Emotional experience during rapid-eye-movement sleep in narcolepsy

STUDY OBJECTIVES: To describe emotional experience during sleep-onset rapid-eye-movement [(REM) SOREM] sleep and nighttime REM in narcoleptic patients and to relate any differences in REM emotion to the more general abnormalities of this disorder. DESIGN: Awakenings were performed from SOREM (REM at the onset of daytime naps and nighttime sleep) and nighttime emergent (ascending) REM in 15 patients with narcolepsy and from nighttime REM in 9 normal healthy participants. Subjects rated the occurrence and intensity of discrete emotion types for each line in their REM-mentation reports. Fragmentation of REM was measured and related to emoton. SETTING: Subjects were studied in their own homes over 2 consecutive days and nights (3 nights for normals) and were monitored by ambulatory polysomnography. PARTICIPANTS: Fifteen patients with narcolepsy, aged 17 to 70 years (mean = 45.3) and 9 normal healthy subjects, aged 31 to 60 years (mean = 43.0). Results: Emotions were found more often and were more intense in narcoleptic SOREM than in nighttime REM of either narcoleptic or normal subjects, with anxiety/fear exhibiting the strongest increase, followed by joy/elation. Comparing nighttime REM in narcoleptic and normal subjects, narcoleptics were found to have more intense feelings of anxiety/fear and of joy/elation but to have a less frequent experience of surprise and anger. Positive and negative emotions occurred in a balanced fashion in SOREM and nighttime REM in narcoleptic subjects. In the SOREM of narcoleptic patients, high levels of positive emotions, in particular of joy/elation, were associated with a less fragmented (more stable) REM sleep. CONCLUSION: The REM sleep of patients with narcolepsy affords a unique opportunity to study emotion and to analyze its psychophysiology. Narcolepsy intensifies REM-dream emotion, especially anxiety/fear and joy/elation, and this is most clearly seen during SOREM sleep. The changes in REM emotion of narcoleptic patients could reflect the effect of the fundamental pathology of this disorder upon neurobiologic systems that support cognitive-emotional functions.     

Dream emotions: a comparison of home dream reports with laboratory early and late REM dream reports

The aim of this study was to compare the emotional content of dream reports collected at home upon morning awakenings with those collected in the laboratory upon early and late rapid eye movement (REM) sleep awakenings. Eighteen adults (11 women, seven men; mean age = 25.89 ± 4.85) wrote down their home dreams every morning immediately upon awakening during a 7‐day period. Participants also spent two non‐consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory where they were awoken 5 min into each continuous REM sleep stage, upon which they gave a verbal dream report. The content of a total of 151 home and 120 laboratory dream reports was analysed by two blind judges using the modified Differential Emotions Scale. It was found that: (1) home dream reports were more emotional than laboratory early REM dream reports, but not more emotional than laboratory late REM dream reports; (2) home dream reports contained a higher density of emotions than laboratory (early or late REM) dream reports; and (3) home dream reports were more negative than laboratory dream reports, but differences between home and early REM reports were larger than those between home and late REM reports. The results suggest that differences between home and laboratory dream reports in overall emotionality may be due to the time of night effect. Whether differences in the density of emotions and negative emotionality are due to sleep environment or due to different reporting procedures and time spent in a sleep stage, respectively, remains to be determined in future studies.     

大学生情绪调节方式与抑郁的研究

目的：探讨大学生的情绪及情绪调节方法及其与抑郁和性别的关系。方法：98名大学本科生接受了情绪量表,情绪调节方式量表和抑郁量表的评定。结果：（1）大学生情绪感受频率序列（从多到少）为：快乐、兴趣,羞愧、内疚,羞涩、悲伤、惊奇、敌意、愤怒、蔑视、厌恶、恐惧等。（2）一般的模式在感受负性情绪时出现比较多的忽视和抑制,感受正性情绪时出现比较多的重视和宣泄;原因调节多于反应调节。（3）男性感受比较多的愤怒、在感受正性情绪时,男性存在比较多的忽视和抑制,女性存在比较多的重视和宣泄。（4）抑郁高分组包含比较的羞愧、羞涩、悲伤,自我敌意、恐惧、厌恶、愤怒等负性情绪,比较少的快乐和兴趣。在调节方式上,高抑郁在感受负情绪时有更多的重视和宣泄,在感受正情情绪时存在比较多的忽视和抑制,比较少的重视和宣泄,结论：不适当的情绪调节方式可能是增强抑郁的重要原因。     

