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PubMed2001

Transcranial magnetic stimulation of medial-frontal cortex impairs the processing of angry facial expressions.

Growing evidence suggests that the recognition of different emotional states involves at least partly separable neural circuits. Here we assessed the discrimination of both anger and happiness in healthy subjects receiving transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the medial-frontal cortex or over a control site (mid-line parietal cortex). We found that TMS over the medial-frontal cortex impairs the processing of angry, but not happy, facial expressions of emotion.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Facial expressions of mentally retarded and nonretarded children: I. Recognition by mentally retarded and nonretarded adults.

Mentally retarded and nonretarded adults' ability to recognize happiness, anger, sadness, and neutral affect from slides of young mentally retarded and nonretarded children was investigated. Recognizing affects in others is part of social awareness and necessary for successful social interactions. Retarded adults recognized fewer facial expressions than did nonretarded adults. Nonretarded children's expressions were identified more accurately than were those of retarded children. Happiness was recognized best. Retarded adults used the label "happy" most often, whereas nonretarded adults used the label "neutral" most often. Absence of affect (neutral) was recognized least well by retarded adults. Neutral and sad were confounded most often by nonretarded adults, whereas retarded adults confounded angry and sad most often.

Adult↗
PubMed1976

[Relationship between perception of facial expression by schizophrenic patients and disorders in their assessment of probability].

The author proposes a method of studying some traits of mimic perception where an oral report is avoided. The essence of the method is in a distribution by the examine of a series of photographs of the same face into such groups so as to have similar facial expressions. The experiments demonstrated that such distributions are mainly performed on a direct intuitive level. The examinee is given several series of photographs of different faces. In an evaluation of the results the probability of different combinations attained in a group of normals are being considered. The author compared a group of schizophrenic patients (60 cases) and a group of normals (100 cases). The patients significantly more frequently (p less than 0.001) give combinations of photographs with a low probability 0.01-0.05. The preliminary data indicate that this trait correlates with the severity of the clinical picture. Among the normals 7% of the examined individuals gave a stable high amount of answers with a low probability. This group of individuals detected characterological peculiarities reflected in the questionnaire. It may be assumed that this trait in the evaluation of mimics is due to a constitutional and morbid process.

Affective Symptoms↗
PubMed2003

Detection of facial expressions of emotions in schizophrenia.

The aim of the present study was to examine spatial processing of facial emotion in schizophrenic patients suffering from affective symptoms. A face-in-the-crowd task using schematic stimuli was administered to schizophrenic patients with flat affect (n=30), schizophrenic patients suffering from anhedonia (n=30), schizophrenic patients not suffering from anhedonia or flat affect (n=28), and a group of healthy controls (n=30). Participants searched displays of neutral schematic faces for a face with a positive or negative mouth expression. Schizophrenic patients manifested a general slowing of response speed compared to normal subjects. All patient groups as well as normal subjects found negative faces more quickly than positive faces amongst neutral faces. Unexpectedly, with increasing anhedonia as assessed by psychiatric rating, a more efficient spatial detection of positive facial expression was observed. For flat-affect patients only, efficiency of search for negative facial expression did not differ from that in the neutral face control condition. This response pattern indicates that, in flat-affect schizophrenic patients, spatial search of negative facial expression might be slowed after the initial engagement of search processes. Potential explanations of the face processing effects found in anhedonia are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Subthalamic nucleus stimulation induces deficits in decoding emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND: Bilateral subthalamic nucleus (STN) stimulation is recognised as a treatment for parkinsonian patients with severe levodopa related motor complications. Although adverse effects are infrequent, some behavioural disturbances have been reported. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the consequences of STN stimulation on emotional information processing in Parkinson's disease by assessing the performance of an emotional facial expression (EFE) decoding task in a group of patients before and after surgery. METHODS: 12 non-demented patients with Parkinson's disease were studied. They were assessed one month before surgery and three months after. Their ability to decode EFEs was assessed using a standardised quantitative task. Overall cognitive function, executive function, visuospatial perception, depression, and anxiety were also measured. Twelve healthy controls were matched for age, sex, and duration of education. RESULTS: Before surgery, the patients showed no impairment in EFE decoding compared with the controls. Their overall cognitive status was preserved but they had a moderate dysexecutive syndrome. Three months after surgery, they had significant impairment of EFE decoding. This was not related to their overall cognitive status or to depression/anxiety scores. Visuospatial perception was not impaired. There was no change in the extent of the dysexecutive syndrome except for a reduction in phonemic word fluency. CONCLUSIONS: Bilateral STN stimulation disturbs negative emotional information processing in Parkinson's disease. The impairment appears specific and unrelated to certain secondary variables. This behavioural complication of STN may have implications for the patient's social life.

