Lateralisation effect in comprehension of emotional facial expression: A comparison between EEG alpha band power and behavioural inhibition (BIS) and activation (BAS) systems

Asymmetry in comprehension of facial expression of emotions was explored in the present study by analysing alpha band variation within the right and left cortical sides. Second, the behavioural activation system (BAS) and behavioural inhibition system (BIS) were considered as an explicative factor to verify the effect of a motivational/emotional variable on alpha activity. A total of 19 participants looked at an ample range of facial expressions of emotions (anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, and neutral) in random order. The results demonstrated that anterior frontal sites were more active than central and parietal sites in response to facial stimuli. Moreover, right and left side responses varied as a function of emotional types, with an increased right frontal activity for negative, aversive emotions vs an increased left response for positive emotion. Finally, whereas higher BIS participants generated more right hemisphere activation for some negative emotions (such as fear, anger, surprise, and disgust), BAS participants were more responsive to positive emotion (happiness) within the left hemisphere. Motivational significance of facial expressions was considered to elucidate cortical differences in participants' responses to emotional types.     

Impaired emotional facial expression recognition in alcoholism compared with obsessive-compulsive disorder and normal controls.

Emotional facial expression (EFE) decoding skills have been shown to be impaired in recovering alcoholics (RA). The aim of the present study is to replicate these results and to explore whether these abnormalities are specific to alcoholism using two control groups: non-patient controls (NC) and patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OC). Twenty-two alcoholic patients at the end of their detoxification process (RA) were compared to 22 OC and 22 NC matched for age, sex and education level. They were presented with 12 photographs of facial expressions portraying different emotions: happiness; anger; and fear. Each emotion was displayed with mild (30%) and moderate (70%) intensity levels. Each EFE was judged on 8 scales labeled happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, shame and contempt. For each scale, subjects rated the estimated intensity level. RA were less accurate in EFE decoding than OC and NC, particularly for anger and happiness expressions. RA overestimated the emotional intensity for mild intensity level expressions compared with both OC and NC while no significant differences emerged for moderate intensity level expressions. Deficits in EFE decoding skills seem to be specific to RA when compared with OC. Comparison with other psychopathological groups is still needed. Possible consequences of EFE decoding deficits in RA include distorted interpersonal relationships.     

Social anxiety is associated with general but not specific biases in emotion recognition

Misreading facial expressions as signals of social disapproval, such as anger and disgust, may maintain social anxiety. If so, manipulating face processing could be therapeutic. It remains unclear, however, whether socially anxious individuals are in fact more sensitive to disapproving emotions. We assessed decoding of, and cost attributions to, emotional expressions in high and low socially anxious females (n=102) using five emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) expressed at 15 intensities (9–65%), providing 75 stimuli (see Supplementary Material). The decoding task briefly presented the stimuli and participants identified the emotion. The cost attribution task asked individuals to rate each stimulus for how costly it would be for them to interact with the person. Random effects regression indicated that social anxiety was not associated with overall decoding accuracy but was associated with a response bias. High socially anxious individuals had a lower threshold for decoding emotions but also more frequently classified low intensity emotions incorrectly. These effects were not emotion-specific. Socially anxious individuals also attributed excessive social cost to expressions of negative valence. Our results provide a novel conceptual framework for understanding emotion decoding in social anxiety, indicating the importance of considering both accuracy and response bias.     

Mixed emotions: alcoholics' impairments in the recognition of specific emotional facial expressions

Facial expression recognition is a central feature of emotional and social behaviour and previous studies have found that alcoholics are impaired in this skill when presented with single emotions of differing intensities. The aim of this study was to explore biases in alcoholics' recognition of emotions when they were a mixture of two closely related emotions. The amygdala is intimately involved in encoding of emotions, especially those related to fear. In animals an increased number of withdrawals from alcohol leads to increased seizure sensitivity associated with facilitated transmission in the amygdala and related circuits. A further objective therefore was to explore the effect of previous alcohol detoxifications on the recognition of emotional facial expressions. Fourteen alcoholic inpatients were compared with 14 age and sex matched social drinking controls. They were asked to rate how much of each of six emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust and anger) were present in morphed pictures portraying a mix of two of those emotions. The alcoholic group showed enhanced fear responses to all of the pictures compared to the controls and showed a different pattern of responding on anger and disgust. There were no differences between groups on decoding of sad, happy and surprised expressions. In addition the enhanced fear recognition found in the alcoholic group was related to the number of previous detoxifications. These results provide further evidence for impairment in facial expression recognition present in alcoholic patients. In addition, since the amygdala has been associated with the processing of facial expressions of emotion, particularly those of fear, the present data furthermore suggest that previous detoxifications may be related to changes within the amygdala.     

