Emotion recognition in schizophrenic and depressed inpatients

The performance of schizophrenic inpatients (N = 14), depressed inpatients (N = 15), and normal hospital employees (N = 15), all females, was compared on Izard's (1971) test of emotion recognition. Subjects were required to match photographs of facial expressions of emotion with the correct label for the emotion. The average numbers of errors of four types were examined: Positive or neutral emotions mislabelled as other positive or neutral emotions; positive or neutral emotions mislabelled as negative; negative emotions mislabelled as positive or neutral; and negative emotions mislabelled as other negative emotions. The principal findings were (1) the schizophrenics were less accurate than normals, but they were not less accurate than the depressives, nor were they less accurate on negative than positive or neutral emotions; (2) the depressives did not display any form of negative bias in emotion recognition; and (3) both groups of inpatients were less accurate than normals when they labelled an emotion as positive or neutral, but not when they labelled it as negative. Implications of the results for the etiology and maintenance of schizophrenia and depression were noted.     

Longitudinal association between adolescent attachment,adult romantic attachment,and emotion regulation strategies

Attachment security towards parents and peers in adolescence, and romantic attachment styles and emotion regulation strategies in young adulthood, were evaluated using an eight-year longitudinal design. Fifty-six young adults completed the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment (IPPA) at age 14, and then, at age 22, the Experience in Close Relationships (ECR) and the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS), an emotion regulation questionnaire concerning coping strategies, including task-oriented versus emotion-oriented foci. Results indicated that greater insecurity to parents and peers in adolescence predicted a more anxious romantic attachment style and greater use of emotion-oriented strategies in adulthood. Concurrently, anxious adult attachment style was related to more emotion-oriented strategies, whereas an avoidant attachment style was related to less support-seeking. Analyses also identified emotion-oriented coping strategies as a partial mediator of the link between adolescent attachment insecurity to parents and adult anxious attachment, and a complete mediator of the association between adolescent attachment insecurity to peers and adult anxious attachment. These findings support the core assumption of continuity in attachment theory, where relationships to parents influence close romantic relationships in adulthood.     

Cynical hostility and the accuracy of decoding facial expressions of emotions

To examine the relation between cynical hostility and the accuracy of decoding facial expressions of emotions, 101 young adult participants completed the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale and Ekman's Pictures of Facial Affect. Results revealed that higher hostility scores were correlated with a greater number of errors in decoding facial expressions of emotions. Hostile individuals were more likely than nonhostile individuals to label inaccurately facial expressions of "disgust" as being "anger" and of "happiness" as being "neutral." Results also revealed that males were more likely than females to label incorrectly facial expressions of disgust as anger. Partial correlations, controlling for gender, revealed that the relation between hostility and inaccurate perceptions of facial portrayals of happiness was significant, whereas the relation between hostility and inaccurate perceptions of facial displays of disgust was no longer significant.     

The influence of attachment representation on parental perception and interpretation of infant emotions: A multilevel approach

The aim of the study was to investigate parental perception and interpretation of infant emotional expression depending on their attachment representation. Forty‐six parents' responses to infant pictures depicting positive, neutral, and negative emotions were assessed on the level of affective judgments (valence, arousal), mimic responses (facial muscle activity), and of the eyelid reflex (using the startle paradigm). Results revealed small differences between parents of different attachment representations with respect to their subjective evaluations. However, secure parents, as compared to insecure ones, showed a positive bias in their mimic responses to infant pictures. The modulation of the startle response indicated a negative evaluation of negative infant emotion expressions in dismissing parents, while an augmentation of the startle response to negative infant emotions could not be observed in secure and preoccupied parents. The findings highlight the role of attachment experiences for emotional information processing in parents and its consequences for parental behavior. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 52: 411–423, 2010.     

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.     

Effects of internal working models of attachment on cognition about facial expressions

This study examined the effects of internal working models of attachment on cognition about emotion in facial expressions. Ninety-five university students participated in a survey and an experiment. The results revealed that (a) effects of internal working models of attachment emerged when there were discrepancies between facial expressions and the emotions that should be rated, (b) "anxiety" did not affect the rating scores or reaction times, and (c) participants who scored high in "avoidance" needed more time to judge the absence of emotions in facial expressions. These results indicate that the dimension of "avoidance" affects automatic information processing.     

