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Aversive learning in patients with unilateral lesions of the amygdala and hippocampus.

The present study applied a visual half field paradigm with emotional facial expressions in patients with selective unilateral amygdalo-hippocampectomy (AHE) to elucidate the contributions of the left and right medial temporal lobe and amygdala to emotional learning. Electrodermal indicators of aversive learning were studied in 14 left AHE and 12 right AHE patients, as well as 13 controls matched in sex and age. In a differential conditioning paradigm with negative (CS+) and positive (CS-) facial expressions, CS+ were associated with an aversive vocalization (US, 95 dB, 3 s). During extinction, stimuli were presented laterally and preattentively using backward masking. Appropriate CS durations yielding preattentive presentation were individually determined prior to conditioning. In contrast to controls, both left and right AHE patients failed to show an autonomic conditioning effect following left visual field presentations of masked negative CS+ during extinction. AHE patients also showed no clear differential acquisition. Moreover, right AHE patients poorly recognised that negative valence was an affiliating dimension of the CS-US compound.

Adult↗

Affective facial and lexical expression in aprosodic versus aphasic stroke patients.

Past research has shown that lesions in the left cerebral hemisphere often result in aphasia, while lesions in the right hemisphere frequently impair the production of emotional prosody and facial expression. At least 3 processing deficits might account for these affective symptoms: (1) failure to understand the conditions that evoke emotional response; (2) inability to experience emotions; (3) disruption in the capacity to encode non-verbal signals. To better understand these disorders and their underlying mechanisms, we investigated spontaneous affective communication in right hemisphere damaged (RHD) stroke patients with aprosody and left hemisphere damaged (LHD) stroke patients with aphasia. Nine aprosodic RHD patients and 14 aphasic LHD patients participated in a videotaped interview within a larger treatment protocol. Two naïve raters viewed segments of videotape and rated facial expressivity. Verbal affect production was tabulated using specialized software. Results indicated that RHD patients smiled and laughed significantly less than LHD patients. In contrast, RHD patients produced a greater percentage of emotion words relative to total words than did LHD patients. These findings suggest that impairments in emotional prosodic production and facial expressivity associated with RHD are not induced by affective-conceptual deficits or an inability to experience emotions. Rather, they likely represent channel-specific nonverbal encoding abnormalities.

Affect↗

Nursing care and the development of sleeping and waking behaviors in preterm infants.

The relationship between nursing care and the development of sleep-wake behaviors of 71 medically high-risk preterms was examined. The development of preterm infants' sleep-wake states, jitteriness, and negative facial expressions were influenced not only by the presence of the nurse, but also by the type of caregiving the nurse provided. The infant was awake more often when with caregivers than when alone. Waking states increased over time only when the infant was with caregivers, whereas quiet sleep increased only when the infant was alone. Infant behaviors and sleep-wake development were related to the intrusiveness of care. For example, negative facial expressions and sleep-wake transitions increased over time during the most intrusive caregiving. The development of sleeping and waking in preterm infants appears to depend not only on biological maturation but also nursing stimulation. As long-term developmental effects of nurse caregiving are unknown, additional research is needed.

Chi-Square Distribution↗

Impaired judgments of sadness but not happiness following bilateral amygdala damage.

Although the amygdala's role in processing facial expressions of fear has been well established, its role in the processing of other emotions is unclear. In particular, evidence for the amygdala's involvement in processing expressions of happiness and sadness remains controversial. To clarify this issue, we constructed a series of morphed stimuli whose emotional expression varied gradually from very faint to more pronounced. Five morphs each of sadness and happiness, as well as neutral faces, were shown to 27 subjects with unilateral amygdala damage and 5 with complete bilateral amygdala damage, whose data were compared to those from 12 brain damaged and 26 normal controls. Subjects were asked to rate the intensity and to label the stimuli. Subjects with unilateral amygdala damage performed very comparably to controls. By contrast, subjects with bilateral amygdala damage showed a specific impairment in rating sad faces, but performed normally in rating happy faces. Furthermore, subjects with right unilateral amygdala damage performed somewhat worse than subjects with left unilateral amygdala damage. The findings suggest that the amygdala's role in processing of emotional facial expressions encompasses multiple negatively valenced emotions, including fear and sadness.

Amygdala↗

History of facial nerve surgery.

