Mothers' depressive symptoms and children's facial emotions: examining the depression-inhibition hypothesis

Vibrant expression of emotion is the principal means infants and young children use to elicit appropriate and timely caregiving, stimulation, and support. This study examined the depression-inhibition hypothesis: that declines in mothers' support as their depressive symptoms increase inhibit children's emotional communication. Ninety-four mothers and their 14- to 27-month-olds interacted in a university playroom. Based on microanalytic coding of discrete facial displays, results supported three components of the hypothesis. (a) As mothers' depressive symptoms increased, children displayed less facial emotion (more flat affect, less joy, less sadness, less negative). (b) Mothers' low emotional and behavioral support predicted children's low facial communication and mediated relations between mothers' depressive symptoms and children's infrequent emotion. (c) Children who were passive with mothers behaviorally expressed emotion infrequently. Children's passivity mediated relations between mothers' depressive symptoms and children's infrequent emotion displays. Contrary to modeling and contagion theories, mothers' facial displays did not mediate relations between their depressive symptoms and children's facial displays. Nor were the outcomes children experienced regulating their facial displays. Rather, findings suggest that, even when depressive symptoms are modest, young children inhibit emotion as mothers' depressive symptoms increase to withdraw from unresponsive mothers, which may adversely affect children's subsequent relationships and competencies.     

Emotion Effects on the N170: A Question of Reference?

We investigated whether face-specific processes as indicated by the N170 in event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are modulated by emotional significance in facial expressions. Results yielded that emotional modulations over temporo-occipital electrodes typically used to measure the N170 were less pronounced when ERPs were referred to mastoids than when average reference was applied. This offers a potential explanation as to why the literature has so far yielded conflicting evidence regarding effects of emotional facial expressions on the N170. However, spatial distributions of the N170 and emotion effects across the scalp were distinguishable for the same time point, suggesting different neural sources for the N170 and emotion processing. We conclude that the N170 component itself is unaffected by emotional facial expressions, with overlapping activity from the emotion-sensitive early posterior negativity accounting for amplitude modulations over typical N170 electrodes. Our findings are consistent with traditional models of face processing assuming face and emotion encoding to be parallel and independent processes.     

Valence matters: An electrophysiological study on how emotions influence cognitive performance in children

Emotional stimuli have been found to influence cognitive performance in children, but it is not clear whether this effect varies with the cognitive demands of the task. In this study, we examined how emotional expressions influenced cognitive performance and event-related potentials (ERPs) in early and middle childhood under varying cognitive control demands. Two groups of children (4.5–6.0 and 7.0–8.5 years) completed a modified flanker task where the stimuli were faces displaying task-irrelevant emotional expressions. Emotional influence varied depending on emotional valence: Accuracy was greater for happy targets, while response time and N2 latency were longer for angry targets. In younger children only, angry targets elicited a larger late frontal negativity. Cognitive control demands did not modulate the effect of emotions on behavioral performance or ERPs, contrasting with findings in adults. Findings are discussed in relation to the dual competition model and previous work demonstrating a positivity bias in children.     

The spatial frequency spectrum of fearful faces modulates early and mid-latency ERPs but not the N170

Prioritized processing of fearful compared to neutral faces is reflected in behavioral advantages such as lower detection thresholds, but also in enhanced early and late event-related potentials (ERPs). Behavioral advantages have recently been associated with the spatial frequency spectrum of fearful faces, better fitting the human contrast sensitivity function than the spectrum of neutral faces. However, it is unclear whether and to which extent early and late ERP differences are due to low-level spatial frequency spectrum information or high-level representations of the facial expression. In this pre-registered EEG study (N = 38), the effects of fearful-specific spatial frequencies on event-related ERPs were investigated by presenting faces with fearful and neutral expressions whose spatial frequency spectra were manipulated so as to contain either the average power spectra of neutral, fearful, or both expressions combined. We found an enlarged N170 to fearful versus neutral faces, not interacting with spatial frequency. Interactions of emotional expression and spatial frequencies were observed for the P1 and Early Posterior Negativity (EPN). For both components, larger emotion differences were observed when the spectrum contained neutral as opposed to fearful frequencies. Importantly, for the EPN, fearful and neutral expressions did not differ anymore when inserting fearful frequencies into neutral expressions, whereas typical emotion differences were found when faces contained average or neutral frequencies. Our findings show that N170 emotional modulations are unaffected by expression-specific spatial frequencies. However, expression-specific spatial frequencies alter early and mid-latency ERPs. Most notably, the EPN to neutral expressions is boosted by adding fearful spectra—but not vice versa.     