Facial emotion space in schizophrenia

Introduction. Previous studies show that patients with schizophrenia have a deficit in facial emotion recognition. In the framework of emotion categorisation theories, the purpose of the present study was to test if this impairment could result from abnormal boundaries between emotions (whether these boundaries are shifted along continuums or are less sharpened).

Method. Twenty-six schizophrenic patients and the same number of healthy participants were required to perform a facial emotion recognition task and an emotion categorisation task with different emotion intensities obtained using morphing techniques.

Results. The main results indicate that schizophrenic patients exhibited an emotion space with less sharpened categories which favoured confusion between different emotions and intrusions of other emotions. Moreover, correlations between different indices showed that the less sharpened the categories, the more frequent the intrusions and the less discriminable the facial emotions.

Conclusion. We conclude that patients with schizophrenia process facial expressions in a less categorical way which involves impaired recognition of facial expressions. Such a specific impairment may favour false perceptions and lead to the settlement of delusional ideas.     

Lateralized Facial Muscle Response to Positive and Negative Emotional Stimuli

Facial electromyography (EMG) was recorded from left and right zygomatic and corrugator muscle regions in response to reflective questions and during voluntary facial expressions. Both muscle regions showed consistent responses to five emotions (happiness, excitement, neutral, sadness, and fear) evoked in the involuntary condition (i.e. reflective questions) and four emotional facial expressions (happiness, excitement, sadness, and fear) self-generated in the voluntary condition. Lateralized responses were found for the zygomatic muscle in the involuntary condition: positive emotion questions elicited relatively greater right muscle activity than left muscle activity, while negative emotion questions elicited relatively greater left muscle activity than right muscle activity. Lateralized responses were found for the corrugator muscle in the voluntary condition, but were not significantly related to type of emotional expression. Sex differences indicating greater lateralization for females were found in some of the measures. The results are consistent with the hypothesized specialization of the left and right cerebral hemispheres for the mediation of positive and negative emotions, respectively.     

The differential roles of early emotion socialization and adult attachment in adult emotional experience: testing a mediator hypothesis

The goal of the present study was to model the relations among self-reported early emotion socialization, adult attachment styles, and positive and negative adult emotion experiences in younger (mean age = 28) and older (mean age = 74) adults. Using structural equation modeling, we found that reports of early emotion socialization had both direct and indirect effects (the latter mediated by attachment style) on adult emotional experiences. There was also some support for the expectation that age would interact with emotion socialization in the effect on adult emotions. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding how attachment and emotion relate across the lifespan.     

The differential roles of early emotion socialization and adult attachment in adult emotional experience: Testing a mediator hypothesis

The goal of the present study was to model the relations among self-reported early emotion socialization, adult attachment styles, and positive and negative adult emotion experiences in younger (mean age — 28) and older (mean age — 74) adults. Using structural equation modeling, we found that reports of early emotion socialization had both direct and indirect effects (the latter mediated by attachment style) on adult emotional experiences. There was also some support for the expectation that age would interact with emotion socialization in the effect on adult emotions. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding how attachment and emotion relate across the lifespan.     

The nursing hypothesis: an evolutionary account of emotional modulation of the postauricular reflex

The postauricular reflex (PAR) is anomalous because it seems to be potentiated during positive emotions and inhibited during negative states, unlike eyeblink and other components of the startle reflex. Two evolutionary explanations based on simian facial emotion expressions were tested. Reflexes were elicited while 47 young adult volunteers made lip pursing or grimacing poses and viewed neutral, intimidating, or appetitive photos. The PAR was enhanced during appetitive slides, but only as subjects carried out the lip-pursing maneuver. These results support the nursing hypothesis, which assumes that infant mammals instinctively retract their pinnae while nursing in order to comfortably position the head. Appetitive emotions prime the ear-retraction musculature, even in higher primates whose postauricular muscles are vestigial.     