Perception of emotional facial expressions at different intensities in early-symptomatic Huntington's disease

BACKGROUND: While there is abundant evidence that patients with Huntington's disease (HD) have an impairment in the recognition of the emotional facial expression of disgust, previous studies have only examined emotion perception using full-blown facial expressions. OBJECTIVE: The current study examines the perception of facial emotional expressions in HD at different levels of intensity to investigate whether more subtle deficits can be detected, possible also in other emotions. METHOD: We compared early symptomatic HD patients with healthy matched controls on emotion perception, presenting short video clips of a neutral face changing into one of the six basic emotions (happiness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust and sadness) with increasing intensity. Overall face perception ability as well as depressive symptoms were taken into account. RESULTS: A specific impairment in recognizing the emotions disgust and anger was found, which was present even at low emotion intensities. CONCLUSION: These results extend previous findings and support the use of more sensitive emotion perception paradigms, which enable the detection of subtle neurobehavioral deficits even in the pre- and early symptomatic stages of the disease.     

Selective Impairment of Basic Emotion Recognition in People with Autism: Discrimination Thresholds for Recognition of Facial Expressions of Varying Intensities

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by early onset qualitative impairments in reciprocal social development. However, whether individuals with ASD exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions is debatable. To investigate subtle deficits in facial emotion recognition, we asked 14 children diagnosed with high-functioning autism (HFA)/AS and 17 typically developing peers to complete a new highly sensitive test of facial emotion recognition. The test stimuli comprised faces expressing increasing degrees of emotional intensity that slowly changed from a neutral to a full-intensity happiness, sadness, surprise, anger, disgust, or fear expression. We assessed individual differences in the intensity of stimuli required to make accurate judgments about emotional expressions. We found that, different emotions had different identification thresholds and the two groups were generally similar in terms of the sequence of discrimination threshold of six basic expressions. It was easier for individuals in both groups to identify emotions that were relatively fully expressed (e.g., intensity >?50%). Compared with control participants, children with ASD generally required stimuli with significantly greater intensity for the correct identification of anger, disgust, and fear expressions. These results suggest that individuals with ASD do not have a general but rather a selective impairment in basic emotion recognition.     

Seeing happy emotion in fearful and angry faces: qualitative analysis of facial expression recognition in a bilateral amygdala-damaged patient

Neuropsychological studies reported that bilateral amygdala-damaged patients had impaired recognition of facial expressions of fear. However, the specificity of this impairment remains unclear. To address this issue, we carried out two experiments concerning the recognition of facial expression in a patient with bilateral amygdala damage (HY). In Experiment 1, subjects matched the emotion of facial expressions with appropriate verbal labels, using standardized photographs of facial expressions illustrating six basic emotions. The performance of HY was compared with age-matched normal controls (n = 13) and brain-damaged controls (n = 9). HY was less able to recognize facial expressions showing fear than normal controls. In addition, the error pattern exhibited by HY for facial expressions of fear and anger were distinct from those exhibited by both control groups, and suggested that HY confused these emotions with happiness. In Experiment 2, subjects were presented with morphed facial expressions that blended happiness and fear, happiness and anger, or happiness and sadness. Subjects were requested to categorize these expressions by two-way forced-choice selection. The performance of HY was compared with age-matched normal controls (n = 8). HY categorized the morphed fearful and angry expressions blended with some happy content as happy facial expressions more frequently than normal controls. These findings support the idea that amygdala-damaged patients have impaired processing of facial expressions relating to certain negative emotions, particularly fear and anger. More specifically, amygdala-damaged patients seem to give positively biased evaluations for these negative facial expressions.     