Emotional facial expressions during REM sleep dreams

Although motor activity is actively inhibited during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, specific activations of the facial mimetic musculature have been observed during this stage, which may be associated with greater emotional dream mentation. Nevertheless, no specific biomarker of emotional valence or arousal related to dream content has been identified to date. In order to explore the electromyographic (EMG) activity (voltage, number, density and duration) of the corrugator and zygomaticus major muscles during REM sleep and its association with emotional dream mentation, this study performed a series of experimental awakenings after observing EMG facial activations during REM sleep. The study was performed with 12 healthy female participants using an 8‐hr nighttime sleep recording. Emotional tone was evaluated by five blinded judges and final valence and intensity scores were obtained. Emotions were mentioned in 80.4% of dream reports. The voltage, number, density and duration of facial muscle contractions were greater for the corrugator muscle than for the zygomaticus muscle, whereas high positive emotions predicted the number (R² 0.601, p = 0.0001) and voltage (R² 0.332, p = 0.005) of the zygomaticus. Our findings suggest that zygomaticus events were predictive of the experience of positive affect during REM sleep in healthy women.     

Brain oscillations and BIS/BAS (behavioral inhibition/activation system) effects on processing masked emotional cues.: ERS/ERD and coherence measures of alpha band

Alpha brain oscillation modulation was analyzed in response to masked emotional facial expressions. In addition, behavioural activation (BAS) and behavioural inhibition systems (BIS) were considered as an explicative factor to verify the effect of motivational significance on cortical activity. Nineteen subjects were submitted to an ample range of facial expressions of emotions (anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, and neutral). The results demonstrated that anterior frontal sites were more active than central and posterior sites in response to facial stimuli. Moreover, right-side responses varied as a function of emotional types, with an increased right-frontal activity for negative emotions. Finally, whereas higher BIS subjects generated a more right hemisphere activation for some negative emotions (such as fear, anger, and surprise), Reward-BAS subjects were more responsive to positive emotion (happiness) within the left hemisphere. Valence and potential threatening power of facial expressions were considered to elucidate these cortical differences.     

Basic and complex emotions in depression and anxiety

The current study was designed to assess the emotion states that occur across the clinical disorders of depression, anxiety and mixed anxiety depression. The emotion states were assessed using the Basic Emotions Scale, which includes a set of simple and complex emotions rationally derived from the basic emotions of sadness, anger, fear, disgust and happiness. The profiles of emotion states across the clinical disorders and across a matched healthy control group supported an analysis in which emotions related to sadness and disgust were elevated in the depressed and mixed disorders, whereas increased levels of anger and fear, and decreased levels of happiness did not distinguish between clinical groups but were found in all disorders in comparison to healthy controls. Further factor analyses gave support for the proposed basic emotions model and did not support alternative models such as the Positive Affect‐Negative Affect model. The findings demonstrate how a theoretically based emotion analysis can provide a useful foundation from which to explore the emotional disorders. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether voluntarily produced emotional facial configurations are associated with differentiated patterns of autonomic activity, and if so, how this might be mediated. Subjects received muscle-by-muscle instructions and coaching to produce facial configurations for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise while heart rate, skin conductance, finger temperature, and somatic activity were monitored. Results indicated that voluntary facial activity produced significant levels of subjective experience of the associated emotion, and that autonomic distinctions among emotions: (a) were found both between negative and positive emotions and among negative emotions, (b) were consistent between group and individual subjects' data, (c) were found in both male and female subjects, (d) were found in both specialized (actors, scientists) and nonspecialized populations, (e) were stronger when the voluntary facial configurations most closely resembled actual emotional expressions, and (f) were stronger when experience of the associated emotion was reported. The capacity of voluntary facial activity to generate emotion-specific autonomic activity: (a) did not require subjects to see facial expressions (either in a mirror or on an experimenter's face), and (b) could not be explained by differences in the difficulty of making the expressions or by differences in concomitant somatic activity.     