The effects of anxiety on the interpretation of emotion in the face�Cvoice pairs

Anxious individuals have been shown to interpret others' emotional states negatively. Since most studies have used facial expressions as emotional cues, we examined whether trait anxiety affects the recognition of emotion in a dynamic face and voice that were presented in synchrony. The face and voice cues conveyed either matched (e.g., happy face and voice) or mismatched emotions (e.g., happy face and angry voice). Participants with high or low trait anxiety were to indicate the perceived emotion using one of the cues while ignoring the other. The results showed that individuals with high trait anxiety were more likely to interpret others' emotions in a negative manner, putting more weight on the to-be-ignored angry cues. This interpretation bias was found regardless of the cue modality (i.e., face or voice). Since trait anxiety did not affect recognition of the face or voice cues presented in isolation, this interpretation bias appears to reflect an altered integration of the face and voice cues among anxious individuals.     

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.     

Behavioural and neurocognitive responses to sad facial affect are attenuated in patients with mania

BACKGROUND: The processing of facial emotion involves a distributed network of limbic and paralimbic brain structures. Many of these regions are also implicated in the pathophysiology of mood disorders. Behavioural data indicate that depressed subjects show a state-related positive recognition bias for faces displaying negative emotions. There are sparse data to suggest there may be an analogous, state-related negative recognition bias for negative emotions in mania. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the behavioural and neurocognitive correlates of happy and sad facial affect recognition in patients with mania. METHOD: Functional MRI and an explicit facial affect recognition task were used in a case-control design to measure brain activation and associated behavioural response to variable intensity of sad and happy facial expressions in 10 patients with bipolar I mania and 12 healthy comparison subjects. RESULTS: The patients with mania had attenuated subjective rating of the intensity of sad facial expressions, and associated attenuation of activation in the subgenual anterior cingulate and bilateral amygdala, with increased activation in the posterior cingulate and posterior insula. No behavioural or neurocognitive abnormalities were found in response to presentation of happy facial expressions. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with mania showed a specific, mood-congruent, negative bias in sad facial affect recognition, which was associated with an abnormal profile of brain activation in paralimbic regions implicated in affect recognition and mood disorders. Functional imaging of facial emotion recognition may be a useful probe of cortical and subcortical abnormalities in mood disorders.     

Judgements of facial and vocal signs of emotion in infants with Down syndrome

We address how adults perceive facial and vocal signs of emotions in infants with and without Down syndrome. A set of naturalistic data from infants with trisomy 21 and typically developing infants (joy expression of young infants, 3.8-4.4 months, and anger and neutral expressions of older infants, 6.8-12.8 months) was rated by adult judges categorically or dimensionally. Facial signs alone, vocal signs alone, and both facial and vocal signs were presented for each expression. Raters were university students who did not have regular contact with infants, nor with people with mental retardation. Young infants' joy expressions were correctly recognized more frequently for typically developing infants than for infants with Down syndrome and, specifically, joy vocalizations in infants with Down syndrome were not identified. Facial signs were also more communicative than vocal signs in the case of older infants' anger and neutral expressions. These results are relevant to the way infant emotion is perceived by others, and may be particularly useful in facilitating interaction between adults and infants with Down syndrome.     

Adult attachment and emotional processing biases: An Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) study

Attachment-related electrophysiological differences in emotional processing biases were examined using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). We identified ERP correlates of emotional processing by comparing ERPs elicited in trials with angry and neutral faces. These emotional expression effects were then compared across groups with secure, anxious and avoidant attachment orientations. Results revealed significant interactions between attachment orientation and facial expression in mean amplitudes of the early C1 (50-80ms post-stimulus) and P1 (80-120ms post-stimulus) ERP components. Significant differences in C1 and P1 mean amplitudes were found at occipital and posterior-parietal channels in response to angry compared with neutral faces only within the avoidant attachment group. No such differences were found within the secure or anxious attachment groups. The present study underscores the usefulness of the ERP methodology, as a sensitive measure for the study of emotional processing biases in the research field of attachment.     

