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PubMed2006

Amygdala response to facial expressions reflects emotional learning.

The functional role of the human amygdala in the evaluation of emotional facial expressions is unclear. Previous animal and human research shows that the amygdala participates in processing positive and negative reinforcement as well as in learning predictive associations between stimuli and subsequent reinforcement. Thus, amygdala response to facial expressions could reflect the processing of primary reinforcement or emotional learning. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested the hypothesis that amygdala response to facial expressions is driven by emotional association learning. We show that the amygdala is more responsive to learning object-emotion associations from happy and fearful facial expressions than it is to the presentation of happy and fearful facial expressions alone. The results provide evidence that the amygdala uses social signals to rapidly and flexibly learn threatening and rewarding associations that ultimately serve to enhance survival.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Speech gestures and facial expression in speechreading.

Two experiments investigated the role of facial expression in speechreading. In Experiment 1 sentences were presented either with only the actor's face shown or with the actor shown in half-size. One happy script with happy, sad and neutral sentences was used, and either a content cue or an emotional cue was presented prior to each sentence. In Experiment 2 happy and sad sentences from one happy and one sad script were first recorded by the actor with a neutral face (face and shoulder shown) and then with a congruent facial expression. The results revealed that there was no difference in performance between half-size and face presentation, but content cues increased performance compared to emotional cues. As expected (Abelson, 1981), happy sentences were easier to speechread than sad in the happy script and vice versa. Also, facial expression raised performance for happy sentences in the happy script. Positive emotions are suggested to be associated with approach behavior in part relying on increased non-pantomimic speech gestures and articulation of the speaker (e.g., Davidson et al., 1990).

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Facial-expression affective attributes and their configural correlates: components and categories.

The present study investigates the perception of facial expressions of emotion, and explores the relation between the configural properties of expressions and their subjective attribution. Stimuli were a male and a female series of morphed facial expressions, interpolated between prototypes of seven emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, and neutral) from Ekman and Friesen (1976). Topographical properties of the stimuli were quantified using the Facial Expression Measurement (FACEM) scheme. Perceived dissimilarities between the emotional expressions were elicited using a sorting procedure and processed with multidimensional scaling. Four dimensions were retained in the reconstructed facial-expression space, with positive and negative expressions opposed along D1, while the other three dimensions were interpreted as affective attributes distinguishing clusters of expressions categorized as "Surprise-Fear," "Anger," and "Disgust." Significant relationships were found between these affective attributes and objective facial measures of the stimuli. The findings support a componential explanatory scheme for expression processing, wherein each component of a facial stimulus conveys an affective value separable from its context, rather than a categorical-gestalt scheme. The findings further suggest that configural information is closely involved in the decoding of affective attributes of facial expressions. Configural measures are also suggested as a common ground for dimensional as well as categorical perception of emotional faces.

Emotions↗
PubMed2006

A fine-grained analysis of facial expression processing in high-functioning adults with autism.

It is unclear whether individuals with autism are impaired at recognizing basic facial expressions, and whether, if any impairment exists, it applies to expression processing in general, or to certain expressions, in particular. To evaluate these alternatives, we adopted a fine-grained analysis of facial expression processing in autism. Specifically, we used the 'facial expression megamix' paradigm [Young, A. W., Rowland, D., Calder, A. J, Etcoff, N. L., Seth, A., & Perrett, D. I. (1997). Facial expression megamix: Tests of dimensional and category accounts of emotion recognition Cognition and Emotion, 14, 39-60] in which adults with autism and a typically developing comparison group performed a six alternative forced-choice response to morphs of all possible combinations of the six basic expressions identified by Ekman [Ekman, P. (1972). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In J. K. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation: vol. 1971, (pp. 207-283). Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press] (happiness, sadness, disgust, anger, fear and surprise). Clear differences were evident between the two groups, most obviously in the recognition of fear, but also in the recognition of disgust and happiness. A second experiment demonstrated that individuals with autism are able to discriminate between different emotional images and suggests that low-level perceptual difficulties do not underlie the difficulties with emotion recognition.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2007

A detailed investigation of facial expression processing in congenital prosopagnosia as compared to acquired prosopagnosia.