The history of facial nerve surgery can be viewed as five overlapping periods, each characterized by a new understanding or approach to the management of facial nerve conditions. The first period, the period of discovery of the nerve of facial expression, began with Sir Charles Bell's description in 1829 of 3 cases of facial paralysis due to facial nerve trauma. The second period, from 1873 to 1960, was the era of facial nerve repair. Decompression of the facial nerve was the primary focus of facial nerve surgery in the third period, from 1908 to 1969. The fourth period, from 1970 to 2000, can be characterized as the "bottleneck" period in honor of the contributions to facial nerve surgery that resulted as Ugo Fisch and other surgeons sought ways to operate on this portion of the proximal nerve. In the current or fifth, period in the history of facial nerve surgery, we anticipate the advent of vaccines and antiviral medications to minimize the sequelae of Bell's palsy, further improvements in endoscopic equipment and techniques, and better surgical outcomes through the use of new technologies such as robotics.

Decompression, Surgical↗

Dissociable face processing impairments after brain injury.

Matched populations of head-injured patients and normal control subjects completed three "forced-choice" face processing tasks designed to test facial expression recognition, familiar face recognition, and unfamiliar face matching. We hypothesised a significant difference in the performance of the patients and controls on the three tasks, and hoped to observe individual differences in the patients' performance across tasks. As predicted the head-injured patients made significantly more errors than the controls on the forced-choice tasks. Four cases of dissociable impairments affecting only one of the face processing tasks are reported; patient JP impaired only on facial expression recognition, patients AB and HI impaired only on familiar face recognition, and patient VS impaired only on unfamiliar face matching. These dissociable impairments provide further evidence for independent cognitive processing of specific face properties.

Adult↗

Measuring individual differences in sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.

The assessment of individual differences in facial expression recognition is normally required to address two major issues: (1) high agreement level (ceiling effect) and (2) differential difficulty levels across emotions. We propose a new assessment method designed to quantify individual differences in the recognition of the six basic emotions, 'sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.' We attempted to address the two major assessment issues by using morphing techniques and item response theory (IRT). We used morphing to create intermediate, mixed facial expression stimuli with various levels of recognition difficulty. Applying IRT enabled us to estimate the individual latent trait levels underlying the recognition of respective emotions (sensitivity scores), unbiased by stimulus properties that constitute difficulty. In a series of two experiments we demonstrated that the sensitivity scores successfully addressed the two major assessment issues and their concomitant individual variability. Intriguingly, correlational analyses of the sensitivity scores to different emotions produced orthogonality between happy and non-happy emotion recognition. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the independence of happiness recognition, unaffected by stimulus difficulty.

Adolescent↗

Face-specific N170 component is modulated by facial expressional change.

We examined processing of change in facial expression. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were elicited by successive presentation of two different faces without interval. Smile faces were preceded by either a neutral face of the same person, a smile face of a different person, or a neutral face of a different person, which generated expressional, individual, or both expressional and individual change, respectively. For the preceding faces, there were no differences in face-specific N170. In contrast, the second faces elicited a larger N170 for expressional change relative to individual or both changes, which indicates that facial expression was processed in the early stage of face processing in the posterior temporal region, when they are presented in change context.

Adult↗

[Assessment of recognition of emotions by healthy persons and patients with focal brain pathology].

To assess the involvement of different structures of the human brain into successive stages of the recognition of the principal emotions by facial expression, we examined 48 patients with local brain lesions and 18 healthy adult subjects. It was shown that at the first (intuitive) stage of the recognition, premotor areas of the right hemisphere and temporal areas of the left hemisphere are of considerable importance in the recognition of both positive and negative emotions. In this process, the left temporal areas are substantially involved into the recognition of anger, and the right premotor areas predominantly participate in the recognition of fear. In patients with lesions of the right and left brain hemispheres, at the second (conscious) stage of recognition, the critical attitude to the assessment of emotions drops depending on the sign of the detected emotion. We have confirmed the hypothesis about a correlation between the personality features of the recognition of facial expressions and the dominant emotional state of a given subject.

Adolescent↗

Nonconscious associative learning: Pavlovian conditioning of skin conductance responses to masked fear-relevant facial stimuli.

We examined the possibility of nonconscious associative learning in a context of skin conductance conditioning, using emotional facial expressions as stimuli. In the first experiment, subjects were conditioned to a backwardly masked angry face that was followed by electric shock, with a masked happy face as the nonreinforced stimulus. In spite of the effectively masked conditioned stimuli, differential conditioned skin conductance responses were observed in a subsequent nonmasked extinction phase. This effect could not be attributed to differential sensitization or pseudo-conditioning. In the second experiment, the differential responding during extinction was replicated with angry but not with happy faces as conditioned stimuli. It was concluded that with fear-relevant facial expressions as the conditioned stimulus, associative learning was possible even in conditions where the subjects remained unaware of the conditioned stimulus and its relationship to the unconditioned stimulus.

