Emotion recognition in girls with conduct problems

A deficit in emotion recognition has been suggested to underlie conduct problems. Although several studies have been conducted on this topic so far, most concentrated on male participants. The aim of the current study was to compare recognition of morphed emotional faces in girls with conduct problems (CP) with elevated or low callous-unemotional (CU+ vs. CU?) traits and a matched healthy developing control group (CG). Sixteen girls with CP-CU+, 16 girls with CP-CU? and 32 controls (mean age: 13.23 years, SD = 2.33 years) were included. Video clips with morphed faces were presented in two runs to assess emotion recognition. Multivariate analysis of variance with the factors group and run was performed. Girls with CP-CU? needed more time than the CG to encode sad, fearful, and happy faces and they correctly identified sadness less often. Girls with CP-CU+ outperformed the other groups in the identification of fear. Learning effects throughout runs were the same for all groups except that girls with CP-CU? correctly identified fear less often in the second run compared to the first run. Results need to be replicated with comparable tasks, which might result in subgroup-specific therapeutic recommendations.     

Conscious and unconscious processing of fear after right amygdala damage: A single case ERP-study

In this study, we describe a 58-year-old male patient (FZ) with a right-amygdala lesion after temporal lobe infarction. FZ is unable to recognize fearful facial expressions. Instead, he consistently misinterprets expressions of fear for expressions of surprise. Employing EEG/ERP measures, we investigated whether presentation of fearful and surprised facial expressions would lead to different response patterns. We also measured ERPs to aversively conditioned and unconditioned fearful faces.

We compared ERPs elicited by supraliminally and subliminally presented conditioned fearful faces (CS+), unconditioned fearful faces (CS–) and surprised faces. Despite FZ's inability to recognize fearful facial expressions in emotion recognition tasks, ERP components showed different response patterns to pictures of surprised and fearful facial expressions, indicating that covert or implicit recognition of fear is still intact.

Differences between ERPs to CS+ and CS– were only found when these stimuli were presented subliminally. This indicates that intact right amygdala function is not necessary for aversive conditioning.

Previous studies have stressed the importance of the right amygdala for discriminating facial emotional expressions and for classical conditioning. Our study suggests that the right amygdala is necessary for explicit recognition of fear, while implicit recognition of fear and classical conditioning may still occur following lesion of the right amygdala.     

Do fearful eyes activate empathy-related brain regions in individuals with callous traits?

Psychopathy, a developmental disorder characterized by profound social disturbance, is associated with impaired recognition of distress cues. Since distress processing and moral socialization are closely linked, uncovering techniques to improve distress recognition could have positive treatment implications for developmental disorders that feature empathy impairments. Previous studies demonstrate that fear-recognition deficits can be remedied by redirecting attention to critical cues (the eyes for fearful faces). However, it remains unclear whether this manipulation increases activity in empathy-related brain regions, or has an alternate compensatory effect that may not promote prosocial behaviours. In this fMRI study, a community sample of individuals with high vs low callous traits completed an emotion recognition task that varied whether the most or least socially meaningful facial features were visible (the eyes were isolated or occluded). For fearful faces, individuals with high callous traits showed significantly less amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex activity than those with low callous traits when the eyes were occluded, but not when they were isolated. Consistent with recent models of the amygdala that emphasize orientation to disambiguate stimuli rather than represent distress, individuals with low trait empathy showed greater amygdala activity to the least vs most socially meaningful features of fearful faces.     

