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PubMed2006

Impaired recognition of fear facial expressions in 5-HTTLPR S-polymorphism carriers following tryptophan depletion.

RATIONALE: Genotype at the 5' promoter region (5-HTTLPR) of the serotonin transporter has been implicated in moderating the effects of acute tryptophan depletion on neurocognitive functioning. Acute tryptophan depletion has been associated with the processing of fear-relevant cues, such as emotional expressions, but the effect of genotype at the 5-HTTLPR has not been assessed. OBJECTIVE: The present study investigated the effects of acute tryptophan depletion on the recognition of standardized facial expressions of emotions in healthy volunteers classified as ll homozygotes or s carriers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A double-blind between-groups design was used with volunteers randomly selected to ingest capsules containing an amino acid mixture specifically lacking tryptophan, or placebo capsules containing lactose. 5 h after capsule ingestion, subjects were required to identify anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise expressions that progressed from neutral to each full emotional expression in 5% steps. RESULTS: Tryptophan depletion significantly impaired the recognition of fearful facial expressions in s carriers but not ll homozygotes. This impairment was specific to fear expressions. No significant differences in the recognition of other expressions were found. Free tryptophan levels were correlated with fear recognition in s carriers but not ll homozygotes. CONCLUSIONS: The effects of acute tryptophan depletion on the processing of emotional expressions varies as a function of genotype at the 5-HTTLPR. Depletion impairs the recognition of fear in s carriers but not ll homozygotes. This finding reinforces the importance of considering genotype when assessing the behavioral effects of pharmacologic modulation.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

On Specifying Specificity: Facial Expressions at 4 Months.

Izard (2004/this issue) clarifies the position of differential emotions theory by proposing a distinction between hard and soft versions of event-emotion expression relations. We concur that the best design to examine situational specificity in facial expressions is one that utilizes multiple stimulus situations assessed over multiple occasions and ages. However, the problem of how to identify, a priori, a family of stimulus situations remains. We offer an example from our own recent work demonstrating how facial expressions and physiological indexes may converge to indicate the presence of a meaningful family of stimulus situations. Specifically, we found evidence for a family of frustrating, goal-blocking events that elicited expressions and cortisol responses indicative of anger at 4 months. Yet, individual differences exist in that these situations also elicited expressions and cortisol changes indicative of sadness. Identification of a more comprehensive set of such situations throughout infancy will allow researchers to more systematically examine the degree to which situational specificity of emotions is present.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2003

Does facial expression affect attention orienting by gaze direction cues?

In 6 experiments, the authors investigated whether attention orienting by gaze direction is modulated by the emotional expression (neutral, happy, angry, or fearful) on the face. The results showed a clear spatial cuing effect by gaze direction but no effect by facial expression. In addition, it was shown that the cuing effect was stronger with schematic faces than with real faces, that gaze cuing could be achieved at very short stimulus onset asynchronies (14 ms), and that there was no evidence for a difference in the strength of cuing triggered by static gaze cues and by cues involving apparent motion of the pupils. In sum, the results suggest that in normal, healthy adults, eye direction processing for attention shifts is independent of facial expression analysis.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Neural interaction of the amygdala with the prefrontal and temporal cortices in the processing of facial expressions as revealed by fMRI.

Some involvement of the human amygdala in the processing of facial expressions has been investigated in neuroimaging studies, although the neural mechanisms underlying motivated or emotional behavior in response to facial stimuli are not yet fully understood. We investigated, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and healthy volunteers, how the amygdala interacts with other cortical regions while subjects are judging the sex of faces with negative, positive, or neutral emotion. The data were analyzed by a subtractive method, then, to clarify possible interaction among regions within the brain, several kinds of analysis (i.e., a correlation analysis, a psychophysiological interaction analysis and a structural equation modeling) were performed. Overall, significant activation was observed in the bilateral fusiform gyrus, medial temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, and the right parietal lobe during the task. The results of subtraction between the conditions showed that the left amygdala, right orbitofrontal cortex, and temporal cortices were predominantly involved in the processing of the negative expressions. The right angular gyrus was involved in the processing of the positive expressions when the negative condition was subtracted from the positive condition. The correlation analysis showed that activity in the left amygdala positively correlated with activity in the left prefrontal cortex under the negative minus neutral subtraction condition. The psychophysiological interaction revealed that the neural responses in the left amygdala and the right prefrontal cortex underwent the condition-specific changes between the negative and positive face conditions. The right amygdaloid activity also had an interactive effect with activity in the right hippocampus and middle temporal gyrus. These results may suggest that the left and right amygdalae play a differential role in effective processing of facial expressions in collaboration with other cortical or subcortical regions, with the left being related with the bilateral prefrontal cortex, and the right with the right temporal lobe.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Facial expression as a behavioral indicator of emotional states.