Face-selective processing and the effect of pleasant and unpleasant emotional expressions on ERP correlates.

Previous studies have revealed that decoding of facial-expressions starts very early in the brain ( approximately 180 ms post-stimulus) and might be processed separately from the basic stage of face perception. In order to explore brain potentials (ERPs) related to decoding of facial-expressions and the effect of emotional valence of the stimulus, we analyzed 18 normal subjects. Faces with five basic emotional expressions (fear, anger, surprise, happiness, sadness) and neutral stimulus were presented in random order. The results demonstrated that an emotional face elicited a negative peak at approximately 230 ms (N230), distributed mainly over the posterior site for each emotion. The electrophysiological activity observed may represent specific cognitive processing underlying the decoding of emotional facial-expressions. Nevertheless, differences in peak amplitude were observed for high-arousal negative expressions compared with positive (happiness) and low-arousal expressions (sadness). N230 amplitude increased in response to anger, fear and surprise, suggesting that subjects' ERP variations are affected by experienced emotional intensity, related to arousal and unpleasant value of the stimulus.     

Emotion recognition: facial components associated with various emotions

This study examined the effect of the changes in facial expressions in different parts of the face on emotion recognition. Fifty-two university students participated in the study. Seven emotions were selected as being the most suitable for categorization and expression: namely, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness, and neutrality. Picture of these emotions were used to create stimulus materials, composed facial expressions were created by combining the upper and the lower parts of the pictures expressing different emotions. The participants were asked to categorize the type of emotion represented by each picture. The results showed that the upper area of the face was more often associated with anger, fear, surprise, and sadness. On the contrary, the lower area was more often associated with disgust and happiness. There were no significant differences between parts of the face associated with neutral emotions. Based on these results, we conclude that affected areas of the face differed as a function of emotion being experienced. Finally, the relationship of our results with Yamada's model (1993) was discussed.     

Emotions in everyday life: an ambulatory monitoring study with female students

Additional heart rate as an indicator of emotional arousal was monitored throughout the day with a special ambulatory device. Fifty female students received acoustic feedback every 10-20 min. The feedback was based either on events (additional heart rate present) or was random without additional heart rate. Following the feedback the subjects were asked to disclose their emotions. The following emotions were listed on the display of the monitoring device: no emotion, happiness, anger, anxiety/fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust. The frequency and quality of the emotions were not different between event-related and random feedbacks, indicating that the subjects were not able to discriminate between events with and without additional heart rate correctly. Accordingly, the physiological profiles of the differing emotions compared to conditions with "no emotion" were equivocal. The psychological ratings of excitement and enjoyment, however, came up to expectations. The results show that cognitive schemata and personality dimensions are more important in emotion perception than physiological activation.     

Three-mode factor analysis of emblematic gesture and body manipulation viewed from the dorsal perspective

This paper focuses on emblematic gesture and manipulation of body movements. Subjects viewed from the dorsal perspective the body movements displayed by two actors/actresses. These movements depicted the ten emotions of affection, joy, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anticipation, anger, contempt and acceptance. Three-mode factor analyses were applied to the data. Three factors were found in the emotion-mode, three in the scene-mode, and two factors in the subjects-mode. The emotion-mode and scene-mode factors were found to correspond to a high degree. Factor I was interpreted as an acceptance dimension, including affection, joy, anticipation and acceptance. The typical emblematic gestures were displayed with a standing posture and advanced movement. Factor II was interpreted as an avoidance dimension, including surprise, fear and sadness. The typical emblematic gestures were divided into two movements; regressive and "shrinking down". In addition, self-attached manipulations were typical expressions of sadness. Factor III was interpreted as a rejection dimension, including disgust, anger and contempt. Considerable body manipulation was used to express these emotional categories. Core-matrix and subjects' factor scores were correlated with a response tendency in terms of subjects' evaluations rather than their accuracy of judgment.     