Effects of diazepam on facial emotion recognition

OBJECTIVE: There have been few studies of the pharmacologic modulation of facial emotion recognition. The present study aimed to replicate and extend the finding that recognition of facial anger was selectively impaired by diazepam. The hypothesis was that, in comparison with placebo, diazepam would impair the recognition of facial anger in healthy volunteers, but not the recognition of 5 other basic emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, sadness and disgust. DESIGN: A randomized, counterbalanced, double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects comparison of diazepam with placebo. SETTING: A university psychopharmacology research unit. PARTICIPANTS: Healthy male (n = 6) and female (n = 22) volunteers, aged 18-45 years. PROCEDURES: Subjects were tested on 2 tasks following the administration of diazepam, 15 mg, and placebo on separate occasions. In the first "multimorph" task, images of facial expressions were morphed to produce continua between the neutral and full expressions of 6 basic emotions. Accuracy and identification thresholds were assessed for stimuli in which the intensity of expression gradually increased. In the second "emotional hexagon" task, facial expressions were morphed between pairs of emotions. Single images were presented, and accuracy and speed of response were assessed. RESULTS: Diazepam produced broad impairments in response accuracy, recognition thresholds and response speed on the facial emotion tasks that were not limited to angry expressions. CONCLUSIONS: The present study found that diazepam, 15 mg, impaired facial emotion recognition, but not selectively. In the emotional hexagon task, a reaction-time analysis suggested that the identification of facial anger might be differentially sensitive to variations in stimulus duration, complicating the interpretation of this paradigm.     

Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by persons with mental retardation. A matched comparison study.

Children and adults with mental retardation were tested on their ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion. The sample consisted of 80 children and adults with mental retardation and a control group of 80 nonhandicapped children matched on mental age and gender. Ekman and Friesen's normed photographs of the six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) were used in a recognition task of facial expressions. Subjects were individually read two-sentence stories identifying a specific emotion, presented with a randomized array of the six photographs of the basic facial expressions of emotion, and then asked to select the photograph that depicted the emotion identified in the story. This procedure was repeated with 24 different stories, with each of the six basic emotions being represented four times. Results showed that, as a group, individuals with mental retardation were not as proficient as their mental-age-matched nonhandicapped control subjects at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Although adults with mild mental retardation were more proficient at this task than those with moderate mental retardation, this finding was not true for children. There was a modest difference between the children with moderate mental retardation and their nonhandicapped matched controls in their ability to recognize facial expression of disgust.     

Impaired emotional facial expression recognition in alcoholics: are these deficits specific to emotional cues?

Previous studies have repeatedly linked alcoholism is to impairment in emotional facial expression decoding. The present study aimed at extending previous findings while controlling for exposure times of stimuli. Further, a control task was added on the decoding of non-emotional facial features. Twenty-five alcoholic participants were compared to 26 control participants matched for age, sex and educational level. Participants performed two computer tasks consisting of presentation of photographs of faces for either 250 or 1000 ms. The first task required "yes" or "no" responses as rapidly as possible to questions regarding non-emotional features of the face (gender, age range and cultural identity). The second task involved a different set of photographs implicating emotional facial expression decoding, with the same exposure times. Again, rapid "yes" or "no" responses to trials combining 32 emotional facial expressions by eight emotional labels (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, shame, and contempt) were required from participants. Reaction times were recorded for both tasks. Alcoholic and control participants showed similar results in both tasks in terms of response accuracy. Yet, in the emotional facial expression task, alcoholic participants' responses matched more negative emotional labels, especially sadness. Further, alcoholics were slower than control participants specifically to answer emotional questions on emotional facial expression. No differences appeared on reaction times in the control task. Contrary to expectations, no interaction of stimulus time exposure and group was observed. Overall, these findings replicate and extend previous results on emotional facial expression decoding ability: Alcoholics are specifically impaired on emotional non-verbal behavior information processing: They are slower to correctly identify an emotion.     

Facial emotion recognition in trait anxiety

The study investigated the relationship between recognition of emotional facial expressions and trait anxiety. A nonclinical sample of 19 participants with high-trait anxiety was selected, using the trait version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and compared with a sample of 20 participants with low-trait anxiety on a facial expression recognition task. Visual stimuli were 42 faces, representing seven emotional expressions: anger, sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, disgust and neutral. Participants had to identify the emotion portrayed by each face. Results showed that participants with high-trait anxiety recognized fear faces significantly better while the two groups did not differ in recognition of other facial expressions.     