This article gives an overview of possibilities for the assessment of facial behavior. With regard to validity, results from a longitudinal study of 36 depressed patients and nine controls as well as of ten schizophrenic patients and their relatives will be referred to. These results are used to illustrate the following principles which have to be taken into account when studying facial behavior: a) communication strongly facilitates facial expression, b) activation of facial behavior follows the "principle of least effort", and c) the principle of individual specificity applies to the association of nonverbal behavior and mood states. Making allowance for these principles has, among others, consequences a) for situations or conditions under which to asses behavior (specifically conditions of communication), b) for data analysis (e.g., dealing with frequent and rare events), and c) for empirical or experimental strategies (e.g., aggregation of single-case longitudinal comparisons). From the results on facial behavior during depression it can be concluded that the nonverbal reaction tendencies of endogenous and neurotic depressed patients differ. Moreover, the differential behavioral patterns observed cast doubt on the assumption of a homogeneity of affects in depression. Taking into account the conditions which govern it, facial behavior has proved to be a valid and, especially, a differential indicator for pathologic affective states and their changes. Given the fact that a psychiatric illness generally incorporates emotional problems it is more than surprising that little attention has been paid to the systematic study of emotional behavior. Some of the reasons for this will be clarified in the following.

Behavior↗
PubMed2002

When the face reveals what words do not: facial expressions of emotion, smiling, and the willingness to disclose childhood sexual abuse.

For survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), verbal disclosure is often complex and painful. The authors examined the voluntary disclosure-nondisclosure of CSA in relation to nonverbal expressions of emotion in the face. Consistent with hypotheses derived from recent theorizing about the moral nature of emotion, CSA survivors who did not voluntarily disclose CSA showed greater facial expressions of shame, whereas CSA survivors who voluntarily disclosed CSA expressed greater disgust. Expressions of disgust also signaled sexual abuse accompanied by violence. Consistent with recent theorizing about smiling behavior, CSA nondisclosers made more polite smiles, whereas nonabused participants expressed greater genuine positive emotion. Discussion addressed the implications of these findings for the study of disclosure of traumatic events, facial expression, and the links between morality and emotion.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

The role of spatial attention in the processing of facial expression: an ERP study of rapid brain responses to six basic emotions.

To investigate the time course of emotional expression processing, we recorded ERP responses to stimulus arrays containing neutral versus angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad, or surprised faces. In one half of the experiment, the task was to discriminate emotional and neutral facial expressions. Here, an enhanced early frontocentral positivity was elicited in response to emotional as opposed to neutral faces, followed by a broadly distributed positivity and an enhanced negativity at lateral posterior sites. These emotional expression effects were very similar for all six basic emotional expressions. In the other half of the experiment, attention was directed away from the faces toward a demanding perceptual discrimination task. Under these conditions, emotional expression effects were completely eliminated, demonstrating that brain processes involved in the detection and analysis of facial expression require focal attention. The face-specific N170 component was unaffected by any emotional expression, supporting the hypothesis that structural encoding and expression analysis are independent processes.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala.

Studies in animals have shown that the amygdala receives highly processed visual input, contains neurons that respond selectively to faces, and that it participates in emotion and social behaviour. Although studies in epileptic patients support its role in emotion, determination of the amygdala's function in humans has been hampered by the rarity of patients with selective amygdala lesions. Here, with the help of one such rare patient, we report findings that suggest the human amygdala may be indispensable to: (1) recognize fear in facial expressions; (2) recognize multiple emotions in a single facial expression; but (3) is not required to recognize personal identity from faces. These results suggest that damage restricted to the amygdala causes very specific recognition impairments, and thus constrains the broad notion that the amygdala is involved in emotion.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Functional consequences of perceiving facial expressions of emotion without awareness.