Is facial emotion recognition impairment in schizophrenia identical for different emotions? A signal detection analysis

Patients with schizophrenia have difficulty recognising the emotion that corresponds to a given facial expression. According to signal detection theory, two separate processes are involved in facial emotion perception: a sensory process (measured by sensitivity which is the ability to distinguish one facial emotion from another facial emotion) and a cognitive decision process (measured by response criterion which is the tendency to judge a facial emotion as a particular emotion). It is uncertain whether facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia are primarily due to impaired sensitivity or response bias. In this study, we hypothesised that individuals with schizophrenia would have both diminished sensitivity and different response criteria in facial emotion recognition across different emotions compared with healthy controls. Twenty-five individuals with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia were compared with age and IQ matched healthy controls. Participants performed a "yes-no" task by indicating whether the 88 Ekman faces shown briefly expressed one of the target emotions in three randomly ordered runs (happy, sad and fear). Sensitivity and response criteria for facial emotion recognition was calculated as d-prime and In(beta) respectively using signal detection theory. Patients with schizophrenia showed diminished sensitivity (d-prime) in recognising happy faces, but not faces that expressed fear or sadness. By contrast, patients exhibited a significantly less strict response criteria (In(beta)) in recognising fearful and sad faces. Our results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have a specific deficit in recognising happy faces, whereas they were more inclined to attribute any facial emotion as fearful or sad.     

The Change in Facial Emotion Recognition Ability in Inpatients with Treatment Resistant Schizophrenia After Electroconvulsive Therapy

People with schizophrenia have impairments in emotion recognition along with other social cognitive deficits. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the immediate benefits of ECT on facial emotion recognition ability. Thirty-two treatment resistant patients with schizophrenia who have been indicated for ECT enrolled in the study. Facial emotion stimuli were a set of 56 photographs that depicted seven basic emotions: sadness, anger, happiness, disgust, surprise, fear, and neutral faces. The average age of the participants was 33.4 ± 10.5 years. The rate of recognizing the disgusted facial expression increased significantly after ECT (p < 0.05) and no significant changes were found in the rest of the facial expressions (p > 0.05). After the ECT, the time period of responding to the fear and happy facial expressions were significantly shorter (p < 0.05). Facial emotion recognition ability is an important social cognitive skill for social harmony, proper relation and living independently. At least, the ECT sessions do not seem to affect facial emotion recognition ability negatively and seem to improve identifying disgusted facial emotion which is related with dopamine enriched regions in brain.     

Exogenous cortisol shifts a motivated bias from fear to anger in spatial working memory for facial expressions

Studies assessing processing of facial expressions have established that cortisol levels, emotional traits, and affective disorders predict selective responding to these motivationally relevant stimuli in expression specific manners. For instance, increased attentional processing of fearful faces (attentional bias for fearful faces) is associated with fear and anxiety and diminishes after administration of the anxiolytic hormone testosterone. Conversely, attentional bias for angry faces has been associated with higher levels of approach motivation (e.g. anger) and testosterone, but lower levels of cortisol. This negative relation between cortisol levels and bias for angry faces was also seen in a test of biased working memory performance. However, previous research suggests that exogenous glucocorticoids acutely decrease fearful and inhibited behavior and increase aggressiveness. Hypothesizing from these findings, the present study tested this spatial working memory for faces of various emotional expressions (neutral, happy, fearful, and angry) after double-blind, placebo-controlled administration of 40 mg cortisol in 18 healthy young men. It was predicted that cortisol would acutely attenuate memory bias for fearful expressions while increasing memory bias for angry expressions, in effect creating a shift in biased motivated memory from fear to anger. Results largely confirmed the hypotheses. This is the first causal evidence that cortisol differentially regulates spatial working memory for different facial expressions. Possible biological mechanisms are discussed.     

Emotional facial expressions modulate pain-induced beta and gamma oscillations in sensorimotor cortex