Face emotion labeling deficits in children with bipolar disorder and severe mood dysregulation

Children with narrow phenotype bipolar disorder (NP-BD; i.e., history of at least one hypomanic or manic episode with euphoric mood) are deficient when labeling face emotions. It is unknown if this deficit is specific to particular emotions, or if it extends to children with severe mood dysregulation (SMD; i.e., chronic irritability and hyperarousal without episodes of mania). Thirty-nine NP-BD, 31 SMD, and 36 control subjects completed the emotional expression multimorph task, which presents gradations of facial emotions from 100% neutrality to 100% emotional expression (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust). Groups were compared in terms of intensity of emotion required before identification occurred and accuracy. Both NP-BD and SMD youth required significantly more morphs than controls to label correctly disgusted, surprised, fearful, and happy faces. Impaired face labeling correlated with deficient social reciprocity skills in NP-BD youth and dysfunctional family relationships in SMD youth. Compared to controls, patients with NP-BD or SMD require significantly more intense facial emotion before they are able to label the emotion correctly. These deficits are associated with psychosocial impairments. Understanding the neural circuitry associated with face-labeling deficits has the potential to clarify the pathophysiology of these disorders.     

Facial emotion identification in males with fragile X syndrome

Fifteen postpubertal males with fragile X syndrome (FRA(X)) and 15 non-FRA(X) males matched on IQ and age were assessed for their ability to identify the facially expressed emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Emotions of happiness and sadness were the easiest to identify for both groups of participants. Regardless of etiology, individuals with higher IQ scores performed better at this task than did individuals with lower IQ scores. Results were consistent with findings in females having the fragile X mutation. The current study supported the notion that FRA(X) individuals are sensitive to facial emotion cues presented by others. This finding is discussed in the context of autism and gaze aversion. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Recognition of Facial Expressions: Selective Impairment of Specific Emotions in Huntington's Disease

Recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions was investigated in HL and UJ, two people with Huntington's disease who showed little evidence of general cognitive deterioration. No impairments were found in tests of the perception of age, sex, familiar face identity, unfamiliar face identity, and gaze direction, indicating adequate processing of the face as a physical stimulus. Computer-interpolated ("morphed") images of facial expressions of basic emotions were used to demonstrate deficits in the recognition of disgust and fear for UJ. HL also showed a deficit in the recognition of disgust, and was not very adept (but not significantly impaired) at recognising fear. Other basic emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, anger) were recognised atnormal levels of performance by HL and UJ. These results show that impairments of emotion recognition can be circumscribed; affecting some emotions more than others, and occurring in people who do not show pronounced perceptual or intellectual deterioration. Questionnaires examining self-assessed emotion indicated normal experience of anger by HL and UJ, but possible abnormalities for disgust and fear. The processes involved in recognising other people's emotions may therefore be linked to those involved in experiencing emotion, and the basic emotions of fear and disgust may have separable neural substrates.     