A substantial body of research has established that even when we are not consciously aware of the faces of others we are nevertheless sensitive to, and impacted by their facial expression. In this paper, we consider this body of research from a new perspective by examining the functions of unconscious perception revealed by these studies. A consideration of the literature from this perspective highlights that existing research methods are limited when it comes to revealing possible functions of unconscious perception. The critical shortcoming is that in all of the methods, the perceived facial expression remains outside of awareness. This is a problem because there are good reasons to believe that one important function of unconsciously perceived negative faces is to attract attention so that they are consciously perceived; such conscious perception, however, is never allowed with existing methodologies. We discuss recent studies of emotional face perception under conditions of visual search that address this issue directly. Further, we suggest that methodologies that do not examine cognitive processes as they occur in more natural settings may result in fundamental misunderstandings of human cognition.

Attention↗
PubMed1980

[Recognition of conventional and emotional facial expressions in patients with cortical lesions (author's transl)].

Recognition of facial expressions was studied in a group of patients with cortical lesions. The test which was used consists in designating 30 expressions upon verbal command. Fifteen items had an emotional characteristic, and fifteen had a conventional characteristic (with an intentional communicative aspect). Results showed that right hemisphere patients had a elective deficit for emotional expressions. Left hemisphere patients had a elective deficit for conventional expressions. Analysis of correlations with associated clinical deficits showed further, that the deficit was associated, in right hemisphere patients, with lesions giving rise to Unilateral Spatial Agnosia. In left hemisphere patients it was associated with posterior lesions outside of the language area.

Agnosia↗
PubMed1983

Brain laterality and the subliminal perception of facial expression.

Right-handed subjects were presented simultaneously with: (1) a face expressing positive, neutral, or negative affect in the left or right visual field and, (2) the outlines of the face containing visual noise, in the opposite visual field. A range of stimulus presentation durations was used to sample above and below threshold processing. On each trial subjects responded to two forced choice questions: (1) Which side was the face on? and (2) What was the emotion expressed by the face? The results revealed a left visual field advantage for locating the face. There was only suggestive evidence in favour of a right hemisphere superiority in the processing of facial expression per se. The most important finding was that when subjects' performance locating the face represented chance (i.e., there was no reportable awareness of stimulus cues needed to discriminate a face from a nonface), they were significantly above chance identifying the facial expression.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

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.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Impaired emotional facial expression recognition is associated with interpersonal problems in alcoholism.

AIMS: Emotional facial expression (EFE) recognition has been shown to be impaired in abstinent alcoholics. The present study investigated the relationship between EFE recognition impairments and interpersonal difficulties in recently detoxified alcoholics (RA). METHODS: Thirty recently detoxified alcoholics were compared to 30 normal controls (NC) matched for age, sex and educational level on an EFE decoding test. This test involves 16 photographs depicting EFE of happiness, anger, disgust and sadness. Subjects were asked to fill in the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems evaluating six dimensions of interpersonal problems (assertiveness, submissiveness, intimacy, reliability, control and sociability). RESULTS: RA had EFE recognition deficits and more interpersonal problems, compared to NC. Reported interpersonal difficulties were correlated with EFE decoding problems. CONCLUSIONS: Interpersonal difficulties serve as a mediator between EFE accuracy problems and alcoholism. Impaired EFE recognition could have a role in the interpersonal difficulties encountered by RA and may therefore constitute a relapse factor.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Emotional facial expressive and discriminative performance and lateralization in normal young adults.

Studies of cerebral dominance for posed emotional facial expression using free-viewing of hemicomposites have produced inconclusive findings, and the concordance of facial emotion identification (discrimination) and the expression of the same facial emotion remains unknown. Expressive and discriminative (14 men, 14 women) facial emotion performances of undergraduates and the lateralization of full-face and lower-face hemicomposite photographic montages of the expressions of six transcultural emotions (joy, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust, anger) as ascertained by 15 male and 15 female undergraduate judges were analyzed. All groups were matched for age and education. The lower face was non-significantly left-face dominant, sadness was strongly significantly right-face dominant and fear was non-significantly left face dominant. Both sexes were equally lateralized overall and demonstrated the same pattern as described above, though slight (apparently trivial) differences appeared in multivariate analysis, and in univariate interactions. Results were interpreted as non-supportive of a simple right hemisphere dominance model of facial affect, nor of a left-hemisphere-negative/right-hemisphere-positive model. It was concluded that facial affect dominance results are coherent only within, and not between, methods such as free viewing hemicomposite and tachistoscopic methods, and tasks, such as expressive and discriminative tasks.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Amygdala response to facial expressions in children and adults.