Affect↗
PubMed2004

Deficits in decoding emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease.

INTRODUCTION: The basal ganglia have numerous connections not only with the motor cortex but also with the prefrontal and limbic cortical areas. Therefore, basal ganglia lesions can disturb motor function but also cognitive function and emotion processing. The aim of the present study was to assess the consequences of Parkinson's disease (PD) on ability to decode emotional facial expressions (EFEs)-a method commonly used to investigate non-verbal emotion processing. METHODS: Eighteen PD patients participated in the study, together with 18 healthy subjects strictly matched with respect to age, education and sex. The patients were early in the course of the disease and had not yet received any antiparkinsonian treatment. Decoding of EFEs was assessed using a standardized, quantitative task where the expressions were of moderate intensity, i.e. quite similar to those experienced in everyday life. A set of tests also assessed executive function. Visuospatial perception, depression and anxiety were measured. RESULTS: Early in the course of the disease, untreated PD patients were significantly impaired in decoding EFEs, as well as in executive function. The deficits were significantly interrelated, although neither was significantly related to severity of the motor symptoms. Visuospatial perception was not impaired, and the patients' impairment was related neither to their depression nor to their anxiety score. The PD patients' impairment in decoding EFEs was related to a systematic response bias. CONCLUSION: Early in the course of PD, non-verbal emotional information processing is disturbed. This suggests that in PD, nigrostriatal dopaminergic depletion leads not only to motor and cognitive disturbances but also to emotional information processing deficits. The observed correlation pattern does not enable adoption of a clear-cut position in the debate over totally or partially segregated functional organization of the basal ganglia circuits.

Aged↗
PubMed2000

Recognition of emotional facial expressions in depressed children and adolescents.

Of the neurobiological models of children's and adolescents' depression, the neuropsychological one is considered here. Experimental and clinical evidence has allowed us to identify a lateralization of emotional functions from the very beginning of development, and a right hemisphere dominance for emotions is by now well-known. Many studies have also correlated depression with a right hemisphere dysfunction in patients of different ages. The aim of our study was to analyze recognition of different facial emotions by a group of depressed children and adolescents. Patients affected by Major Depressive Disorder recognized less fear in six fundamental emotions than a group of healthy controls, and Dysthymic subjects recognized less anger. The group of patients' failure to recognize negative-aroused facial expressions could indicate a subtle right hemisphere dysfunction in depressed children and adolescents.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The role of facial expressions in the holding environment.

The significance of a visual dialogue between patient and therapist in assisting tension regulation for patients with severe narcissistic injury is proposed. Non-verbal interactions may unfold spontaneously and contribute to development of a "holding environment" in its broadest sense. There will be inevitably both countertransference and real elements in this bipersonal field. The development of a visual holding environment at a symbiotic level may be based on a counter-transference response by the therapist of an earlier need to "hold or be held." It has been suggested that it is difficult for the therapist to feel a "gleam in the eye" for patients who have missed early mirroring. Developmental stages of treatment involving active mutuality of eye contact, considered a "language of silence" beyond verbal interpretation, are suggested. These observations agree with Searles' paper that facial expressions form a bridge to personal relatedness.

Countertransference↗
PubMed1991

Children's understanding of facial expression of emotion: II. Drawing of emotion-faces.

67 children from Grades 2, 4, and 7 drew faces representing the emotional expressions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, happiness, and sadness. The children themselves and 29 adults later decoded the drawings in an emotion-recognition task. Children were the more accurate decoders, and their accuracy and the accuracy of adults increased significantly for judgments of 7th-grade drawings. The emotions happy and sad were most accurately decoded. There were no significant differences associated with sex. In their drawings, children utilized a symbol system that seems to be based on a highlighting or exaggeration of features of the innately governed facial expression of emotion.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2003

Adolescent immaturity in attention-related brain engagement to emotional facial expressions.

Selective attention, particularly during the processing of emotionally evocative events, is a crucial component of adolescent development. We used functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) with adolescents and adults to examine developmental differences in activation in a paradigm that involved selective attention during the viewing of emotionally engaging face stimuli. We evaluated developmental differences in neural activation for three comparisons: (1) directing attention to subjective responses to fearful facial expressions relative to directing attention to a nonemotional aspect (nose width) of fearful faces, (2) viewing fearful relative to neutral faces while attending to a nonemotional aspect of the face, and (3) viewing fearful relative to neutral faces while attention was unconstrained (passive viewing). The comparison of activation across attention tasks revealed greater activation in the orbital frontal cortex in adults than in adolescents. Conversely, when subjects attended to a nonemotional feature, fearful relative to neutral faces influenced activation in the anterior cingulate more in adolescents than in adults. When attention was unconstrained, adolescents relative to adults showed greater activation in the anterior cingulate, bilateral orbitofrontal cortex, and right amygdala in response to the fearful relative to neutral faces. These findings suggest that adults show greater modulation of activity in relevant brain structures based on attentional demands, whereas adolescents exhibit greater modulation based on emotional content.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Stimulus gender and emotional difficulty level: their effect on recognition of facial expressions of affect in children with and without LD.