Language for emotions in adolescents with externalizing and internalizing disorders

This study compared the structure and quality of emotion language in adolescents with externalizing disorders (N = 21), internalizing disorders (N = 18), and without a behavioral or emotional disorder (N = 16). Emotion language was elicited in response to vignette material prototypical for anger/sadness and fear, to autobiographical experiences, and to an actual emotional challenge. The findings reveal different emphases in the emotion language of internalizing and externalizing youth rather than a relative weakness for externalizing adolescents. Overall, clinical adolescents used fewer emotion terms that were semantically specific for anger, sad, or fear than typical adolescents. The results also show that emotion language is affected differentially for externalizing and internalizing adolescents depending on the emotion domain. Internalizing youth's emotion language to anger/sad events used inner-directed terms, situational references, and reduced intensity while their representation of emotions in response to salient threatening material was dominated by terms with a cognitive focus. Externalizing adolescents' emotion language responses to anger/sad events were more outer directed and intense, and their emotion language in a salient threat situation more orientated to direct affective terms. The results suggest that examining emotion language for specific emotion domains in adolescents with specific disorders will better clarify the role of emotion language in the regulation of emotions than approaches that globalize emotion language competencies or deficits.     

Pervasive emotion recognition deficit common to alexithymia and the repressive coping style

OBJECTIVE: Previous research has demonstrated a deficit in the ability to recognize emotions in alexithymic individuals. The repressive coping style is thought to preferentially impair the detection of unpleasant compared with pleasant emotions, and the degree of deficit is typically thought to be less severe than in alexithymia. We compared emotion recognition ability in both individuals with alexithymia and those with the repressive coping style. METHODS: Three hundred seventy-nine subjects completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale, the Marlowe-Crowne Scale (a measure of repressive defensiveness), the Bendig Short Form of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Perception of Affect Task. The Perception of Affect Task consists of four 35-item emotion recognition subtasks: matching sentences and words, faces and words, sentences and faces, and faces and photographs of scenes. The stimuli in each subtask consist of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, and neutral) depicted five times each. Recognition accuracy results were collapsed across subtasks within each emotion category. RESULTS: Highly alexithymic subjects (for all, p<.01) and those with low emotional awareness (for all, p<.001) were consistently less accurate in emotion recognition in all seven categories. Highly defensive subjects (including repressors) were less accurate in the detection of anger, sadness, fear, and happiness (for all, p<.05). Furthermore, scores on the Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale accounted for significantly more variance in performance on the Perception of Affect Task than scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Scale (p<.01). CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that alexithymia and the repressive coping style are each associated with impairments in the recognition of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions and that the two styles of emotional self-regulation differ more in the magnitude than in the quality of these impairments.     

Discrimination thresholds for recognizing facial emotions: mostly higher among the elderly

Elderly people have lower ability for recognizing facial emotions than younger people. Previous studies showed that older adults had difficulty in recognizing anger, sadness and fear, but there were no consistent results for happiness, surprise and disgust. Most of these studies used a small number of stimuli, and tabulated the number of correct responses for facial expressions. These characteristics of the task might be the source of the discrepancy in the findings. The present study used a task which measures participants' discrimination thresholds for six basic emotions using psychophysical measurement methods. The results showed that the thresholds for elderly participants (74.8 +/- 6.5 yrs) were significantly higher than for younger participants (20.1 +/- 1.6 yrs) for sadness, surprise, anger, disgust and fear. There was no significant difference for happiness. Since the task that we developed was sufficiently sensitive, it is a useful tool for assessing individuals' ability to perceive emotion.     

Brain-mind states: I. Longitudinal field study of sleep/wake factors influencing mentation report length

STUDY OBJECTIVES: To collect and analyze reports of mental activity across sleep/wake states. DESIGN: Mentation reports were collected in a longitudinal design by combining our Nightcap sleep monitor with daytime experience sampling techniques. Reports were collected over 14 days and nights from active and quiet wake, after instrumental awakenings at sleep onset, and after both spontaneous and instrumental awakenings from REM and NREM sleep. SETTING: All reports were collected in the normal home, work and school environments of the subjects. PARTICIPANTS: Subjects included 8 male and 8 female undergraduate students (19-26 years of age). INTERVENTIONS: N/A. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS: A total of 1,748 reports, averaging 109 per subject, were collected from active wake across the day (n=894), from quiet wake in the pre-sleep onset period (n=58), from sleep onset (n=280), and from later REM (n=269) and nonREM (n=247) awakenings. Median report lengths varied more than 2-fold, in the order REM > active wake > quiet wake > NREM = sleep onset. The extended protocol allowed many novel comparisons between conditions. In addition, while spontaneous REM reports were longer than those from forced awakenings, the difference was explained by the time within the REM period at which the awakenings occurred. Finally, intersubject differences in REM report lengths were correlated with similar differences in waking report lengths. CONCLUSIONS: The use of the Nightcap sleep monitoring system along with waking experience sampling permits a more complete sampling and analysis of mental activity across the sleep/wake cycle than has been previously possible.     

