapists handles that can be used in therapy.

Neural measures of the causal role of observers' facial mimicry on visual working memory for facial expressions.

Simulation models of facial expressions propose that sensorimotor regions may increase the clarity of facial expressions representations in extrastriate areas. We monitored the event-related potential marker of visual working memory (VWM) representations, namely the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN), also termed contralateral delay activity, while participants performed a change detection task including to-be-memorized faces with different intensities of anger. In one condition participants could freely use their facial mimicry during the encoding/VWM maintenance of the faces while in a different condition participants had their facial mimicry blocked by a gel. Notably, SPCN amplitude was reduced for faces in the blocked mimicry condition when compared to the free mimicry condition. This modulation interacted with the empathy levels of participants such that only participants with medium-high empathy scores showed such reduction of the SPCN amplitude when their mimicry was blocked. The SPCN amplitude was larger for full expressions when compared to neutral and subtle expressions, while subtle expressions elicited lower SPCN amplitudes than neutral faces. These findings provide evidence of a functional link between mimicry and VWM for faces and further shed light on how this memory system may receive feedbacks from sensorimotor regions during the processing of facial expressions.

Necessary Morphological Patches Extraction for Automatic Micro-Expression Recognition

Micro expressions are usually subtle and brief facial expressions that humans use to hide their true emotional states. In recent years, micro-expression recognition has attracted wide attention in the fields of psychology, mass media, and computer vision. The shortest micro expression lasts only 1/25 s. Furthermore, different from macro-expressions, micro-expressions have considerable low intensity and inadequate contraction of the facial muscles. Based on these characteristics, automatic micro-expression detection and recognition are great challenges in the field of computer vision. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic facial expression recognition framework based on necessary morphological patches (NMPs) to better detect and identify micro expressions. Micro expression is a subconscious facial muscle response. It is not controlled by the rational thought of the brain. Therefore, it calls on a few facial muscles and has local properties. NMPs are the facial regions that must be involved when a micro expression occurs. NMPs were screened based on weighting the facial active patches instead of the holistic utilization of the entire facial area. Firstly, we manually define the active facial patches according to the facial landmark coordinates and the facial action coding system (FACS). Secondly, we use a LBP-TOP descriptor to extract features in these patches and the Entropy-Weight method to select NMP. Finally, we obtain the weighted LBP-TOP features of these NMP. We test on two recent publicly available datasets: CASME II and SMIC database that provided sufficient samples. Compared with many recent state-of-the-art approaches, our method achieves more promising recognition results.

Subtle ways of stigmatization among professionals: The subjective experience of consumers and their family members.

Subtle expressions of stigmata or microaggressions consist of insensitive and demeaning remarks or statements which negate an individual's perception of their reality. They are differentiated from more traditional and overt forms of discrimination in that they are often voiced by well-intentioned individuals who are unaware of the negative underpinnings and potentially harmful effects of their comments. This study aimed to explore the subjective experience of stigma and macroaggression among consumers and their family members during their encounters with mental health care providers. Sixteen individuals who were recently diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders and 15 of their family members were interviewed. The interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using grounded theory. Three major forms of subtle stigma expressions or microaggressions were identified: that lived experience is not relevant, people diagnosed with a psychosis have no hope for recovery, and sharing and discussing professional knowledge is not necessary. Encounters with mental health care providers include subtle conveyance of stigmatizing messages that are well recognized as a barrier to recovery. Psychoeducational interventions for staff that emphasize the importance of lived experience and sharing professional knowledge are recommended, as well as further studying the subtle ways of stigmatization among staff. (PsycINFO Database Record

Dissociating neural signatures of mental state retrodiction and classification based on facial expressions.

Posed facial expressions of actors have often been used as stimuli to induce mental state inferences, in order to investigate ‘Theory of Mind’ processes. However, such stimuli make it difficult to determine whether perceivers are using a basic or more elaborated mentalizing strategy. The current study used as stimuli covert recordings of target individuals who viewed various emotional expressions, which caused them to spontaneously mimic these expressions. Perceivers subsequently judged these subtle emotional expressions of the targets: in one condition (‘classification’) participants were instructed to classify the target’s expression (i.e. match it to a sample) and in another condition (‘retrodicting’) participants were instructed to retrodict (i.e. infer which emotional expression the target was viewing). When instructed to classify, participants showed more prevalent activations in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) at earlier and mid-latency ERP components N170, P200 and P300–600. By contrast, when instructed to retrodict participants showed enhanced late frontal and fronto-temporal ERPs (N800–1000), with more sustained activity over the right than the left hemisphere. These findings reveal different cortical processes involved when retrodicting about a facial expression compared to merely classifying it, despite comparable performance on the behavioral task.