BACKGROUND: The amygdala plays a central role in the human response to affective or emotionally charged stimuli, particularly fear-producing stimuli. We examined the specificity of the amygdala response to facial expressions in adults and children. METHODS: Six adults and 12 children were scanned in a 1.5-T scanner during passive viewing of fearful and neutral faces using an EPI BOLD sequence. All scans were registered to a reference brain, and analyses of variance were conducted on the pooled data to examine interactions with age and gender. RESULTS: Overall, we observed predominantly left amygdala and substantia innominata activity during the presentation of nonmasked fearful faces relative to fixation, and a decrease in activation in these regions with repeated exposure to the faces. Adults showed increased left amygdala activity for fearful faces relative to neutral faces. This pattern was not observed in the children who showed greater amygdala activity with neutral faces than with fearful faces. For the children, there was an interaction of gender and condition whereby boys but not girls showed less activity with repeated exposure to the fearful faces. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study to examine developmental differences in the amygdala response to facial expressions using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by persons with mental retardation.

A sample of 511 children and adults with mental retardation or borderline intelligence (1 SD below the mean IQ) and children of average intelligence were tested on their ability to recognize the six basic facial expressions of emotion as they are exemplified in Ekman and Friesen's (1975) normed photographs. Each subject was shown four sets of six photographs, one of each emotion. Subjects were read 24 short stories; after each one they were asked to point to the photograph that depicted the emotion described. Children and adults with mental retardation or borderline intelligence were less proficient at identifying facial expressions of emotion than were children of average intelligence. Among individuals with mental retardation or borderline intelligence, recognition of accuracy of facial emotion increased with IQ. Among individuals with average intelligence, recognition accuracy increased with age.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Altered electrodermal response to facial expression after closed head injury.

UNLABELLED: The objective was to determine whether diffuse damage to orbital and ventromedial regions of the prefrontal cortex usually associated with moderate-to-severe closed head injury (CHI) would affect the ability to perceive and respond to socially relevant information. METHODS: Participants with CHI and age-matched non-injured controls were presented with faces that varied with respect to emotional expression while electrodermal activity (EDA) was monitored. Cognitive and general adaptive functioning was also assessed. RESULTS: CHI was associated with a failure to increase EDA in response to negative facial expressions and with reduced ability to identify negative expressions, especially fear. The groups differed on other signs of orbital/medial prefrontal damage such as anosmia and in general social adaptability and awareness-of-deficit as measured by the Brock Adaptive Functioning Questionnaire. CONCLUSIONS: CHI affected the ability to identify and respond to negative facial expression. Addressing these deficits may enhance rehabilitative efforts within the social domain.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Evoked cerebral cortex activity in the human brain in conditions of the active and passive perception of facial expressions.

Visual evoked potentials were recorded in the occipital, parietal, central, frontal, and posterior temporal areas of the cortex in 22 healthy right-handed subjects during passive observation and recognition of emotionally positive, negative, and neutral facial expressions. Recognition of emotions was associated with significantly higher levels of cortical activity than was passive observation; this was reflected as increases in the amplitudes of the negative waves N1, N2, and N3, along with decreases in the latencies of the N1, P2, and N2 waves. The latencies of the N3 and P3 waves, which are associated with the later stages of information processing, increased as compared with those recorded during passive observation. Dynamic mapping during the recognition of emotions demonstrated involvement of the anterocentral regions of the cortex of both hemispheres, while passive perception was associated only with right-sided activation of these areas. Analysis of evoked potentials by the principal components method showed an increase in the complexity of the structure of the N2 wave during recognition of the type of facial expression, and a component corresponding to the descending part of the N2 wave was identified, associated with the classification stage.

Adult↗