Painful events in our environment are often accompanied by stimuli from other sensory modalities. These stimuli may influence the perception and processing of acute pain, in particular when they comprise emotional cues, like facial expressions of people surrounding us. In this whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we examined the neuronal mechanisms underlying the influence of emotional (fearful, angry, or happy) compared to neutral facial expressions on the processing of pain in humans. Independent of their valence, subjective pain ratings for intracutaneous inputs were higher when pain stimuli were presented together with emotional facial expressions than when they were presented with a neutral facial expression. Source reconstruction using linear beamforming revealed pain-induced early (70-270 ms) oscillatory beta-band activity (BBA; 15-25 Hz) and gamma-band activity (GBA; 60-80 Hz) in the sensorimotor cortex. The presentation of faces with emotional expressions compared to faces with neutral expressions led to a stronger bilateral suppression of the pain-induced BBA, possibly reflecting enhanced response readiness of the sensorimotor system. Moreover, pain-induced GBA in the sensorimotor cortex was larger for faces expressing fear than for faces expressing anger, which might reflect the facilitation of avoidance-motivated behavior triggered by the concurrent presentation of faces with fearful expressions and painful stimuli. Thus, the presence of emotional cues, like facial expressions from people surrounding us, while receiving acute pain may facilitate neuronal processes involved in the preparation and execution of adequate protective motor responses.     

Impaired recognition of musical emotions and facial expressions following anteromedial temporal lobe excision

We have shown that an anteromedial temporal lobe resection can impair the recognition of scary music in a prior study (Gosselin et al., 2005). In other studies ( [Adolphs et?al., 2001] and [Anderson et?al., 2000] ), similar results have been obtained with fearful facial expressions. These findings suggest that scary music and fearful faces may be processed by common cerebral structures. To assess this possibility, we tested patients with unilateral anteromedial temporal excision and normal controls in two emotional tasks. In the task of identifying musical emotion, stimuli evoked either fear, peacefulness, happiness or sadness. Participants were asked to rate to what extent each stimulus expressed these four emotions on 10-point scales. The task of facial emotion included morphed stimuli whose expression varied from faint to more pronounced and evoked fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, anger or disgust. Participants were requested to select the appropriate label. Most patients were found to be impaired in the recognition of both scary music and fearful faces. Furthermore, the results in both tasks were correlated, suggesting a multimodal representation of fear within the amygdala. However, inspection of individual results showed that recognition of fearful faces can be preserved whereas recognition of scary music can be impaired. Such a dissociation found in two cases suggests that fear recognition in faces and in music does not necessarily involve exactly the same cerebral networks and this hypothesis is discussed in light of the current literature.     

The role of trait anxiety in the recognition of emotional facial expressions

Previous work has suggested that elevated levels of trait anxiety are associated with an increased ability to accurately recognize the facial expression of fear. However, to date, recognition has only been assessed after viewing periods of 10s, despite the fact that the process of emotion recognition from faces typically takes a fraction of this time. The current study required participants with either high or low levels of non-clinical trait anxiety to make speeded emotional classification judgments to a series of facial expressions drawn from seven emotional categories. Following previous work it was predicted that recognition of fearful facial expressions would be more accurate in the high-trait anxious group compared with the low-trait anxious group. However, contrary to this prediction, no anxiety-related differences in emotion perception were observed across all seven emotions. This suggests that anxiety does not influence the perception of fear as has been previously proposed.     

Spared ability to recognise fear from static and moving whole-body cues following bilateral amygdala damage

Bilateral amygdala lesions impair the ability to identify certain emotions, especially fear, from facial expressions, and neuroimaging studies have demonstrated differential amygdala activation as a function of the emotional expression of faces, even under conditions of subliminal presentation, and again especially for fear. Yet the amygdala's role in processing emotion from other classes of stimuli remains poorly understood. On the basis of its known connectivity as well as prior studies in humans and animals, we hypothesised that the amygdala would be important also for the recognition of fear from body expressions. To test this hypothesis, we assessed a patient (S.M.) with complete bilateral amygdala lesions who is known to be severely impaired at recognising fear from faces. S.M. completed a battery of tasks involving forced-choice labelling and rating of the emotions in two sets of dynamic body movement stimuli, as well as in a set of static body postures. Unexpectedly, S.M.'s performance was completely normal. We replicated the finding in a second rare subject with bilateral lesions entirely confined to the amygdala. Compared to healthy comparison subjects, neither of the amygdala lesion subjects was impaired in identifying fear from any of these displays. Thus, whatever the role of the amygdala in processing whole-body fear cues, it is apparently not necessary for the normal recognition of fear from either static or dynamic body expressions.     