Music From the Very Beginning-A Neuroscience-Based Framework for Music as Therapy for Preterm Infants and Their Parents.

Human and animal studies demonstrate that early auditory experiences influence brain development. The findings are particularly crucial following preterm birth as the plasticity of auditory regions, and cortex development are heavily dependent on the quality of auditory stimulation. Brain maturation in preterm infants may be affected among other things by the overwhelming auditory environment of the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Conversely, auditory deprivation, (e.g., the lack of the regular intrauterine rhythms of the maternal heartbeat and the maternal voice) may also have an impact on brain maturation. Therefore, a nurturing enrichment of the auditory environment for preterm infants is warranted. Creative music therapy (CMT) addresses these demands by offering infant-directed singing in lullaby-style that is continually adapted to the neonate’s needs. The therapeutic approach is tailored to the individual developmental stage, entrained to the breathing rhythm, and adapted to the subtle expressions of the newborn. Not only the therapist and the neonate but also the parents play a role in CMT. In this article, we describe how to apply music therapy in a neonatal intensive care environment to support very preterm infants and their families. We speculate that the enriched musical experience may promote brain development and we critically discuss the available evidence in support of our assumption.

The contribution of facial dynamics to subtle expression recognition in typical viewers and developmental visual agnosia

Facial expressions are inherently dynamic cues that develop and change over time, unfolding their affective signal. Although facial dynamics are assumed important for emotion recognition, testing often involves intense and stereotypical expressions and little is known about the role of temporal information in the recognition of subtle, non-stereotypical expressions. In Experiment 1 we demonstrate that facial dynamics are critical for recognizing subtle and non-stereotypical facial expressions, but not for recognizing intense and stereotypical displays of emotion. In Experiment 2 we further examined whether the facilitative effect of motion can lead to improved emotion recognition in LG, an individual with developmental visual agnosia and prosopagnosia, who has poor emotion recognition when tested with static facial expressions. LG's emotion recognition improved when subtle, non-stereotypical faces were dynamic rather than static. However, compared to controls, his relative gain from temporal information was diminished. Furthermore, LG's eye-tracking data demonstrated atypical visual scanning of the dynamic faces, consisting of longer fixations and lower fixation rates for the dynamic-subtle facial expressions, comparing to the dynamic-intense facial expressions. We suggest that deciphering subtle dynamic expressions strongly relies on integrating broad facial regions across time, rather than focusing on local emotional cues, skills which are impaired in developmental visual agnosia.

Animals Remember Previous Facial Expressions that Specific Humans Have Exhibited

For humans, facial expressions are important social signals, and how we perceive specific individuals may be influenced by subtle emotional cues that they have given us in past encounters. A wide range of animal species are also capable of discriminating the emotions of others through facial expressions [1-5], and it is clear that remembering emotional experiences with specific individuals could have clear benefits for social bonding and aggression avoidance when these individuals are encountered again. Although there is evidence that non-human animals are capable of remembering the identity of individuals who have directly harmed them [6, 7], it is not known whether animals can form lasting memories of specific individuals simply by observing subtle emotional expressions that they exhibit on their faces. Here we conducted controlled experiments in which domestic horses were presented with a photograph of an angry or happy human face and several hours later saw the person who had given the expression in a neutral state. Short-term exposure to the facial expression was enough to generate clear differences in subsequent responses to that individual (but not to a different mismatched person), consistent with the past angry expression having been perceived negatively and the happy expression positively. Both humans were blind to the photograph that the horses had seen. Our results provide clear evidence that some non-human animals can effectively eavesdrop on the emotional state cues that humans reveal on a moment-to-moment basis, using their memory of these to guide future interactions with particular individuals.