Lateralization of emotional expression under a neuroleptic drug

Sixteen student volunteers were administered placebo and 50 mg of chlorpromazine (CPZ) in tablet form, on separate occasions, two hours before testing. Whilst volunteers related pleasant and unpleasant personal life events, the frequency and intensity of expressions on the left and right sides of the face were rated by independent observers. Subsequently the valence of the narration was also rated. Similar to a previous study facial expressions during negative emotions were expressed more often and intensely in the left face but positive emotions were bilaterally represented. CPZ neutralised the emotion on both sides of the face, irrespective of whether it was positive or negative. However, because negative emotions were almost completely lateralised to the left face the drug's effect on this emotion was most pronounced on this side. Independent ratings of the narration of the life events showed CPZ made them more pleasant. It is suggested that emotional arousal increases the asymmetry of behaviours when these are unilaterally represented or controlled. CPZ may equalize the symmetry of behaviour by reducing emotional arousal rather than by blocking all behaviour.     

Alexithymic features and automatic amygdala reactivity to facial emotion

Alexithymic individuals have difficulties in identifying and verbalizing their emotions. The amygdala is known to play a central role in processing emotion stimuli and in generating emotional experience. In the present study automatic amygdala reactivity to facial emotion was investigated as a function of alexithymia (as assessed by the 20-Item Toronto Alexithymia Scale). The Beck-Depression Inventory (BDI) and the State-Trait-Anxiety Inventory (STAI) were administered to measure participants' depressivity and trait anxiety. During 3T fMRI scanning, pictures of faces bearing sad, happy, and neutral expressions masked by neutral faces were presented to 21 healthy volunteers. The amygdala was selected as the region of interest (ROI) and voxel values of the ROI were extracted, summarized by mean and tested among the different conditions. A detection task was applied to assess participants' awareness of the masked emotional faces shown in the fMRI experiment. Masked sad and happy facial emotions led to greater right amygdala activation than masked neutral faces. The alexithymia feature difficulties identifying feelings was negatively correlated with the neural response of the right amygdala to masked sad faces, even when controlling for depressivity and anxiety. Reduced automatic amygdala responsivity may contribute to problems in identifying one's emotions in everyday life. Low spontaneous reactivity of the amygdala to sad faces could implicate less engagement in the encoding of negative emotional stimuli.     

Effects of anxiety and depression on heart disease attributions

Cardiac patients’beliefs about the causes of their illness may influence their receptivity to psychosocial interventions. The purpose of this study was to determine whether depression or anxiety influence patients’ attributions about the causes of their heart disease. The primary hypothesis was that depressed or anxious patients are more likely to endorse negative emotions as among the causes of their heart disease than are patients who are not depressed or anxious. Sixty-nine patients with documented ischemic heart disease recruited from an exercise stress testing laboratory completed the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories and a heart disease attribution checklist. Univariate analyses confirmed that patients who are depressed or anxious are more likely than other patients to endorse negative emotions as causes of their heart disease. Anxiety but not depression was retained as an independent predictor of negative emotion attributions in a logistic regression analysis. We conclude that mood state influences cardiac patients’ beliefs about the causes of their heart disease.     

Attachment style, empathy, and helping following a collective loss: evidence from the September 11 terrorist attacks

This study examined the relationships between avoidant and ambivalent attachment dimensions, empathy, and helping behavior in the context of one of the most tragic examples of collective loss in the USA. US college students (314 total: 219 females, 95 males) completed questionnaires between 20 and 42 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Results from this correlational study confirm previous laboratory experiments finding that attachment style may be related to people's ability to experience empathy and engage in helping behavior. Following the terrorist attacks, those with lower scores on avoidant attachment (i.e., more secure individuals) reported greater empathy with the bereaved. No association was found between the anxious attachment dimension and empathy, most likely due to a curvilinear relationship. Empathy for the bereaved was significantly correlated with helping behavior. Although neither attachment dimension was directly associated with collective helping behavior, avoidant attachment was negatively and indirectly related to collective helping behavior via its relationship with empathy for the bereaved.