Emotional conflict occurs at an early stage: Evidence from the emotional face–word Stroop task

The perceptual processing of emotional conflict was studied using electrophysiological techniques to measure event-related potentials (ERPs). The emotional face–word Stroop task in which emotion words are written in prominent red color across a face was use to study emotional conflict. In each trial, the emotion word and facial expression were either congruent or incongruent (in conflict). When subjects were asked to identify the expression of the face during a trial, the incongruent condition evoked a more negative N170 ERP component in posterior lateral sites than in the congruent condition. In contrast, when subjects were asked to identify the word during a trial, the incongruent condition evoked a less negative N170 component than the congruent condition. The present findings extend our understanding of the control processes involved in emotional conflict by demonstrating that differentiation of emotional congruency begins at an early perceptual processing stage.     

The role of encoding and attention in facial emotion memory: An EEG investigation

Facial expressions are encoded via sensory mechanisms, but meaning extraction and salience of these expressions involve cognitive functions. We investigated the time course of sensory encoding and subsequent maintenance in memory via EEG. Twenty-nine healthy participants completed a facial emotion delayed match-to-sample task. P100, N170 and N250 ERPs were measured in response to the first stimulus, and evoked theta power (4–7 Hz) was measured during the delay interval. Negative facial expressions produced larger N170 amplitudes and greater theta power early in the delay. N170 amplitude correlated with theta power, however larger N170 amplitude coupled with greater theta power only predicted behavioural performance for one emotion condition (very happy) out of six tested (see Supplemental Data). These findings indicate that the N170 ERP may be sensitive to emotional facial expressions when task demands require encoding and retention of this information. Furthermore, sustained theta activity may represent continued attentional processing that supports short-term memory, especially of negative facial stimuli. Further study is needed to investigate the potential influence of these measures, and their interaction, on behavioural performance.     

Parental Expressed Emotion-Criticism and Neural Markers of Sustained Attention to Emotional Faces in Children

There is growing evidence for the role of environmental influences on children’s information-processing biases for affectively salient stimuli. The goal of this study was to extend this research by examining the relation between parental criticism (expressed emotion-criticism, or EE-Crit) and children’s processing of facial displays of emotion. Specifically, we examined the relation between EE-Crit and children’s sensitivity in detecting facial displays of emotion. We also examined a neural marker of sustained attention, the late positive potential (LPP) event-related potential component (ERP). Participants were 87 children (ages 7–11 years; 53.3% female, 77.8% Caucasian) and their parents (ages 24–71; 90% female, 88.9% Caucasian). Parents completed the Five-Minute Speech Sample to determine levels of EE-Crit toward their child. Children completed a morphed faces task during which behavioral and ERP responses were assessed. Although there were no group differences in sensitivity in detecting facial displays of emotion, we found that children of parents exhibiting high, compared to low, EE-Crit displayed less attention (smaller LPP magnitudes) to all facial displays of emotion (fearful, happy, sad). These results suggest that children of critical parents may exhibit an avoidant pattern of attention to affectively-salient interpersonal stimuli.     

Mood effects on the ERP processing of emotional intensity in faces: a P3 investigation with depressed students.

This study examined mood-relevant emotion processing in depression using event-related potentials (ERPs). Cognition in depression has been characterized as having attention and memory biases for negative (or mood relevant) information and away from positive (or mood incongruent) information, however, the time course and specificity of this processing during the perception of emotional expressions is not well known. In order to index specific information processing stages a visual oddball task with facial stimuli was utilized, with neutral expressions as the standard and targets varying on valence (happy and fear) and intensity (40%, 70% or 100% emotive) dimensions. Participants were 36 university students grouped according to their BDI-II scores; 18 non-depressed controls (BDI-IIor=15, M=25.5), age- and sex-matched between groups. Mixed model ANOVAs revealed interactions between control and depressed participants with happy and fearful stimuli showing significantly reduced P3 amplitudes and P3 latencies for happy faces as well as significantly delayed P3 latencies specifically for 40% happy faces in depressed participants. These findings are interpreted as evidence for a diminished cognitive processing ability during emotion discrimination for low-intensity mood incongruous (happy) faces in depression.     