Whether the ability to recognize facial expression can be preserved in the absence of the recognition of facial identity remains controversial. The current study reports the results of a detailed investigation of facial expression recognition in three congenital prosopagnosic (CP) participants, in comparison with two patients with acquired prosopagnosia (AP) and a large group of 30 neurologically normal participants, including individually age- and gender-matched controls. Participants completed a fine-grained expression recognition paradigm requiring a six-alternative forced-choice response to continua of morphs of six different basic facial expressions (e.g. happiness and surprise). Accuracy, sensitivity and reaction times were measured. The performance of all three CP individuals was indistinguishable from that of controls, even for the most subtle expressions. In contrast, both individuals with AP displayed pronounced difficulties with the majority of expressions. The results from the CP participants attest to the dissociability of the processing of facial identity and of facial expression. Whether this remarkably good expression recognition is achieved through normal, or compensatory, mechanisms remains to be determined. Either way, this normal level of performance does not extend to include facial identity.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Increased medial temporal lobe activation during the passive viewing of emotional and neutral facial expressions in schizophrenia.

INTRODUCTION: Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in facial affect and facial identity recognition and exhibit structural and neurophysiological abnormalities in brain regions known to mediate these processes. Functional neuroimaging studies of neural responses to emotional facial expressions in schizophrenia have reported both increases and decreases in medial temporal lobe (MTL) activity in schizophrenia. Some of this variability may be related to the tasks performed and the baseline conditions used. Here we tested whether MTL responses to human faces in schizophrenia are abnormal when unconstrained by a cognitive task and measured relative to a low-level baseline (fixation) condition. METHODS: 15 patients with schizophrenia and 16 healthy control subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while passively viewing human faces displaying fearful, happy, and neutral emotional expressions. RESULTS: Relative to control subjects, the patients demonstrated (1) significantly greater activation of the left hippocampus while viewing all three facial expressions and (2) increased right amygdala activation during the initial presentation of fearful and neutral facial expressions. CONCLUSIONS: In schizophrenia, hippocampal and amygdala activity is elevated during the passive viewing of human faces.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

The acute and sub-acute effects of 'ecstasy' (MDMA) on processing of facial expressions: preliminary findings.

RATIONALE: There is evidence that serotonergic processes may modulate the processing of fearful facial expressions. It is therefore possible that the recreational drug 'ecstasy' (MDMA), which has marked serotonergic effects, may affect people's ability to recognise human facial expressions portraying fear. OBJECTIVE: The present study therefore aimed to determine whether ecstasy users differed from controls in fear recognition at two time points: shortly after taking the drug and a few days later. METHODS: Sixteen ecstasy users and 21 controls were compared on a facial expression recognition task involving the 6 basic emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear and disgust) and on self-ratings of mood on the night of drug use (day 0) and 4 days later (day 4). RESULTS: In recognising fearful facial expressions, ecstasy users were more accurate than controls on day 0 but less accurate than them on day 4 when compared with their overall ability to recognise other basic emotions. Accuracy of fear recognition on day 4 was negatively correlated with both years of ecstasy use and number of ecstasy tablets taken on a typical session. On self-rated aggression scales, ecstasy users scored lower than controls on day 0 and higher on day 4. CONCLUSIONS: These results support the notion that 5-HT plays a role in modulating the recognition of fearful facial expressions. Increased accuracy of fear recognition may relate to 5-HT release following ecstasy use on day 0, and decreased accuracy may reflect subsequent depletion of 5-HT mid-week.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

The recognition of facial expressions in the first two years of life: mechanisms of development.