Facial Emotion Recognition after Bilateral Amygdala Damage: Differentially Severe Impairment of Fear

Although the amygdala is widely believed to have a role in the recognition of emotion, a central issue concerns whether it is involved in the recognition of all emotions or whether it is more important to some emotions than to others. We describe studies of two people, DR and SE, with impaired recognition of facial expressions in the context of bilateral amygdala damage. When tested with photographs showing facial expressions of emotion from the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series, both DR and SE showed deficits in the recognition of fear. Problems in recognising fear were also found using photographic quality images interpolated (“morphed”) between prototypes of the six emotions in the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series to create a hexagonal continuum (running from happiness to surprise to fear to sadness to disgust to anger to happiness). Control subjects identified these morphed images as belonging to distinct regions of the continuum, corresponding to the nearest prototype expression. However, DR and SE were impaired on this task, with problems again being most clearly apparent in the region of the fear prototype. An equivalent test of recognition of morphed identities of six famous faces was performed normally by DR, confirming the dissociability of impairments affecting the recognition of identity and expression from the face. Further two-way forced-choice tests showed that DR was unable to tell fear from anger, but could tell happiness from sadness without difficulty. The finding that the recognition of fear can be differentially severely affected by brain injury is consistent with reports of the effects of bilateral amygdala damage in another case (Adolphs, Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1994, 1995). The recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions may therefore be linked, to some extent, to specific neural substrates.     

Basic emotion profiles in healthy, chronic pain, depressed and PTSD individuals

Objectives: To compare self‐reports of five basic emotions across four samples: healthy, chronic pain, depressed and post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and to investigate the extent to which basic emotion reports discriminate between individuals in healthy or clinical groups. Methods: In total, 439 participants took part in this study: healthy (n = 131), chronic pain (n = 220), depressed (n = 24) and PTSD (n = 64). The participants completed the trait version of the Basic Emotion Scale. Basic emotion profiles were compared both within each group and between the healthy group and each of the three other groups. Discriminant analysis was used to assess the extent to which basic emotions can be used to classify the participants as belonging to the healthy group or one of the clinical groups. Results: In the healthy group, happiness was experienced more than any other basic emotion. This was not found in the clinical groups. In comparison to the healthy participants, the chronic pain group experienced more fear, anger and sadness, the depressed group reported more sadness and the PTSD group experienced all of the negative emotions more frequently. Discriminant analysis revealed that happiness was the most important variable in determining whether an individual belonged to the healthy group or one of the clinical groups. Anger was found to further discriminate between depressed and chronic pain individuals. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that basic emotion profile analysis can provide a useful foundation for the exploration of emotional experience both within and between healthy and clinical groups. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key Practitioner Message: ? More frequent experiences of happiness relative to discrete negative emotions most clearly discriminate between individuals in healthy and clinical groups. More frequent anger experiences further discriminate between individuals with chronic pain and those with depression while disgust levels help discriminate between those with post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. ? More frequent experiences of high arousal negative emotions—fear, anger and disgust—are characteristic of individuals with PTSD. ? Fear is the most frequently experienced negative emotion in both healthy and clinical groups. Higher levels of fear compared with other discrete negative emotions are not necessarily an indicator of psychopathology. Consideration of emotional profiles more generally and the relative frequency with which happiness is experienced relative to negative emotions may be more useful in delineating between healthy individuals and those with chronic pain, depression or PTSD.