Adult↗

Bilateral congenital facial paralysis.

A 17-year-old girl who has the Möbius syndrome showed compensatory motions in sucking, speech, and eating. Movements of facial expression were absent (except for contraction of the buccinator muscle and some closure of the eyelids). The patient has been referred to a specialist for restoration of additional facial expression.

Adolescent↗

Observer liking of unilateral stroke patients.

OBJECTIVE: To examine observers' initial affective impressions of unilateral stroke patients, based on exposure to the patients' verbal and nonverbal behavior. Given the linguistic deficits associated with left hemisphere damage (LHD), the authors expected affective judgments based on exposure to patients' utterances to be reduced for patients with LHD. Given the nonverbal deficits associated with right hemisphere damage (RHD), the authors expected affective judgments based on exposure to patients' facial expressions to be reduced for patients with RHD. METHOD: Ten patients with LHD, 11 patients with RHD, and seven normal control (NC) patients were videotaped while engaging in social interaction. Observers read transcripts of the interactions and made judgments about how much they liked the patients. They then watched soundless videotapes and made similar liking judgments. This reflected a 3 (patient group) x 2 (coding modality) mixed factorial design. RESULTS: A 2 x 3 analysis of variance yielded a significant interaction. When liking judgments were based on utterances, patients with LHD were liked less than patients with RHD and NC patients. When liking judgments were based on facial expressions, patients with RHD were liked less than patients with LHD and NC patients. CONCLUSIONS: The verbal behavior of patients with LHD and the nonverbal behavior of patients with RHD may affect others' impressions of them, and consequently put these patients at interpersonal risk.

Adult↗

Interaction of prime and target in the subliminal affective priming effect.

It has been found that an emotional stimulus such as a facial expression presented subliminally can affect subsequent information processing and behavior, usually by shifting evaluation of a subsequent stimulus to a valence congruent with the previous stimulus. This phenomenon is called subliminal affective priming. The present study was conducted to replicate and expand previous findings by investigating interaction of primes and targets in the affective priming effect. Two conditions were used. Prime (subliminal presentation 35 msec.) of an angry face of a woman and a No Prime control condition. Just after presentation of the prime, an ambiguous angry face or an emotionally neutral face was presented above the threshold of awareness (500 msec.). 12 female undergraduate women judged categories of facial expressions (Anger, Neutral, or Happiness) for the target faces. Analysis indicated that the Anger primes significantly facilitated judgment of anger for the ambiguous angry faces; however, the priming effect of the Anger primes was not observed for neutral faces. Consequently, the present finding suggested that a subliminal affective priming effect should be more prominent when affective valence of primes and targets is congruent.

Adult↗

Contextual modulation of amygdala responsivity to surprised faces.

We recently demonstrated a functional relationship between fMRI responses within the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex based upon whether subjects interpreted surprised facial expressions positively or negatively. In the present fMRI study, we sought to assess amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex responsivity when the interpretations of surprised faces were determined by contextual experimental stimuli, rather than subjective judgment. Subjects passively viewed individual presentations of surprised faces preceded by either a negatively or positively valenced contextual sentence (e. g., She just found $500 vs. She just lost $500). Negative and positive sentences were carefully matched in terms of length, situations described, and arousal level. Negatively cued surprised faces produced greater ventral amygdala activation compared to positively cued surprised faces. Responses to negative versus positive sentences were greater within the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, whereas responses to positive versus negative sentences were greater within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The present study demonstrates that amygdala response to surprised facial expressions can be modulated by negatively versus positively valenced verbal contextual information. Connectivity analyses identified candidate cortical-subcortical systems subserving this modulation.

Adult↗

Dosage-sensitive X-linked locus influences the development of amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, and fear recognition in humans.