In recent years the infant's ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion has attracted considerable attention from developmental psychologists. The rationale guiding much of this research has been that this ability plays an important role in later socioemotional development. In the present article, the research relating to this topic is reviewed and synthesized. It is concluded that the recognition of facial expressions develops slowly over the first 2 years of life, and that even at the end of the second year the infant's understanding of facial expressions is still quite rudimentary. Following this review is a discussion of 2 unresolved issues regarding the development of this ability. 1 issue relates to the biological/experimental basis on which the ability to recognize facial expressions develops. Research with primates is brought to bear on this point, and useful analogues with human infants are sought. From this research it is suggested that a component of the ability to recognize facial expressions is unlearned, although experience of some as yet undetermined nature affects this biological readiness. The second issue relates to the possible neurological mechanisms that mediate this ability. Research with primates, normal adults, and brain damaged adults is used to support the speculation that a posterior region of the right hemisphere is responsible for mediating the recognition of facial expressions.

Affect↗
PubMed2006

Spontaneous facial mimicry in response to dynamic facial expressions.

Based on previous neuroscientific evidence indicating activation of the mirror neuron system in response to dynamic facial actions, we hypothesized that facial mimicry would occur while subjects viewed dynamic facial expressions. To test this hypothesis, dynamic/static facial expressions of anger/happiness were presented using computer-morphing (Experiment 1) and videos (Experiment 2). The subjects' facial actions were unobtrusively videotaped and blindly coded using Facial Action Coding System [FACS; Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial action coding system. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologist]. In the dynamic presentations common to both experiments, brow lowering, a prototypical action in angry expressions, occurred more frequently in response to angry expressions than to happy expressions. The pulling of lip corners, a prototypical action in happy expressions, occurred more frequently in response to happy expressions than to angry expressions in dynamic presentations. Additionally, the mean latency of these actions was less than 900 ms after the onset of dynamic changes in facial expression. Naive raters recognized the subjects' facial reactions as emotional expressions, with the valence corresponding to the dynamic facial expressions that the subjects were viewing. These results indicate that dynamic facial expressions elicit spontaneous and rapid facial mimicry, which functions both as a form of intra-individual processing and as inter-individual communication.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Enhanced recognition of facial expressions of disgust in opiate users receiving maintenance treatment.

AIMS: Accurate recognition of facial expressions of emotion is critical in interpersonal interaction but is impaired in alcoholics, even after a period of abstinence. Little is known of whether other drug-dependent populations also show these impairments. This study aimed to investigate facial expression recognition by chronic opiate users. DESIGN: An independent group design was used to compare 20 participants receiving opiate substitution treatment, 20 ex-opiate users in rehabilitation (average abstinence of 6 months) and 21 unemployed healthy controls. MEASUREMENTS: The accuracy and speed of recognizing morphed emotional facial expressions were assessed using an emotional hexagon task. FINDINGS: Current opiate users were significantly more accurate than ex-users at recognizing expressions of disgust. They were also generally slower than controls in recognizing all expressions, and slower than ex-opiate users in recognizing surprise, happy and fearful expressions. CONCLUSIONS: Opiate users in maintenance treatment show a heightened ability to recognize facial expressions of disgust. We suggest that this may reflect increased exposure to other people's expressions of disgust and/or priming by the physical and social environments encountered by opiate-dependent individuals. Further, opiate maintained individuals' global slowness in processing emotional expressions may reflect the sedative effects of methadone.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

The forced-choice paradigm and the perception of facial expressions of emotion.

The view that certain facial expressions of emotion are universally agreed on has been challenged by studies showing that the forced-choice paradigm may have artificially forced agreement. This article addressed this methodological criticism by offering participants the opportunity to select a none of these terms are correct option from a list of emotion labels in a modified forced-choice paradigm. The results show that agreement on the emotion label for particular facial expressions is still greater than chance, that artifactual agreement on incorrect emotion labels is obviated, that participants select the none option when asked to judge a novel expression, and that adding 4 more emotion labels does not change the pattern of agreement reported in universality studies. Although the original forced-choice format may have been prone to artifactual agreement, the modified forced-choice format appears to remedy that problem.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Spontaneous facial expression of emotions in brain-damaged patients.

