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PubMed2004

Development of sensitivity to facial expression of pain.

The ability to perceive pain in others is an important human capacity. Its development has not been studied. The present study examined the development of sensitivity to evidence of pain from childhood to early adulthood. One hundred and thirty-four males and females from four age groups (5-6, 8-9, 11-12 years and young adult) took part. They judged the amount of pain displayed on videotaped excerpts of the facial expressions of pain patients. Excerpts were selected to display no pain, some pain and strong pain, based on facial measurements, and were displayed to participants in a signal-detection paradigm. All participant groups were more sensitive to evidence of strong than some pain. The ability to detect pain expressions increased across the young, middle and older groups of children, but older children did not differ from adults. Increasing age was generally associated with increasing sensitivity to more subtle facial signs of pain. The results indicate that the ability to perceive pain in others is already significantly developed by the ages of five to six, but refinements in the ability continue through to early adulthood. These findings represent the first description of the development of the ability to perceive pain in others. Important areas for future research into the neurobiological, personal and social determinants of this ability are highlighted.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Processing of facial expressions of negative emotion in alexithymia: the influence of temporal constraint.

Alexithymia, a characteristic involving a limited affective vocabulary appears to involve three components: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally oriented thinking. There is evidence that alexithymic characteristics are associated with differences in emotion information-processing. We examined the role of temporal factors in alexithymic emotion-processing deficits, taking into account the confound between alexithymic characteristics and positive and negative affectivity. One hundred forty-six participants completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. In a signal-detection paradigm, participants judged facial expressions depicting neutral or negative emotions under slow and rapid presentation conditions. The alexithymia component of difficulty in describing feelings was inversely related to the ability to detect expressions of negative emotion in the speeded condition. This relationship was independent of positive and negative affectivity. Alexithymic components positive and negative affectivity were unrelated to response bias. The results emphasize the influence of difficulty describing feelings within the alexithymia construct and its difference from positive and negative affectivity. They suggest that an alexithymic deficit in describing feelings is associated with a deficit in processing negative emotions that is most apparent when processing capacity is challenged. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by unconsciously recognized facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures.

Multisensory integration is a powerful mechanism for increasing adaptive responses, as illustrated by binding of fear expressed in a face with fear present in a voice. To understand the role of awareness in intersensory integration of affective information we studied multisensory integration under conditions of conscious and nonconscious processing of the visual component of an audiovisual stimulus pair. Auditory-event-related potentials were measured in two patients (GY and DB) who were unable to perceive visual stimuli consciously because of striate cortex damage. To explore the role of conscious vision of audiovisual pairing, we also compared audiovisual integration in either naturalistic pairings (a facial expression paired with an emotional voice) or semantic pairings (an emotional picture paired with the same voice). We studied the hypothesis that semantic pairings, unlike naturalistic pairings, might require mediation by intact visual cortex and possibly by feedback to primary cortex from higher cognitive processes. Our results indicate that presenting incongruent visual affective information together with the voice translates as an amplitude decrease of auditory-event-related potentials. This effect obtains for both naturalistic and semantic pairings in the intact field, but is restricted to the naturalistic pairings in the blind field.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Effects of a alpha 2C-adrenoreceptor gene polymorphism on neural responses to facial expressions in depression.

Alterations in processing of emotionally salient information have been reported in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). Evidence suggests a role for noradrenaline in the regulation of a cortico-limbic-striatal circuit that has also been implicated in the pathophysiology of MDD. Herein, we studied the physiological consequences of a common coding polymorphism of the gene for the alpha(2C)-adrenoreceptor (AR) subtype--the deletion of four consecutive amino acids at codons 322-325 of the alpha2C-AR (alpha2CDel322-325-AR) in medication-free, remitted individuals with MDD (rMDD), and healthy control subjects. After injection of 10 mCi of H2(15)O, positron emission tomography (PET) measures of neural activity were acquired while subjects were viewing unmasked sad, happy, and fearful faces. The neural responses to sad facial expressions were increased in the amygdala and decreased in the left ventral striatum in rMDD patients relative to healthy control subjects. Furthermore, we report that rMDD carriers of one or two copies of the alpha2CDel322-325-AR exhibit greater amygdala as well as pregenual and subgenual anterior cingulate gyrus neuronal activity in response to sad faces than healthy alpha2CDel322-325-AR carriers and rMDD noncarriers. These results suggest that the alpha2CDel322-325-AR confers a change in brain function implicating this alpha2-AR subtype into the pathophysiology of MDD.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Effects of social anxiety and facial expression on habituation of the electrodermal orienting response.

The present research examined electrodermal orienting to happy and angry faces as a function of social anxiety and threat of shock. A preliminary study using 569 undergraduate participants developed an adequate set of normative data of social anxiety for the Willoughby questionnaire (WQ) for use in subject selection. Electrodermal activity was measured in both high and low socially anxious subjects (N = 85) during exposure to 10 presentations of an angry face intermixed with 10 presentations of a happy face. Threat of shock (no-shock, shock work-up only, and shock work-up plus threat) was also manipulated. Skin conductance responses (SCRs) which occurred within 1-4 s of stimulus onset and trials-to-habituation constituted the data of primary interest. Although trials-to-habituation did not differ between angry and happy facial expressions, SCRs were larger to the angry face than to the happy face in both high and low socially anxious subjects. No differences in SCR magnitude were found as a function of threat of shock. The implications of these results for Ohman's functional-evolutionary model of social phobia are discussed, and alternative explanations in terms of prepotency and prior learning are examined.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

Time courses of left and right amygdalar responses to fearful facial expressions.