Strength of lateralisation for processing facial emotion in relation to autistic traits in individuals without autism

A great number of studies have shown that non-clinical individuals rely predominantly on the right hemisphere to process facial emotion. Previous studies have shown that males suffering from Asperger's syndrome show a typical right hemisphere bias for processing facial emotion (happiness and sadness) but a reduced right hemisphere bias for processing facial identity. This study looks at the lateralisation of all six basic emotions using the chimeric faces test in 64 non-clinical participants (32 males, 32 females) and correlates it with their autistic traits measured using the Broad Autistic Phenotype Questionnaire. For males only, regression analyses showed a relationship between the aloof personality trait and lateralisation for fear, happiness, and surprise. Males with high autistic scores on the aloof personality subscale (showing a lack of interest in social interaction) were more strongly lateralised to the right hemisphere for processing fear, happiness, and surprise. For males there was no relationship with anger, disgust, sadness, or non-facial stimuli, and for females there were no significant relationships at all. The autistic traits of rigidity and pragmatic language were not significant predictors of emotion lateralisation. The over-reliance on the right hemisphere for processing facial emotion in males seems to support the idea that the autistic brain could be seen as hyper-masculinised, possibly due to prenatal testosterone exposure.     

Recognition of emotion from moving facial and prosodic stimuli in depressed patients

BACKGROUND: It has been suggested that depressed patients have a "negative bias" in recognising other people's emotions; however, the detailed structure of this negative bias is not fully understood. OBJECTIVES: To examine the ability of depressed patients to recognise emotion, using moving facial and prosodic expressions of emotion. METHODS: 16 depressed patients and 20 matched (non-depressed) controls selected one basic emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, or disgust) that best described the emotional state represented by moving face and prosody. RESULTS: There was no significant difference between depressed patients and controls in their recognition of facial expressions of emotion. However, the depressed patients were impaired relative to controls in their recognition of surprise from prosodic emotions, judging it to be more negative. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that depressed patients tend to interpret neutral emotions, such as surprise, as negative. Considering that the deficit was seen only for prosodic emotive stimuli, it would appear that stimulus clarity influences the recognition of emotion. These findings provide valuable information on how depressed patients behave in complicated emotional and social situations.     

Misinterpretation of facial expression: a cross-cultural study

Accurately recognizing facial emotional expressions is important in psychiatrist-versus-patient interactions. This might be difficult when the physician and patients are from different cultures. More than two decades of research on facial expressions have documented the universality of the emotions of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. In contrast, some research data supported the concept that there are significant cultural differences in the judgment of emotion. In this pilot study, the recognition of emotional facial expressions in 123 Japanese subjects was evaluated using the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expression of Emotion (JACFEE) photos. The results indicated that Japanese subjects experienced difficulties in recognizing some emotional facial expressions and misunderstood others as depicted by the posers, when compared to previous studies using American subjects. Interestingly, the sex and cultural background of the poser did not appear to influence the accuracy of recognition. The data suggest that in this young Japanese sample, judgment of certain emotional facial expressions was significantly different from the Americans. Further exploration in this area is warranted due to its importance in cross-cultural clinician-patient interactions.     

Impaired sadness recognition is linked to social interaction deficit in autism

Can autistic individuals use motion cues to identify simple emotions from 2D abstract animations? We compared emotion recognition ability using a novel test involving computerised animations, and a more conventional emotion recognition test using facial expressions. Adults with autism and normal controls, matched for age and verbal IQ, participated in two experiments. First, participants viewed a series of short (5s) animations. These featured an 'emotional' triangle, interacting with a circle. They were designed to evoke an attribution of emotion to the triangle, which was rated both in terms of anger, happiness, sadness or fear from its pattern of movement, and how animate ("living") it appeared to be. Second, emotion recognition was tested from standardised photographs of facial expressions. In both experiments, adults with autism were significantly impaired relative to comparisons in their perception of sadness. This is the first demonstration that, in autism, individuals can have difficulties both in the interpretation of facial expressions and in the recognition of equivalent emotions based on the movement of abstract stimuli. Poor performance in the animations task was significantly correlated with the degree of impairment in reciprocal social interaction, assessed by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Our findings point to a deficit in emotion recognition in autism, extending beyond the recognition of facial expressions, which is associated with a functional impairment in social interaction skills. Our results are discussed in the context of the results of neuroimaging studies that have used animated stimuli and images of faces.     