Spontaneous facial expression of emotion was studied in two groups of right (N = 23) and left (N = 39) brain-damaged patients and in a control group of normal subjects (N = 28). To elicit emotions four short movies, constructed to produce positive, negative or neutral emotional responses, were used. The method used to assess the facial expression of emotions was the Facial Action Coding System. Brain-damaged patients showed less facial responses to emotional stimuli than normal controls, but no difference was observed between subjects with right and left-sided lesions either with global or disaggregated data analyses, inconsistent with the hypothesis of a specialization of the right hemisphere for facial emotional expressions. An unexpected difference was observed in response to the unpleasant movie. Both normal controls and left brain-damaged patients often averted their gaze from the screen when unpleasant material was displayed, whereas right brain-damaged patients rarely showed gaze aversion. This finding suggests that the degree of emotional involvement or manner of coping with stressful input may be reduced as a result of right brain damage.

Affect↗
PubMedDate not supplied

An evaluation of facial expression displayed by patients with chest pain.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether patterns of facial expressions of patients complaining of chest pain can aid in the diagnosis of myocardial infarctions. DESIGN: Exploratory. SETTING: Southeastern university medical center emergency department (ED). PATIENTS: Twenty-eight patients in the ED who presented with chest pain. Age range was 40 to 84 years, with a mean of 65.4 years. OUTCOME MEASURES: Common patterns of facial expressions among patients diagnosed with myocardial infarction. INTERVENTION: On admission to the ED, patients were videotaped during physical examination. Videotapes were reviewed to code the facial action units exhibited by the patients. The presence or absence of creatine kinase (CK) enzymes was determined; these results were blinded to the coders until after all facial actions were coded. RESULTS: With use of the Facial Action Coding System, 4 facial expressions were found to be associated with true myocardial infarction: lowering the brow, pressing the lips, parting the lips, and turning the head left. CONCLUSION: Additional research with a larger sample of patients presenting with chest pain is needed to validate the findings of this study. However, if these findings are supported, instruction regarding assessment of specific facial expressions in clinical settings may be warranted.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Cynical hostility and the accuracy of decoding facial expressions of emotions.

To examine the relation between cynical hostility and the accuracy of decoding facial expressions of emotions, 101 young adult participants completed the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale and Ekman's Pictures of Facial Affect. Results revealed that higher hostility scores were correlated with a greater number of errors in decoding facial expressions of emotions. Hostile individuals were more likely than nonhostile individuals to label inaccurately facial expressions of "disgust" as being "anger" and of "happiness" as being "neutral." Results also revealed that males were more likely than females to label incorrectly facial expressions of disgust as anger. Partial correlations, controlling for gender, revealed that the relation between hostility and inaccurate perceptions of facial portrayals of happiness was significant, whereas the relation between hostility and inaccurate perceptions of facial displays of disgust was no longer significant.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Facial expression recognition in people with medicated and unmedicated Parkinson's disease.

Recognition of facial expressions of emotion was investigated in people with medicated and unmedicated Parkinson's disease (PD) and matched controls (unmedicated PD, n=16; medicated PD, n=20; controls, n=40). Participants in the medicated group showed some visual impairment (impaired contrast sensitivity) and performed less well on perception of unfamiliar face identity, but did not show significant deficits in the perception of sex, gaze direction, or familiar identity from the face. For both Parkinson's disease groups, there was evidence of impaired recognition of facial expressions in comparison to controls. These deficits were more consistently noted in the unmedicated group, who were also found to perform worse than the medicated group at recognising disgust from prototypical facial expressions, and at recognising anger and disgust in computer-manipulated images. Although both Parkinson's disease groups showed impairments of facial expression recognition, the consistently worse recognition of disgust in the unmedicated group is consistent with the hypothesis from previous studies that brain regions modulated by dopaminergic neurons are involved in the recognition of disgust.

Aged↗
PubMed2001

Administration of the beta-adrenoceptor blocker propranolol impairs the processing of facial expressions of sadness.