Hypervigilance for fear after basolateral amygdala damage in humans

Recent rodent research has shown that the basolateral amygdala (BLA) inhibits unconditioned, or innate, fear. It is, however, unknown whether the BLA acts in similar ways in humans. In a group of five subjects with a rare genetic syndrome, that is, Urbach–Wiethe disease (UWD), we used a combination of structural and functional neuroimaging, and established focal, bilateral BLA damage, while other amygdala sub-regions are functionally intact. We tested the translational hypothesis that these BLA-damaged UWD-subjects are hypervigilant to facial expressions of fear, which are prototypical innate threat cues in humans. Our data indeed repeatedly confirm fear hypervigilance in these UWD subjects. They show hypervigilant responses to unconsciously presented fearful faces in a modified Stroop task. They attend longer to the eyes of dynamically displayed fearful faces in an eye-tracked emotion recognition task, and in that task recognize facial fear significantly better than control subjects. These findings provide the first direct evidence in humans in support of an inhibitory function of the BLA on the brain''s threat vigilance system, which has important implications for the understanding of the amygdala''s role in the disorders of fear and anxiety.     

Impaired facial expression recognition in children with temporal lobe epilepsy: impact of early seizure onset on fear recognition

The amygdala has been implicated in the recognition of facial emotions, especially fearful expressions, in adults with early-onset right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The present study investigates the recognition of facial emotions in children and adolescents, 8–16 years old, with epilepsy. Twenty-nine subjects had TLE (13 right, 16 left) and eight had fronto-central epilepsy (FCE). Each was matched on age and gender with a control subject. Subjects were asked to label the emotions expressed in pictures of children's faces miming five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust and anger) or neutrality (no emotion). All groups of children with epilepsy performed less well than controls. Patterns of impairment differed according to the topography of the epilepsy: the left-TLE (LTLE) group was impaired in recognizing fear and neutrality, the right-TLE (RTLE) group was impaired in recognizing disgust and, the FCE group was impaired in recognizing happiness. We clearly demonstrated that early seizure onset is associated with poor recognition of facial expression of emotion in TLE group, particularly for fear. Although right-TLE and left-TLE subjects were both impaired in the recognition of facial emotion, their psychosocial adjustment, as measured by the CBCL questionnaire [Achenbach, T. M. (1991). Manual for the Child Behavior Checklist and Youth Self-report. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Department of Psychiatry], showed that poor recognition of fearful expressions was related to behavioral disorders only in children with right-TLE. Our study demonstrates for the first time that early-onset TLE can compromise the development of recognizing facial expressions of emotion in children and adolescents and suggests a link between impaired fear recognition and behavioral disorders.     

Symptom Correlates of Static and Dynamic Facial Affect Processing in Schizophrenia: Evidence of a Double Dissociation?

Schizophrenia patients have been shown to be compromised in their ability to recognize facial emotion. This deficit has been shown to be related to negative symptoms severity. However, to date, most studies have used static rather than dynamic depictions of faces. Nineteen patients with schizophrenia were compared with seventeen controls on 2 tasks; the first involving the discrimination of facial identity, emotion, and butterfly wings; the second testing emotion recognition using both static and dynamic stimuli. In the first task, the patients performed more poorly than controls for emotion discrimination only, confirming a specific deficit in facial emotion recognition. In the second task, patients performed more poorly in both static and dynamic facial emotion processing. An interesting pattern of associations suggestive of a possible double dissociation emerged in relation to correlations with symptom ratings: high negative symptom ratings were associated with poorer recognition of static displays of emotion, whereas high positive symptom ratings were associated with poorer recognition of dynamic displays of emotion. However, while the strength of associations between negative symptom ratings and accuracy during static and dynamic facial emotion processing was significantly different, those between positive symptom ratings and task performance were not. The results confirm a facial emotion-processing deficit in schizophrenia using more ecologically valid dynamic expressions of emotion. The pattern of findings may reflect differential patterns of cortical dysfunction associated with negative and positive symptoms of schizophrenia in the context of differential neural mechanisms for the processing of static and dynamic displays of facial emotion.     