The ability to recognize emotions that were easily identifiable and those that were more difficult to identify, as expressed by male and female faces, was studied in 48 nondisabled children and 76 children with learning disabilities (LD) ages 9 through 12. On the basis of their performance on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and the Benton Visual Retention Test, the LD group was divided into three subgroups: those with verbal (VD), nonverbal (NVD), and both verbal and nonverbal (BD) deficits. A shortened version of Ekman and Friesen's Pictures of Facial Affect, including pictures of both men and women, was the measure of ability to identify facial expressions of affect. Children of both genders in all three groups of children with LD, as well as their normally achieving peers, were more accurate in identifying expressions of affect from female faces, notwithstanding differences in sensitivity to such emotional communication in favor of the nondisabled and VD groups. However, a significant interaction was found between gender and emotional recognition difficulty level, with female faces being more expressive for emotions that were difficult to recognize.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed2002

Early experience is associated with the development of categorical representations for facial expressions of emotion.

A fundamental issue in human development concerns how the young infant's ability to recognize emotional signals is acquired through both biological programming and learning factors. This issue is extremely difficult to investigate because of the variety of sensory experiences to which humans are exposed immediately after birth. We examined the effects of emotional experience on emotion recognition by studying abused children, whose experiences violated cultural standards of care. We found that the aberrant social experience of abuse was associated with a change in children's perceptual preferences and also altered the discriminative abilities that influence how children categorize angry facial expressions. This study suggests that affective experiences can influence perceptual representations of basic emotions.

Case-Control Studies↗
PubMed2001

Development of speech, feeding, eating, and facial expression in Möbius sequence.

OBJECTIVE: Möbius sequence is a rare congenital disorder with the primary diagnostic criteria of congenital facial and abducens nerve palsy. Involvement from other cranial nerves is common. Orofacial anomalies and limb malformations may be associated with the disorder. Mental retardation and autism have been reported in some. The aim of this study was to describe orofacial dysfunction observed in a prospective, multidisciplinary study of individuals with Möbius sequence. METHODS: Twenty-five patients with Möbius sequence, aged 2 months to 54 years, participated in the study. Clinical observations by different medical specialists were collected in an established database. Dentists and a speech pathologist made the orofacial examination. The parents or the patient described orofacial function and dysfunction through interviews and a questionnaire. RESULTS: Bilateral facial palsy was observed in 16 patients, unilateral palsy in 9. Observed orofacial anomalies were tongue dysfunction (16), micrognatia (8), microglossia (7), cleft palate (4), and cleft lip (1). Seventeen had speech problems, 16 reported feeding difficulties in infancy, 14 eating problems, and 8 drooling. CONCLUSIONS: Orofacial problems are common in Möbius sequence and have a significant impact on the quality of life for the patient and for the whole family. Early intervention by a speech pathologist and a paediatric dentist should be undertaken to improve orofacial function and symptoms. Plastic surgery, oral motor training, facial massage, speech therapy, and orthodontic treatment are some of the therapy methods that can be considered.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗
PubMed2004

Young children with autism show atypical brain responses to fearful versus neutral facial expressions of emotion.

Evidence suggests that autism is associated with impaired emotion perception, but it is unknown how early such impairments are evident. Furthermore, most studies that have assessed emotion perception in children with autism have required verbal responses, making results difficult to interpret. This study utilized high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether 3-4-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show differential brain activity to fear versus neutral facial expressions. It has been shown that normal infants as young as 7 months of age show differential brain responses to faces expressing different emotions. ERPs were recorded while children passively viewed photos of an unfamiliar woman posing a neutral and a prototypic fear expression. The sample consisted of 29 3-4-year-old children with ASD and 22 chronological age-matched children with typical development. Typically developing children exhibited a larger early negative component (N300) to the fear than to the neutral face. In contrast, children with ASD did not show the difference in amplitude of this early ERP component to the fear versus neutral face. For a later component, typically developing children exhibited a larger negative slow wave (NSW) to the fear than to the neutral face, whereas children with autism did not show a differential NSW to the two stimuli. In children with ASD, faster speed of early processing (i. e. N300 latency) of the fear face was associated with better performance on tasks assessing social attention (social orienting, joint attention and attention to distress). These data suggest that children with ASD, as young as 3 years of age, show a disordered pattern of neural responses to emotional stimuli.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1989

[Asymmetry of visual perceptive activity of faces and emotional facial expressions].