RATIONALE: Noradrenergic processes within the amygdala have been implicated in the modulation of memory for emotional material. The amygdala has also been associated with the processing of facial expressions of emotion, particularly those of fear and sadness. However, the role of noradrenaline in the latter process is unknown. OBJECTIVE: Therefore the present study examined the effect of an oral beta-blocker (propranolol, 80 mg) upon facial expression recognition in healthy volunteers. METHODS: Facial expressions of six basic emotions, which had been "morphed" between neutral and each emotional standard, were used in the recognition task. Subjects completed this task both before and 1 h following either propranolol or a placebo. Control measures of choice reaction time and vigilance performance were also included to assess any non-specific effects of the drug upon alertness and speed. RESULTS: The administration of propranolol, relative to placebo, specifically increased reaction time to identify facial expressions of sadness correctly, in the absence of changes in speed to recognise other facial expressions of emotion. Subjective ratings of mood and alertness as well as speed in the two control tasks were not altered by propranolol, arguing against an account in terms of general sedation. CONCLUSIONS: These data suggest that noradrenergic processes are not only involved in memory for emotional material but also in the evaluation of sadness from facial expression. The selective nature of this effect adds to evidence suggesting that the recognition of different expressions of emotion depends upon at least partly separable neural processes. A role for noradrenaline in recognising sadness in others has potential relevance for our understanding of disorders characterised by disturbances in emotional processing.

Administration, Oral↗
PubMed1998

Neural structures associated with recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions.

People with Huntington's disease and people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder show severe deficits in recognizing facial expressions of disgust, whereas people with lesions restricted to the amygdala are especially impaired in recognizing facial expressions of fear. This double dissociation implies that recognition of certain basic emotions may be associated with distinct and non-overlapping neural substrates. Some authors, however, emphasize the general importance of the ventral parts of the frontal cortex in emotion recognition, regardless of the emotion being recognized. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate neural structures that are critical for recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions by investigating cerebral activation of six healthy adults performing a gender discrimination task on images of faces expressing disgust, fear and anger. Activation in response to these faces was compared with that for faces showing neutral expressions. Disgusted facial expressions activated the right putamen and the left insula cortex, whereas enhanced activity in the posterior part of the right gyrus cinguli and the medial temporal gyrus of the left hemisphere was observed during processing of angry faces. Fearful expressions activated the right fusiform gyrus and the left dorsolateral frontal cortex. For all three emotions investigated, we also found activation of the inferior part of the left frontal cortex (Brodmann area 47). These results support the hypotheses derived from neuropsychological findings, that (i) recognition of disgust, fear and anger is based on separate neural systems, and that (ii) the output of these systems converges on frontal regions for further information processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Are facial expressions reproducible?

OBJECTIVES: To determine the extent of reproducibility of five facial expressions. DESIGN: Thirty healthy Caucasian volunteers (15 males, 15 females) aged 21 to 30 years had 20 landmarks highlighted on the face with a fine eyeliner pencil. Subjects were asked to perform a sequence of five facial expressions that were captured by a three-dimensional camera system. Each expression was repeated after 15 minutes to investigate intrasession expression reproducibility. To investigate intersession expression reproducibility, each subject returned 2 weeks after the first session. A single operator identified 3-dimensional coordinate values of each landmark. A partial ordinary procrustes analysis was used to adjust for differences in head posture between similar expressions. Statistical analysis was undertaken using analysis of variance (linear mixed effects model). RESULTS: Intrasession expression reproducibility was least between cheek puffs (1.12 mm) and greatest between rest positions (0.74 mm). The reproducibility of individual landmarks was expression specific. Except for the lip purse, the reproducibility of facial expressions was not statistically different within each of the two sessions. Rest position was most reproducible, followed by lip purse, maximal smile, natural smile, and cheek puff. Subjects did not perform expressions with the same degree of symmetry on each occasion. Female subjects demonstrated significantly better reproducibility with regard to the maximal smile than males (p =.036). CONCLUSIONS: Under standardized conditions, intrasession expression reproducibility was high. Variation in expression reproducibility between sessions was minimal. The extent of reproducibility is expression specific. Differences in expression reproducibility exist between males and females.

Adult↗