Morphine reduced perceived anger from neutral and implicit emotional expressions

The μ-opioid system modulates responses to pain and psychosocial stress and mediates non-social and social reward. In humans, the μ-opioid agonist morphine can increase overt attention to the eye-region and visual exploration of faces with neutral expressions. However, little is known about how the human μ-opioid system influences sensitivity to and appraisal of subtle and explicit cues of social threats and reward. Here, we examined the effects of selective μ-opioid stimulation on perception of anger and happiness in faces with explicit, neutral or implicit emotion expressions. Sixty-three healthy adults (32 females) attended two sessions where they received either placebo or 10 mg per oral morphine in randomised order under double-blind conditions. Based on the known μ-opioid reduction of pain and discomfort, as well as reports suggesting that the non-specific partial agonist buprenorphine or the non-specific antagonist naltrexone affect appraisal of social emotional stimuli, we hypothesised that morphine would reduce threat sensitivity and enhance perception of happy facial expressions. While overall perception of others’ happiness was unaffected by morphine treatment, morphine reduced perception of anger in stimuli with neutral and implicit expressions without affecting perception of explicit anger. This effect was statistically unrelated to gender, subjective drug effects, mood and autism trait measures. The finding that a low dose of μ-agonist reduced the propensity to perceive anger in photos with subtle facial expressions is consistent with the notion that μ-opioids mediate social confidence and reduce sensitivity to threat cues.

Individual differences in socioemotional sensitivity are an index of salience network function

Connectivity in intrinsically connected networks (ICNs) may predict individual differences in cognition and behavior. The drastic alterations in socioemotional awareness of patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) are presumed to arise from changes in one such ICN, the salience network (SN). We examined how individual differences in SN connectivity are reflected in overt social behavior in healthy individuals and patients, both to provide neuroscientific insight into this key brain–behavior relationship, and to provide a practical tool to diagnose patients with early bvFTD. We measured SN functional connectivity and socioemotional sensitivity in 65 healthy older adults and 103 patients in the earliest stage [Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) Scale score ≤1] of five neurodegenerative diseases [14 bvFTD, 29 Alzheimer's disease (AD), 20 progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), 21 semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), and 19 non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA)]. All participants underwent resting-state functional imaging and an informant described their responsiveness to subtle emotional expressions using the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (RSMS). Higher functional connectivity in the SN, predominantly between the right anterior insula (AI) and both “hub” cortical and “interoceptive” subcortical nodes, predicted socioemotional sensitivity among healthy individuals, showing that socioemotional sensitivity is a behavioral marker of SN function, and particularly of right AI functional connectivity. The continuity of this relationship in both healthy and neurologically affected individuals highlights the role of socioemotional sensitivity as an early diagnostic marker of SN connectivity. Clinically, this is particularly important for identification of patients in the earliest stage of bvFTD, where the SN is selectively vulnerable.

Gently does it: Humans outperform a software classifier in recognizing subtle, nonstereotypical facial expressions.

According to dominant theories of affect, humans innately and universally express a set of emotions using specific configurations of prototypical facial activity. Accordingly, thousands of studies have tested emotion recognition using sets of highly intense and stereotypical facial expressions, yet their incidence in real life is virtually unknown. In fact, a commonplace experience is that emotions are expressed in subtle and nonprototypical forms. Such facial expressions are at the focus of the current study. In Experiment 1, we present the development and validation of a novel stimulus set consisting of dynamic and subtle emotional facial displays conveyed without constraining expressers to using prototypical configurations. Although these subtle expressions were more challenging to recognize than prototypical dynamic expressions, they were still well recognized by human raters, and perhaps most importantly, they were rated as more ecological and naturalistic than the prototypical expressions. In Experiment 2, we examined the characteristics of subtle versus prototypical expressions by subjecting them to a software classifier, which used prototypical basic emotion criteria. Although the software was highly successful at classifying prototypical expressions, it performed very poorly at classifying the subtle expressions. Further validation was obtained from human expert face coders: Subtle stimuli did not contain many of the key facial movements present in prototypical expressions. Together, these findings suggest that emotions may be successfully conveyed to human viewers using subtle nonprototypical expressions. Although classic prototypical facial expressions are well recognized, they appear less naturalistic and may not capture the richness of everyday emotional communication. (PsycINFO Database Record

Disulfiram and disulfiram-loaded poly-[lactide-co-glycolic acid] nanoparticles modulate metastatic markers and proteasomal activity in hepatocarcinoma Hep3b cell line

AbstractHepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) results in significantly high mortality rates due to its subtle metastatic expressions. Exorbitant costs of anticancer drugs have lead to the concept of repositioning standard drugs for their anticancer potential. One such antialcoholic drug, disulfiram (DSF), has been reported to show significant cytotoxicity (IC

Referential NPs as subtle expressions of attitude in infanticide trials, 1674–1775

AbstractThis article discusses how victims of infanticide were portrayed in theProceedings of the Old Baileyin 1674–1775. More specifically, the study focuses on the use of lexical NPs as subtle foregrounding devices in the trial accounts. It is argued that the use of a prosodically prominent lexical NP in a place where a topical and a highly accessible referent could naturally be expressed by an unstressed pronoun may not be emotionally or attitudinally neutral; rather, I will argue that by repeatedly using lexical NPs, the trial participants were able to express sympathy and solidarity to the victims in a very subtle way by making the referent more discourse-prominent and emphasising the victims’ young age by using head nouns likechildandinfant. The data will mainly be discussed from a diachronic perspective, and the results show that as most women convicted of infanticide in the eighteenth century were acquitted, the frequency of lexical NPs used in reference to the deceased children increased. The overuse of lexical NPs is particularly prominent in the trials where the woman was found guilty of the crime, suggesting a possible connection between the degree of violence used in the murder and the kinds of NPs the trial participants used to refer to the deceased children as subtle indications of sympathy.

Sensitivity to facial expressions among extremely low birth weight survivors in their 30s.

The current study investigated the impact of birth weight on the ability to recognize facial expressions in adulthood among the longest known prospectively followed cohort of extremely low birth weight survivors (ELBW; <1,000 g). We measured perceptual threshold to detect subtle facial expressions and confusion among different emotion categories in order to disentangle visual perceptual ability from emotional processing. ELBW adults (N = 64, Mage = 31.9 years) were more likely than normal birth weight (NBW) controls (N = 82, Mage = 32.5 years) to see fear in angry faces. This finding was not a result of increased perceptual efficiency in processing fearful expressions in the ELBW adults, since the two groups did not differ on their threshold to detect emotion in low intensity facial expressions. These findings suggest that a processing bias toward fear may reflect long-term developmental effects from being born at ELBW that may portend socioemotional problems that characterize ELBW survivors.

A Wearable Device for Fast and Subtle Spontaneous Smile Recognition

Facial expressions are usually linked to emotional states of a person, and are among the most salient cues for automatic emotion recognition. They are an indispensable social communication tool, and therefore, they can also be fabricated to face complex situations in social interaction. Despite efforts to either deliberately or unconsciously conceal an emotion, micro-expressions are usually leaked. Because of their revealing nature, potential applications can arise from automatically detecting them, both at a personal and inter-personal levels. Therefore, we explored micro-expression detection using a wearable device that detects distal facial EMG signals unobtrusively, as an alternative to Computer Vision-based detection. EMG recognition is advantageous over commonly used video recognition techniques because of its robustness against occlusion and light changes, good temporal resolution, and independence of movement. We evaluated the performance of the wearable device on micro-smile recognition. The results show the potential of EMG to detect such fast and subtle spontaneous expressions. Finally, we evaluated the device as a tool to provide affective annotations of Advertisement Videos, and social interaction in a face-to-face context while watching these stimuli.

The Founder’s Personal-Environmental Conflict and Apprehension in the Family Business Succession

Why founders of small family businesses (SFBs) are apprehensive about the inter-generational succession is the main concern in this qualitative research comprising 18 interviews in Thailand. The in-depth analysis based on the appraisal theory reveals that incongruence of technical and social goals and coping power of the founder contribute to the apprehension about the succession. The technical and social goal incongruence reflects from the actions of actors (A), consequences of events (E) and characteristics of objects (O). The externally regulated motivations further compound the apprehension formation. In addition to technical and social concerns of the founder about the succession, subtle other expressions of the founder indicate that the ego (self-else conflict) pressure through obligations cause the tension and uncertainty. Complementing the appraisal theory, the self- determination theory of autonomous interest explains this moderating role of the internalized but disintegrated external regulations. Therefore, only the technical-social duality of the goals is likely to induce apprehension but also the founder’s unwillingness, inability and lack of internal endorsement constitute apprehension.

Brief Report: Is Impaired Classification of Subtle Facial Expressions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Related to Atypical Emotion Category Boundaries?