Eye movements were studied in 40 right-handed subjects during perception of symmetrical chimerical faces. These movements were recorded using an original system based on a differential optical method for the detection of corneal reflection and of the pupil made shiny. Under basal conditions, the first fixation was usually located in the left visual hemifield. The subjects spent more time gazing at the right hemiface (P less than 0.04). This visuo-spatial asymmetry in favour of the left hemispace was increased when the subject was requested to determine the emotional expressions of a new series of faces (P less than 0.002). Compared with basal conditions, the increase in the percentage of time spent in the left area was significant (P less than 0.035). An analysis performed on the first 3 seconds confirmed and amplified the differences observed. These results can partly be explained by reading habits and exploratory activity for symmetrical shapes. However, activation of the right hemisphere, specialized in the perception of faces and facial expressions, probably influenced visual exploration by drawing attention to the left area and favouring the left visual hemifield.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Faces as reinforcers: effects of pairing condition and facial expression.

The reinforcing properties of faces were investigated in two experiments in which tones were first paired with an adult female face and subsequently tested for their ability to potentiate visual fixation when compounded with a checkerboard pattern. In Experiment 1, infants who had been presented six pairings of a 65-dB, 1000-Hz tone with a smiling face later fixated a checkerboard pattern significantly more when it was compounded with the tone than when it was tested alone. Infants in random and backward controls fixated the checkerboard pattern roughly equal amounts in the presence absence of the tone, and infants in a no tone control did not exhibit a novelty response when shifted from the face to the checkerboard pattern. In Experiment 2, facial expression was varied across groups and the effects on conditioning of a 65-dB tone that immediately preceded the face were studied. On test trials, greater fixation in the presence of the tone than in its absence was observed when a smiling or a surprised expression was presented, but not when a neutral expression was presented. Differences scores (fixation on tone minus no tone test trials) were significantly greater than zero in the smiling and surprised conditions, and significantly greater in the surprised condition than in the neural condition. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of a conditioned visual fixation paradigm for the study of the reinforcing properties of faces and of infant associative learning in general, and suggest that the expression portrayed by a face contributes to its effectiveness as a reinforcer.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2005

Functional asymmetry and interhemispheric cooperation in the perception of emotions from facial expressions.

The present study used the redundant target paradigm on healthy subjects to investigate functional hemispheric asymmetries and interhemispheric cooperation in the perception of emotions from faces. In Experiment 1 participants responded to checkerboards presented either unilaterally to the left (LVF) or right visual half field (RVF), or simultaneously to both hemifields (BVF), while performing a pointing task for the control of eye movements. As previously reported (Miniussi et al. in J Cogn Neurosci 10:216-230, 1998), redundant stimulation led to shorter latencies for stimulus detection (bilateral gain or redundant target effect, RTE) that exceeded the limit for a probabilistic interpretation, thereby validating the pointing procedure and supporting interhemispheric cooperation. In Experiment 2 the same pointing procedure was used in a go/no-go task requiring subjects to respond when seeing a target emotional expression (happy or fearful, counterbalanced between blocks). Faster reaction times to unilateral LVF than RVF emotions, regardless of valence, indicate that the perception of positive and negative emotional faces is lateralized toward the right hemisphere. Simultaneous presentation of two congruent emotional faces, either happy or fearful, produced an RTE that cannot be explained by probability summation and suggests interhemispheric cooperation and neural summation. No such effect was present with BVF incongruent facial expressions. In Experiment 3 we studied whether the RTE for emotional faces depends on the physical identity between BVF stimuli, and we set a second BVF congruent condition in which there was only emotional but not physical or gender identity between stimuli (i.e. two different faces expressing the same emotion). The RTE and interhemispheric cooperation were present also in this second BVF congruent condition. This shows that emotional congruency is the sufficient condition for the RTE to take place in the intact brain and that the cerebral hemispheres can interact in spite of physical differences between stimuli.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Perceived facial expressions of emotion as motivational incentives: evidence from a differential implicit learning paradigm.

Participants (N = 216) were administered a differential implicit learning task during which they were trained and tested on 3 maximally distinct 2nd-order visuomotor sequences, with sequence color serving as discriminative stimulus. During training, 1 sequence each was followed by an emotional face, a neutral face, and no face, using backward masking. Emotion (joy, surprise, anger), face gender, and exposure duration (12 ms, 209 ms) were varied between participants; implicit motives were assessed with a picture-story exercise. For power-motivated individuals, low-dominance facial expressions enhanced and high-dominance expressions impaired learning. For affiliation-motivated individuals, learning was impaired in the context of hostile faces. These findings did not depend on explicit learning of fixed sequences or on awareness of sequence-face contingencies.

Adult↗