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The influence of alexithymic characteristics on the self-perception and facial expression of a physiological stress state.

BACKGROUND: In spite of the connection of alexithymic characteristics to many stress-related disorders, little is known about the effects of these characteristics on the self-perception of stress, which may have functional value in the regulation of daily behavior. The present study assessed the influence of alexithymic characteristics on the self-perception of stress in relation to the corresponding physiological/expressive responses during and while recovering from a phasic stressor. METHODS: A median split of the scores on the Toronto Alexithymia Scale was used to divide 32 healthy middle-aged men into two groups, a high alexithymia (HA) and a low alexithymia (LA) group. Both groups participated in a 3-min hand-grip task, followed by a 3-min recovery period. During these periods, subjects' heart rate (HR) and facial electromyographical (EMG) activity on the corrugator supercilii and frontalis lateralis areas were measured and perceptions of exertion, unpleasantness and tension were self-rated. The perceptual style was assessed with the discrepancy scores: standardized scores of the physiological measures were subtracted from the corresponding standardized scores of the perceptions. Thus, positive scores indicated that self-reported perceptions exceeded the corresponding physiological or expressive activity (overestimation) and negative scores indicated the opposite (underestimation). RESULTS: The HA group decreasingly underestimated exertion in relation to HR during the task and increasingly overestimated it during the recovery period. The HA group also overestimated unpleasantness in relation to the corrugator EMG response during the recovery period. CONCLUSIONS: High alexithymic characteristics seem to predispose to the delayed self-perception of physiological stress state so that the beginning of this state may remain subjectively unnoticed and the subjective recovery from it prolonged relative to the physical recovery. During this prolonged subjective recovery the feelings of unpleasantness are not facially expressed. The consequences of this style for health-related behavior are discussed.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

Emotion recognition via facial expression and affective prosody in schizophrenia: a methodological review.

Disturbances in affect recognition may be one of the most pervasive and serious aspects of the schizophrenic patient's interpersonal problems. Interest in the decoding of emotional information in schizophrenia has focused on facial affect recognition with 29 experimental papers on that topic published since 1987. A smaller literature exists on the topic of recognition of affect in speech and there are at least seven studies, which have examined both face and voice perception in the same individuals with schizophrenia. This paper includes a comprehensive analysis of the schizophrenia facial affect recognition research over the past decade and the schizophrenia literature on affective prosody, and provides the first review of the schizophrenia literature on multichannel emotion recognition research. The weight of evidence would suggest that individuals with schizophrenia experience problems in the perception of emotional material; however, the specificity, extent, and nature of the deficits are unclear. Emotion recognition research in schizophrenia should be informed by the general literature on emotion recognition with serious attention paid to methodological issues.

Affect↗

Facial expressions, their communicatory functions and neuro-cognitive substrates.

Human emotional expressions serve a crucial communicatory role allowing the rapid transmission of valence information from one individual to another. This paper will review the literature on the neural mechanisms necessary for this communication: both the mechanisms involved in the production of emotional expressions and those involved in the interpretation of the emotional expressions of others. Finally, reference to the neuro-psychiatric disorders of autism, psychopathy and acquired sociopathy will be made. In these conditions, the appropriate processing of emotional expressions is impaired. In autism, it is argued that the basic response to emotional expressions remains intact but that there is impaired ability to represent the referent of the individual displaying the emotion. In psychopathy, the response to fearful and sad expressions is attenuated and this interferes with socialization resulting in an individual who fails to learn to avoid actions that result in harm to others. In acquired sociopathy, the response to angry expressions in particular is attenuated resulting in reduced regulation of social behaviour.

Affect↗

Using facial expressions to assess musculoskeletal pain in older persons.

Past research examined measures of pain among seniors who were experiencing movement-related exacerbations of musculoskeletal pain and obtained clear support for the utility of the behavioural coding of pain-related body movements (e.g., bracing, guarding). Support for the utility of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which involves the objective coding of facial reactions, was not as strong. The findings concerning FACS could have been an artifact of the methodology that was used. Specifically, the duration of the facial reactions was not taken into account and the patients suffered from a variety of painful conditions. Thus, the physical activities involved in the study could have been painful for some patients but not for others. The present study corrected these methodological concerns by accounting for the duration of facial reactions and ensuring that all patients suffered from the same painful condition. Participants were 82 post-surgical (knee replacement) inpatients. Cognitive status was assessed using the Modified Mini Mental Status Examination. Under physiotherapist's supervision, the patients performed structured activities (i.e., reclining, standing, knee bends). Facial reactions were coded using FACS. Facial reactions varied as a function of the degree to which the various activities were strenuous. The results support the utility of FACS in the assessment of musculoskeletal pain among seniors undergoing rehabilitation following knee surgery.

Aged↗

Facial expressions and genetic sensitivity to 6-n-propylthiouracil predict hedonic response to sweet.

Individuals differ in their hedonic response to sweet: sweet likers show increasing liking with increasing sucrose concentration, while sweet dislikers show increasing dislike with increasing concentration. Our results indicated that naive raters can correctly classify sweet likers and dislikers by observing subjects' facial responses to the taste of sucrose. Also, for both adults and children, the sweet liker/disliker distinction correlated strongly with the genetically determined ability to taste 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP): PROP nontasters were almost always sweet likers, whereas sweet dislikers were almost always PROP tasters. Sweet dislikers also reported a purer sweet sensation than likers, who perceived nonsweet components in pure sucrose solutions. These results suggest that the sweet liker/disliker distinction is robust and valid, and that sensitivity to PROP may influence preference for sweet by altering the quality of sweet.

Adolescent↗

Discrimination of facial expressions of emotion by depressed subjects.

A frequent complaint of depressed people concerns their poor interpersonal relationships. Yet, although nonverbal cues are considered of primary importance in interpersonal communication, the major theories of depression focus little attention on nonverbal social perception. The present study investigated the ability of depressed, disturbed control, and normal American adults to make rapid discriminations of facial emotion. We predicted and found that depressed subjects were slower than normal subjects in facial emotion discrimination but were not slower in word category discrimination. These findings suggest that current theories of depression may need to address difficulties with nonverbal information processing. There were also no significant differences between depressed and disturbed control subjects, suggesting that the unique social-behavioral consequences of depression have yet to be identified.

Adolescent↗

Visual scanning of facial expressions in schizophrenia.

The authors previously observed that schizophrenic patients generated fewer fixations of < or = 50.1 ms in response to faces than did a clinical control group. This study examined whether deficits in short-duration eye movements were related to patients' problems in gestalt perception of faces. Faces were presented in upright and inverted orientations to examine the effects of distorting facial gestalts on eye movements. Normal subjects generated more saccades of < or = 50.1 ms to upright than to inverted faces. Patients' saccades of < or = 50.1 ms did not differ between orientations. Patterns of fixations and of saccades > 50.1 ms did not differ between groups. The results may indicate deficits in these patients in search strategies that underlie perception of facial gestalts.

Adult↗