Effects of lesion variables and emotion type on the perception of facial emotion.

The purpose of this study was to consider the effects of valence, motoric direction (i.e., approach/withdrawal), and arousal on the perception of facial emotion in patients with unilateral cortical lesions. We also examined the influence of lesion side, site, and size on emotional perception. Subjects were 30 right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and 30 left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) male patients with focal lesions restricted primarily to the frontal, temporal, or parietal lobe. Patient groups were comparable on demographic and clinical neurological variables. Subjects were tested for their ability to match photographs of four facial emotional expressions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Overall, RHD patients were significantly more impaired than LHD patients in perceiving facial emotion. Lesion side, but not site, was associated with motoric direction and valence dimensions. RHD patients had specific deficits relative to LHD patients in processing negative and withdrawal emotions; there were no group differences for positive/approach emotions. Lesion size was not significantly correlated with accuracy of emotional perception.     

Recognition of emotion in the frontal and temporal variants of frontotemporal dementia

Recent studies have suggested that the frontal and temporal variants of frontotemporal dementia (fvFTD and tvFTD) are both associated with impairments in emotional processing. However, the degree and type of emotional processing deficits in the two syndromes have not been previously compared. We used the Florida Affect Battery to examine recognition of facial expressions of emotion in fvFTD and tvFTD patients who have no evidence of visual perceptual difficulties for faces. In general, both groups were impaired at recognizing emotions compared with age-matched controls. In tvFTD, this deficit was limited to emotions with a negative valence (sadness, anger, fear), while fvFTD patients showed impairment for positive valence (happiness) as well. These results suggest that damage to frontal lobe regions in FTD may lead to more profound impairment in recognition of emotion than when damage is more limited to the temporal lobe.     

Biased processing of neutral facial expressions is associated with depressive symptoms and suicide ideation in individuals at risk for major depression due to affective temperaments

Background

To elucidate whether abnormal facial emotion processing represents a vulnerability factor for major depression, some studies have explored deficits in emotion processing in individuals at familial risk for depression. Nevertheless, these studies have provided mixed results. However, no studies on facial emotion processing have been conducted in at-risk samples with early or attenuated signs of depression, such as individuals with affective temperaments who are characterized by subclinical depressive moods, cognitions, and behaviors that resemble those that occur in patients with major depression.

Methods

Presence and severity of depressive symptoms, affective temperaments, death wishes, suicidal ideation, and suicide planning were explored in 231 participants with a mean age 39.9 years (SD = 14.57). Participants also completed an emotion recognition task with 80 emotional face stimuli expressing fear, angry, sad, happy, and neutral facial expressions.

Results

Participants with higher scores on affective temperamental dimensions containing a depressive component, compared to those with lower scores, reported more depressive symptoms, death wishes, suicide ideation and planning, and an increased tendency to interpret neutral facial expressions as emotional facial expressions; in particular, neutral facial expressions were interpreted more negatively, mostly as sad facial expressions. However, there were no group differences in identification and discrimination of facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, and anger.

Conclusions

A negative bias in interpretation of neutral facial expressions, but not accuracy deficits in recognizing emotional facial expressions, may represent a vulnerability factor for major depression. However, further research is needed.     

Processing of emotional facial expressions in Korsakoff's syndrome

Interpersonal contacts depend to a large extent on understanding emotional facial expressions of others. Several neurological conditions may affect proficiency in emotional expression recognition. It has been shown that chronic alcoholics are impaired in labelling emotional expressions. More specifically, they mislabel sad expressions, regarding them as more hostile. Surprisingly, there has been relatively little research on patients with Korsakoff's syndrome as a result of chronic alcohol abuse. The current study investigated 23 patients diagnosed with Korsakoff's syndrome compared to 23 matched control participants. This study is the first to make use of a newly developed sensitive paradigm to measure emotion recognition for several emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise). The results show that patients with Korsakoff's syndrome are impaired at recognizing angry, fearful and surprised facial emotional expressions. These deficits might be due to the reported sub-cortical brain dysfunction in Korsakoff's syndrome.