Reactive Aggression Among Maltreated Children: The Contributions of Attention and Emotion Dysregulation

Examined the complex interplay among emotion, attention, and aggression in a sample of 141 maltreated and 87 non-maltreated impoverished, inner-city children. Data were collected during a summer day camp, which provided an ecologically valid setting for studying children's behavior in social contexts. Maltreated children were more likely than non-maltreated children to be aggressive, with findings suggesting that physically abused children were at heightened risk for reactive aggression. Maltreated children also evidenced attention deficits, and subclinical or nonpathological dissociation was more likely among children who had experienced physical or sexual abuse. A history of abuse also predicted emotion dysregulation, affective lability/negativity, and socially inappropriate emotion expressions. This emotion dysregulation, fostered by poor attention modulation, was a mechanism of the effects of maltreatment on reactive aggression.     

Socialization of children's emotion regulation in mother-child dyads: a developmental psychopathology perspective

This study investigated the socialization of children's emotion regulation in 25 physically maltreating and 25 nonmaltreating mother-child dyads. Maltreating mothers and their 6- to 12-year-old children were recruited from two parenting programs affiliated with Children's Protective Services with a control group matched on race, SES, child gender, and child age. Children and their mothers were interviewed individually about their (a) management of emotional expression. (b) strategies for coping with emotional arousal, and (c) anticipated consequences following emotional displays. Compared to controls, maltreated children expected less maternal support in response to their emotional displays, reported being less likely to display emotions to their mothers, and generated fewer effective coping strategies for anger. Maltreating mothers indicated less understanding of children's emotional displays and fewer effective strategies for helping children to cope with emotionally arousing situations than nonmaltreating mothers. Further, findings indicated that maternal socialization practices (e.g., providing support in response to children's emotional display, generating effective coping strategies for their child) mediate the relation between child maltreatment and children's regulation of emotional expression and emotional arousal. These findings suggest that children's emotion regulation strategies are influenced by their relationship with their social environment (e.g.. physically maltreating, nonmaltreating) and that the experience of a physically maltreating relationship may interfere with children's emotional development.     

Age differences on ERP old/new effects for emotional and neutral faces

This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine age differences in recognition memory for negative and neutral faces that systematically varied in facial expression during encoding and retrieval. During study, younger and older participants viewed negative and neutral faces and were asked to classify each facial expression. During test, half of the facial identities changed their facial expression, while the other half showed the same facial expression. Participants were asked to give old/new judgments to the depicted person. Four main findings were observed. First, when facial emotion did not switch from study to test, negative and neutral faces evoked spatially dissociable ERP old/new effects, independent of age. This suggests that different retrieval mechanisms contributed to successful recognition of negative and neutral faces in both age groups. Second, faces encoded with a negative expression evoked an early occipital old/new effect only in the young, perhaps suggesting superior memory for visual information. Third, faces retrieved with a negative expression evoked in both age groups an early parietal old/new effect, suggesting that negative emotion during retrieval facilitated memory access. Hence, in the early time latency in young adults both encoding-related and retrieval-related emotion effects contributed to face recognition memory, whereas in older adults encoding-related emotion effects were reduced and retrieval-related emotion effects were preserved. Finally, in the late time latency perceptual similarity between study and test faces modified or overruled encoding-related emotion effects in the young and retrieval-related emotion effects in both age groups, respectively.     