Impairments in recognizing subtle facial expressions, in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), may relate to difficulties in constructing prototypes of these expressions. Eighteen children with predominantly intellectual low-functioning ASD (LFA, IQ <80) and two control groups (mental and chronological age matched), were assessed for their ability to classify emotional faces, of high, medium and low intensities, as happy or angry. For anger, the LFA group made more errors for lower intensity expressions than the control groups, classifications did not differ for happiness. This is the first study to find that the LFA group made more across-valence errors than controls. These data are consistent with atypical facial expression processing in ASD being associated with differences in the structure of emotion categories.

Impaired Recognition of Basic Emotions from Facial Expressions in Young People with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Assessing the Importance of Expression Intensity

It has been proposed that impairments in emotion recognition in ASD are greater for more subtle expressions of emotion. We measured recognition of 6 basic facial expressions at 8 intensity levels in young people (6–16 years) with ASD (N = 63) and controls (N = 64) via an Internet platform. Participants with ASD were less accurate than controls at labelling expressions across intensity levels, although differences at very low levels were not detected due to floor effects. Recognition accuracy did not correlate with parent-reported social functioning in either group. These findings provide further evidence for an impairment in recognition of basic emotion in ASD and do not support the idea that this impairment is limited solely to low intensity expressions.

Lip syncing method for realistic expressive 3D face model

Lip synchronization of 3D face model is now being used in a multitude of important fields. It brings a more human, social and dramatic reality to computer games, films and interactive multimedia, and is growing in use and importance. High level of realism can be used in demanding applications such as computer games and cinema. Authoring lip syncing with complex and subtle expressions is still difficult and fraught with problems in terms of realism. This research proposed a lip syncing method of realistic expressive 3D face model. Animated lips requires a 3D face model capable of representing the myriad shapes the human face experiences during speech and a method to produce the correct lip shape at the correct time. The paper presented a 3D face model designed to support lip syncing that align with input audio file. It deforms using Raised Cosine Deformation (RCD) function that is grafted onto the input facial geometry. The face model was based on MPEG-4 Facial Animation (FA) Standard. This paper proposed a method to animate the 3D face model over time to create animated lip syncing using a canonical set of visemes for all pairwise combinations of a reduced phoneme set called ProPhone. The proposed research integrated emotions by the consideration of Ekman model and Plutchik’s wheel with emotive eye movements by implementing Emotional Eye Movements Markup Language (EEMML) to produce realistic 3D face model.

Cultura de masas, ornamentación y cine. Una crítica de Siegfried Kracauer a la modernidad

Siegfried Kracauer fue un testigo de las precipitadas transformaciones con las que comenzó el siglo xx: crecimiento de las ciudades y de las lógicas inherentes a las mismas, prolongación de dinámicas industriales a los ámbitos de la diversión y la masificación social. La modernidad avanzada, apoyada en el desarrollo técnico, posibilitó irrupciones sociales y culturales que este autor identificó en fenómenos particulares, que surgieron con la emergencia del nuevo actor social: las masas. Kracauer no solo presenció el cambio, también lo interpretó y buscó comprenderlo en sus expresiones más finas y sutiles. El espectáculo masivo, que viene determinado y que da pie a una transformación radical en el gusto, acaparó su atención: ornamental, estrepitoso, ruidoso, fue para él una estetización de la confusión social imperante. De influencia simmeliana, pero imprimiendo su mirada única, que nutrió las reflexiones sociológicas de la Teoría crítica, Kracauer develó, en los fenómenos culturales de la gran urbe de las primeras décadas del siglo xx, las tendencias racionalizadoras con las que la experiencia moderna sacudió y subsumió al individuo y a su percepción. Este ensayo da cuenta de la experiencia moderna, a partir de los postulados e interpretaciones de Kracauer, con énfasis en su vigencia y en su riqueza conceptual, un gran aporte a la sociología de la modernidad. Fenómenos concretos como el cine, la literatura de consumo masivo y los espectáculos ornamentales en grandes estadios, sirven para revelar las características principales de la modernidad y problematizar la relación libertad-represión que se genera entre el individuo y la organización social. Se argumenta y desarrolla que esta forma de interpretación de la experiencia moderna tiene gran vigencia por su enfoque en lo concreto y brinda elementos enriquecedores del análisis social más amplio para cada época y sus problemáticas.