Recognition of emotion in facial expression by people with Prader-Willi syndrome

Background People with Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) may have mild intellectual impairments but less is known about their social cognition. Most parents/carers report that people with PWS do not have normal peer relationships, although some have older or younger friends. Two specific aspects of social cognition are being able to recognise other people's emotion and to then respond appropriately. In a previous study, mothers/carers thought that 26% of children and 23% of adults with PWS would not respond to others' feelings. They also thought that 64% could recognise happiness, sadness, anger and fear and a further 30% could recognise happiness and sadness. However, reports of emotion recognition and response to emotion were partially dissociated. It was therefore decided to test facial emotion recognition directly. Method The participants were 58 people of all ages with PWS. They were shown a total of 20 faces, each depicting one of the six basic emotions and asked to say what they thought that person was feeling. The faces were shown one at a time in random order and each was accompanied by a reminder of the six basic emotions. Results This cohort of people with PWS correctly identified 55% of the different facial emotions. These included 90% of happy faces, 55% each of sad and surprised faces, 43% of disgusted faces, 40% of angry faces and 37% of fearful faces. Genetic subtype differences were found only in the predictors of recognition scores, not in the scores themselves. Selective impairment was found in fear recognition for those with PWS who had had a depressive illness and in anger recognition for those with PWS who had had a psychotic illness. Conclusions The inability to read facial expressions of emotion is a deficit in social cognition apparent in people with PWS. This may be a contributing factor in their difficulties with peer relationships.     

Affective blindsight in the intact brain: neural interhemispheric summation for unseen fearful expressions

The emotional valence of facial expressions can be reliably discriminated even in the absence of conscious visual experience by patients with lesions to the primary visual cortex (affective blindsight). Prior studies in one such patient (GY) also showed that this non-conscious perception can influence conscious recognition of normally seen emotional faces. Here we report a similar online interaction across hemispheres between conscious and non-conscious perception of emotions in normal observers. Fearful and happy facial expressions were presented either unilaterally (to the left or right visual field) or simultaneously to both visual fields. In bilateral displays, conscious perception of one face in a pair was prevented by backward masking after 20 ms, while the opposite expression remained normally visible. The results showed a bidirectional influence of non-conscious fear processing over conscious recognition of happy as well as fearful expressions. Consciously perceived fearful faces were more readily recognized when they were paired with invisible emotionally congruent fearful expressions in the opposite field, as compared to the single presentation of the same unmasked faces. On the other hand, recognition of unmasked happy faces was delayed by the simultaneous presence of a masked fearful face. No such effect was reported for masked happy expressions. These findings show that non-conscious processing of fear may modulate ongoing conscious evaluation of facial expressions via neural interhemispheric summation even in the intact brain.     

Differences in facial expressions of four universal emotions

The facial action coding system (FACS) was used to examine recognition rates in 105 healthy young men and women who viewed 128 facial expressions of posed and evoked happy, sad, angry and fearful emotions in color photographs balanced for gender and ethnicity of poser. Categorical analyses determined the specificity of individual action units for each emotion. Relationships between recognition rates for different emotions and action units were evaluated using a logistic regression model. Each emotion could be identified by a group of action units, characteristic to the emotion and distinct from other emotions. Characteristic happy expressions comprised raised inner eyebrows, tightened lower eyelid, raised cheeks, upper lip raised and lip corners turned upward. Recognition of happy faces was associated with cheek raise, lid tightening and outer brow raise. Characteristic sad expressions comprised furrowed eyebrow, opened mouth with upper lip being raised, lip corners stretched and turned down, and chin pulled up. Only brow lower and chin raise were associated with sad recognition. Characteristic anger expressions comprised lowered eyebrows, eyes wide open with tightened lower lid, lips exposing teeth and stretched lip corners. Recognition of angry faces was associated with lowered eyebrows, upper lid raise and lower lip depression. Characteristic fear expressions comprised eyes wide open, furrowed and raised eyebrows and stretched mouth. Recognition of fearful faces was most highly associated with upper lip raise and nostril dilation, although both occurred infrequently, and with inner brow raise and widened eyes. Comparisons are made with previous studies that used different facial stimuli.     