孤独症幼儿对面部情绪表情认知特征的初步研究

目的探究孤独症患儿对面部情绪表情的认知特征。方法选取2007年3月至2008年9月在中山大学附属第三医院发育行为中心诊断为孤独症的18～36个月患儿作为孤独症组,同期行健康查体的年龄、性别与孤独症组匹配的正常儿童作为对照组,被动观看电脑屏幕显示的高兴、悲伤、惊讶、愤怒和恐惧5种面部基本情绪表情图,观察比较两组幼儿对各种面部表情的视觉注意行为和自身情绪反应。结果研究期间孤独症组和对照组均纳入45例,两组幼儿对各种面部表情的初次注视时间组间效应不明显,而表情效应明显,两组幼儿初次注视高兴和愤怒表情的时间长于注视恐惧表情的时间。但孤独症组对各种面部表情图的回看次数明显少于对照组,总注视时间也明显短于对照组。对照组对不同的面部表情自身情绪反应评分明显不同,对高兴表情的积极情绪评分明显高于其他表情,对高兴表情的消极情绪评分明显低于愤怒和恐惧表情,对悲伤和惊讶表情的消极情绪评分也明显低于恐惧表情。而孤独症组对各种情绪表情的自身情绪反应评分差异无统计学意义。结论孤独症患儿早期不仅对面部情绪表情的视觉注意减少,对面部情绪表情的感知也存在缺陷,尤其对各种负性情绪表情理解困难。     

Affective inhibitory control in adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Abnormalities in electrocortical late positivity

Boys afflicted with ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) are characterized by deficient response inhibition and reduced electrocortical late positivity when presented with facial expressions of anger. This deficit might contribute to their problems in social interactions. We conducted the present event-related potential study with 15 men suffering from ADHD and 15 healthy controls in order to investigate whether similar dysfunctions are present in adult ADHD. The participants underwent an emotional version of a Go/NoGo task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. They were instructed to inhibit a motor response to one of four facial emotional expressions: anger, fear, sadness, or happiness. There were no behavioral differences in inhibitory control between the ADHD and the control group. However, the patients showed a reduced right parietal late positivity when instructed to inhibit a response to negative emotions. Obviously, the patients have learned to compensate for their deficit on a behavioral level, while it is still visible on the electrocortical level in this relatively simple task. Interestingly, the reduced positivity correlated with lowered self-reported emotional intelligence in the ADHD group.     

Differential modulations of reward expectation on implicit facial emotion processing: ERP evidence

Implicit emotional processing refers to the preferential processing of emotional content even if it is task irrelevant. Given that motivation enhances executive control by biasing attentional resources toward target stimuli, here we investigated the effects of reward expectation on implicit facial emotional processing in two experiments using ERPs. A precue signaling additional monetary reward for fast and accurate response for the upcoming trial (incentive condition; relative to a cue indicating no such additional reward, i.e., nonincentive condition) was followed by the presentation of a happy, angry, or neutral face. Participants had to determine the gender of the face in Experiment 1 and decide whether a number superimposed on the face was even or odd in Experiment 2. In both experiments, incentive cues elicited larger P3 and contingent negative variation responses, and the targets following incentive cues elicited more positive‐going ERPs (200–700 ms), compared with the nonincentive condition. Importantly, the N2 responses (200–280 ms) to the target exhibited differential patterns of Reward × Emotion interaction: relative to the nonincentive condition, the N2 amplitude differences between emotional (i.e., happy and/or angry) and neutral faces increased in the incentive condition in Experiment 1, but diminished in Experiment 2. These results indicate that reward expectation can differentially modulate implicit processing of facial expressions, with increased sensitivity to emotions when the processing of whole faces is required, but with reduced sensitivity when the processing of faces is distractive. This study enriches the evidence for interactions between reward‐related executive control and implicit emotional processing.     

Priming emotional facial expressions as evidenced by event-related brain potentials.

As human faces are important social signals in everyday life, processing of facial affect has recently entered into the focus of neuroscientific research. In the present study, priming of faces showing the same emotional expression was measured with the help of event-related potentials (ERPs) in order to investigate the temporal characteristics of processing facial expressions. Participants classified portraits of unfamiliar persons according to their emotional expression (happy or angry). The portraits were either preceded by the face of a different person expressing the same affect (primed) or the opposite affect (unprimed). ERPs revealed both early and late priming effects, independent of stimulus valence. The early priming effect was characterized by attenuated frontal ERP amplitudes between 100 and 200 ms in response to primed targets. Its dipole sources were localised in the inferior occipitotemporal cortex, possibly related to the detection of expression-specific facial configurations, and in the insular cortex, considered to be involved in affective processes. The late priming effect, an enhancement of the late positive potential (LPP) following unprimed targets, may evidence greater relevance attributed to a change of emotional expressions. Our results (i) point to the view that a change of affect-related facial configuration can be detected very early during face perception and (ii) support previous findings on the amplitude of the late positive potential being rather related to arousal than to the specific valence of an emotional signal.     