The amygdala, which plays a critical role in emotional learning and social cognition, is structurally and functionally sexually dimorphic in humans. We used magnetic neuroimaging and molecular genetic analyses with healthy subjects and patients possessing X-chromosome anomalies to find dosage-sensitive genes that might influence amygdala development. If such X-linked genes lacked a homologue on the Y-chromosome they would be expressed in one copy in normal 46,XY males and two copies in normal 46,XX females. We showed by means of magnetic neuroimaging that 46,XY males possess significantly increased amygdala volumes relative to normal 46,XX females. However, females with Turner syndrome (45,X) have even larger amygdalae than 46,XY males. This finding implies that haploinsufficiency for one or more X-linked genes influences amygdala development irrespective of a direct or indirect (endocrinological) mechanism involving the Y-chromosome. 45,X females also have increased grey matter volume in the orbitofrontal cortex bilaterally, close to a region implicated in emotional learning. They are as poor as patients with bilateral amygdalectomies in the recognition of fear from facial expressions. We attempted to localize the gene(s) responsible for these deficits in X-monosomy by means of a deletion mapping strategy. We studied female patients possessing structural X-anomalies of the short arm. A genetic locus (no greater than 4.96 Mb in size) at Xp11.3 appears to play a key role in amygdala and orbitofrontal structural and (by implication) functional development. Females with partial X-chromosome deletions, in whom this critical locus is deleted, have normal intelligence. Their fear recognition is as poor as that of 45,X females and their amygdalae are correspondingly enlarged. This 4.96 Mb region contains, among others, the genes for monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and B (MAOB), which are involved in the oxidative deamination of several neurotransmitters, including dopamine and serotonin. Abnormal activity of these neurotransmitters has been implicated in the aetiology of several neurodevelopmental disorders in which social cognitive deficits are prominent. These associated deficits include a specific lack of fear recognition from facial expressions. We show that the thrombocytic activity of MAOB is proportionate to the number of X-chromosomes, and hypothesize that haploinsufficiency of this enzyme in 45,X females predisposes to their deficits in social cognition.

Adolescent↗

Emotional attribution in high-functioning individuals with autistic spectrum disorder: a functional imaging study.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether expertise in the attribution of emotion from basic facial expressions in high-functioning individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) is supported by the amygdala, fusiform, and prefrontal regions of interest (ROI) and is comparable to that of typically developing individuals. METHOD: Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were acquired from 14 males with ASD and 10 matched adolescent controls while performing emotion match (EM) (perceptual), emotion label (EL) (linguistic), and control tasks. Accuracy, response time, and average activation were measured for each ROI. RESULTS: There was no significant difference in accuracy, response time, or ROI activation between groups performing the EL task. The ASD group was as accurate as the control group performing the EM task but had a significantly longer response time and lower average fusiform activation. CONCLUSIONS: Expertise in the attribution of emotion from basic facial expressions was task-dependent in the high-functioning ASD group. The hypothesis that the high-functioning ASD group would be less expert and would have reduced fusiform activation was supported in the perceptual task but not the linguistic task. The reduced fusiform activation in the perceptual task was not explained by reduced expertise; it is therefore concluded that reduced fusiform activation is associated with the diagnosis of ASD.

Adolescent↗

Impaired auditory recognition of fear and anger following bilateral amygdala lesions.

The amygdalar complex is a medial temporal lobe structure in the brain which is widely considered to be involved in the neural substrates of emotion. Selective bilateral damage to the human amygdala is rare, offering a unique insight into its functions. There is impairment of social perception after amygdala damage, with defective recognition of facial expressions of emotion. Among the basic emotions, the processing of fear and anger has been shown to be disrupted by amygdala damage. Although it remains puzzling why this not found in all cases, the importance of the amygdala in negative emotion, and especially fear, has been confirmed by conditioning, memory and positron emission tomography (PET) experiments. Central to our understanding of these findings is the question of whether the amygdala is involved specifically in the perception of visual signals of emotion emanating from the face, or more widely in the perception of emotion in all sensory modalities. We report here a further investigation of one of these rare cases, a woman (D.R.) who has impaired perception of the intonation patterns that are essential to the perception of vocal affect, despite normal hearing. As is the case for recognition of facial expressions, it is recognition of fear and anger that is most severely affected in the auditory domain. This shows that the amygdala's role in the recognition of certain emotions is not confined to vision, which is consistent with its being involved in the appraisal of danger and the emotion of fear.

Amygdala↗

Expressed emotion and airway conductance in children with bronchial asthma.

Fourteen asthmatic children (ages 9-11) and their controls were exposed to a stress inducing competitive achievement situation. Facial expression of emotions were systematically analyzed from video-recordings, and peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR) reduction was measured from pre-stress to post-stress. The asthmatic children showed a significantly lower frequency and duration of overall emotional expression than their controls. Specifically, the frequency and duration of expressed anger/rage, enjoyment/joy, and surprise/startle were lower in the asthmatic children. Moreover, duration of overall expressed emotion showed a significant negative correlation with PEFR reduction in the asthmatic group, indicating a relevant relationship between facial expression of emotions and breathing function.

Airway Resistance↗