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.     

Impaired fear processing in right mesial temporal sclerosis: a fMRI study

Lesion and neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the mesial temporal lobe is crucial for recognizing emotions from facial expressions. In humans, bilateral amygdala damage is followed by impaired recognition of facial expressions of fear. To evaluate the influence of unilateral mesial temporal lobe damage we examined recognition of facial expressions and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) brain activation associated with incidental processing of fearful faces in thirteen mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) patients (eight with right MTLE, five with left MTLE). We also examined the effect of early versus later damage, comparing subjects with hippocampal-amygdalar sclerosis (MTS) and seizures occurring before five years of age to epilepsy patients with late onset seizures. Fourteen healthy volunteers participated as controls. Neuropsychological testing demonstrated that the ability of right MTLE patients to recognize fearful facial expressions is impaired. Patients with early onset of seizures were the most severely impaired. This deficit was associated with defective activation of a neural network involved in the processing of fearful expressions, which in controls and left MTLE included the left inferior frontal cortex and several occipito-temporal structures of both hemispheres.     

Rôle de la flexibilité cognitive dans la reconnaissance d’expressions émotionnelles chez les personnes atteintes de Troubles du Spectre Autistique

The present research tested whether young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) shows impaired recognition of basic-emotion expressions (anger, fear, happiness, sadness, disgust) and the same emotions embedded in a social background (i.e. simple versus complex facial emotion recognition), compared with typically developing (TD) children. Moreover, we investigated whether cognitive flexibility could be linked with these faces processing skills. Our results showed that performance in ASD children was similar to the group of TD children for simple emotion recognition whereas TD children outperformed ASDs children in the complex task. In the second part, our study tends to confirm a link between cognitive flexibility and faces processing skills in children with ASD, especially when different contextual cues are present to extract facial emotion. We confirm previous findings demonstrating that individuals with ASDs use an effortful “systematizing” process to recognize emotion expressions, whereas TD individuals use a more holistic process. These results are discussed within the context of current neuropsychological studies on “weak central coherence”, hyper-systemizing theory, and lack of cognitive flexibility in ASD.     

Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: intensity effects and error pattern

OBJECTIVE: The authors used color photographs of emotional and neutral expressions to investigate recognition patterns of five universal emotions in schizophrenia. METHOD: Twenty-eight stable outpatients with schizophrenia (19 men and nine women) and 61 healthy subjects (29 men and 32 women) completed an emotion discrimination test that presented mild and extreme intensities of happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, and neutral faces, balanced for gender and ethnicity. Analyses evaluated accuracy of identifying emotions as a function of intensity, diagnosis, and gender of poser and rater. RESULTS: Patients performed worse than comparison subjects on recognition of all emotions and neutral faces combined, including mild and extreme expressions. For specific emotions, patients performed worse on recognition of fearful, disgusted, and neutral expressions. For all emotions except disgust, recognition of extreme intensity was better than recognition of mild intensity. However, patients showed less benefit from increased intensity for all emotions combined, and the difference was most pronounced for fear. Thus, patients were more impaired than healthy comparison subjects in identifying high-intensity expressions, even though this was an easier task than identifying low-intensity expressions. In the comparison of patterns of errors, patients and healthy subjects differed only in misattributions of neutral expressions; patients overattributed disgusted expressions and underattributed happy expressions. CONCLUSIONS: Patients with schizophrenia were impaired in overall emotion recognition, particularly fear and disgust, and did not benefit from increased emotional intensity. Error patterns indicate that patients misidentified neutral cues as negatively valenced.