Emotion understanding in postinstitutionalized Eastern European children

To examine the effects of early emotional neglect on children's affective development, we assessed children who had experienced institutionalized care prior to adoption into family environments. One task required children to identify photographs of facial expressions of emotion. A second task required children to match facial expressions to an emotional situation. Internationally adopted, postinstitutionalized children had difficulty identifying facial expressions of emotion. In addition, postinstitutionalized children had significant difficulty matching appropriate facial expressions to happy, sad, and fearful scenarios. However, postinstitutionalized children performed as well as comparison children when asked to identify and match angry facial expressions. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of emotional input early in life on later developmental organization.     

Evidence for implicit self-positivity bias: an event-related brain potential study

We investigated the processing of self-related information under the prime paradigm using event-related potentials (ERPs) to provide evidence for implicit self-positivity bias in Chinese individuals. Reaction times and ERPs were recorded when participants made positive/negative emotional judgments to personality-trait adjectives about themselves or others. Faster responses occurred to self-related positive adjectives and other-related negative adjectives, indicating implicit self-positivity bias at the behavioral level. ERPs showed an interaction between prime and emotion at the P300 amplitude, with larger P300 amplitudes for words within the self-positivity bias, indicating that self-related information occupied more attentional resources. Larger N400 amplitudes elicited by words that were inconsistent with the self-positivity bias, suggesting that accessing non-self-relevant information is more difficult than self-relevant information. Thus, P300 and N400 could be used as neuro-indexes of the implicit self-positivity bias.     

Local context influences memory for emotional stimuli but not electrophysiological markers of emotion‐dependent attention

Emotional enhancement of free recall can be context dependent. It is readily observed when emotional and neutral scenes are encoded and recalled together in a “mixed” list, but diminishes when these scenes are encoded separately in “pure” lists. We examined the hypothesis that this effect is due to differences in allocation of attention to neutral stimuli according to whether they are presented in mixed or pure lists, especially when encoding is intentional. Using picture stimuli that were controlled for semantic relatedness, our results contradicted this hypothesis. The amplitude of well‐known electrophysiological markers of emotion‐related attention—the early posterior negativity (EPN), the late positive potential (LPP), and the slow wave (SW)—was higher for emotional stimuli. Crucially, the emotional modulation of these ERPs was insensitive to list context, observed equally in pure and mixed lists. Although list context did not modulate neural markers of emotion‐related attention, list context did modulate the effect of emotion on free recall. The apparent decoupling of the emotional effects on attention and memory, challenges existing hypotheses accounting for the emotional enhancement of memory. We close by discussing whether findings are more compatible with an alternative hypothesis, where the magnitude of emotional memory enhancement is, at least in part, a consequence of retrieval dynamics.     

Anhedonia and emotional responses to affect evoking stimuli

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether individuals with unusually high scores on the Scale for Physical Anhedonia (Chapman et al. 1976) would differ from average scorers in their emotional responses to affect-evoking stimuli. Ten male and ten female anhedonics, as well as ten male and ten female control subjects, were each shown brief filmclips that were expected to elicit emotional responses. The subjects' facial expressions were videotaped while they watched the filmclips, and they also completed adjective checklists describing how they felt while watching them. The anhedonics and nonanhedonics did not differ in their self-reports of emotional experience, nor did they differ in their facial expressions of emotion while viewing the filmclips. Compared to men, women reported experiencing more emotion, and their facial expressions also indicated greater responsiveness.     

Depression symptoms and cognitive control of emotion cues: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Few studies have examined associations between depressive symptoms and alterations in neural systems that subserve cognitive control. Cognitive control was assessed with an exogenous cueing task using happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions as cues among women with mild to moderate symptoms of depression and a non-depressed control group while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measured brain activity. Amygdala and medial/orbital prefrontal cortex (PFC) response to valid emotion cues did not differ as a function of depression symptoms. However, significant depression group differences were observed when task demands required cognitive control. Participants with elevated depression symptoms showed weaker activation in right and left lateral PFC and parietal regions when shifting attentional focus away from invalid emotion cues. No depression group differences were observed for invalid non-emotional cues. Findings suggest that mild to moderate depression symptoms are associated with altered function in brain regions that mediate cognitive control of emotional information.