Despite the many studies highlighting the role of the amygdala in fear perception, few have examined differences between right and left amygdalar responses. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined neural responses in three groups of healthy volunteers (n = 18) to alternating blocks of fearful and neutral faces. Initial observation of extracted time series of both amygdalae to these stimuli indicated more rapid decreases of right than left amygdalar responses to fearful faces, and increasing magnitudes of right amygdalar responses to neutral faces with time. We compared right and left responses statistically by modeling each time series with (1) a stationary fit model (assuming a constant magnitude of amygdalar response to consecutive blocks of fearful faces) and (2) an adaptive model (no assumptions). Areas of significant sustained nonstationarity (time series points with significantly greater adaptive than stationary model fits) were demonstrated for both amygdalae. There was more significant nonstationarity of right than left amygdalar responses to neutral, and left than right amygdalar responses to fearful faces. These findings indicate significant variability over time of both right and left amygdalar responses to fearful and neutral facial expressions and are the first demonstration of specific differences in time courses of right and left amygdalar responses to these stimuli.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Scopolamine induces impairments in the recognition of human facial expressions of anger and disgust.

RATIONALE: Recent psychopharmacological studies lend support to the notion of partially dissociable neuronal systems dedicated to processing specific emotions. For example, GABA-ergic enhancement after an acute dose of the benzodiazepine, diazepam, produces specific impairments in anger and fear recognition. However, it is unclear if these impairments are a general property of benzodiazepines and other drugs that produce a similar profile of neurocognitive impairment to benzodiazepines, such as the anticholinergic, scopolamine. OBJECTIVE: We investigated the effects of scopolamine and the benzodiazepine, lorazepam, on emotion-recognition accuracy. METHODS: A double-blind independent group design was used with 48 healthy volunteers to compare the effects of scopolamine and lorazepam with an inactive placebo on a commonly used emotion-recognition task. Control measures included an episodic memory task and subjective mood ratings. RESULTS: Anger and disgust recognition accuracy was impaired after scopolamine. In contrast, lorazepam produced no impairment in emotion-recognition despite producing similar levels of sedation and anterograde amnesia to scopolamine. CONCLUSIONS: Scopolamine-induced cholinergic hypofunction selectively impaired the recognition accuracy of disgust and anger facial expressions. The effects of scopolamine on emotion-recognition are similar to those found in Huntington's disease patients. Furthermore, the impairments in anger and fear recognition previously observed with diazepam do not appear to be a general property of benzodiazepines. This suggests that alterations in emotional processing involving changes in the ability to recognize threat-related emotions (particularly, fear and anger) may not be a principal mechanism underlying anxiolysis or paradoxical aggression seen with benzodiazepines.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Hemiface mobility and facial expression asymmetry.

Thirty-seven right-handed college-aged males and females were assessed for facial asymmetry during emotional expression and for nonemotional hemiface mobility. Objective, subjective, and undirected measures of facial mobility were obtained, separately for the upper and lower face. While judges rated mobility of the lower face as left-sided, subjects declared themselves to be as facile on the right as on the left side of the face. When asked to move a side of the lower face, subjects moved the right side more frequently than the left. For the upper face, none of the measures of mobility were significantly left- or right-sided. Facial expression asymmetries (which were observed to be left-sided) were not significantly related to any measures of hemiface mobility.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Facial expression and imagery in depression: an electromyographic study.

When subjects are instructed to self-generate happy, sad, and angry imagery, discrete patterns of facial muscle activity can be detected using electromyographic (EMG) procedures. Prior research from this laboratory suggests that depressed subjects show attenuated facial EMG patterns during imagery conditions, particularly during happy imagery. In the present experiment, 12 depressed subjects and 12 matched normals were requested to generate happy and sad imagery, first with the instruction to simply "think" about the imagery, and then to self-regulate the affective state by "reexperiencing the feelings" associated with the imagery. Continuous recordings of facial EMG were obtained from the corrugator, zygomatic major, depressor anguli oris, and mentalis muscle regions. It was hypothesized that (a) these muscle sites would reliably differentiate between happy and sad imagery. (b) the instruction to self-generate the affective feeling state would produce greater EMG differences than the "think" instructions, and (c) the "think" instructions would be a more sensitive indicator of the difference between depressed and nondepressed subjects, especially for happy imagery. All three hypotheses were confirmed. The application of facial electromyography to the assessment of normal and clinical mood states, and the role of facial muscle patterning in the subjective experience of emotion, are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Emotional experience and facial expression in Alzheimer's disease.

Emotional experiences and facial muscle activity of individuals with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) (n = 13) and healthy elderly control subjects (n = 21) were measured while viewing emotion-eliciting images. Alzheimer's disease and control groups rated their emotional experiences similarly and in the expected directions on dimensions of valence and arousal. Change in corrugator activity while viewing images, compared to baseline, was comparable across groups and was greatest while viewing negative images. Change in zygomatic activity, however, was significantly different between AD and control groups, with AD subjects demonstrating an inverted pattern of activity compared to controls. These findings are discussed as possible consequences of frontal cortical system involvement accompanying the disease process.

Aged↗