"Who Said That?" Matching of Low- and High-Intensity Emotional Prosody to Facial Expressions by Adolescents with ASD

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grossman, Ruth B.; Tager-Flusberg, Helen

2012-01-01

Data on emotion processing by individuals with ASD suggest both intact abilities and significant deficits. Signal intensity may be a contributing factor to this discrepancy. We presented low- and high-intensity emotional stimuli in a face-voice matching task to 22 adolescents with ASD and 22 typically developing (TD) peers. Participants heard…

Effects of emotionally valenced working memory taxation on negative memories.

PubMed

Tsai, Cynthia; McNally, Richard J

2014-03-01

Memories enter a labile state during recollection. Thus, memory changes that occur during recollection can affect future instances of its activation. Having subjects perform a secondary task that taxes working memory while they recall a negative emotional memory often reduces its vividness and emotional intensity during subsequent recollections. However, researchers have not manipulated the emotional valence of the secondary task itself. Subjects viewed a video depicting the aftermath of three fatal road traffic accidents, establishing the same negative emotional memory for all subjects. We then tested their memory for the video after randomly assigning them to no secondary task or a delayed match-to-sample secondary task involving photographs of positive, negative, or neutral emotional valence. The positive secondary task reduced memory for details about the video, whereas negative and neutral tasks did not. We did not assess the vividness and emotionality of the subjects' memory of the video. Having subjects recall a stressful experience while performing a positively valent secondary task can decrement details of the memory and perhaps its emotionality. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cognitive Flexibility in ASD; Task Switching with Emotional Faces

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

de Vries, Marieke; Geurts, Hilde M.

2012-01-01

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) show daily cognitive flexibility deficits, but laboratory data are unconvincing. The current study aimed to bridge this gap. Thirty-one children with ASD (8-12 years) and 31 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children performed a gender emotion switch task. Unannounced switches and complex…

Facial emotion perception in Chinese patients with schizophrenia and non-psychotic first-degree relatives.

PubMed

Li, Huijie; Chan, Raymond C K; Zhao, Qing; Hong, Xiaohong; Gong, Qi-Yong

2010-03-17

Although there is a consensus that patients with schizophrenia have certain deficits in perceiving and expressing facial emotions, previous studies of facial emotion perception in schizophrenia do not present consistent results. The objective of this study was to explore facial emotion perception deficits in Chinese patients with schizophrenia and their non-psychotic first-degree relatives. Sixty-nine patients with schizophrenia, 56 of their first-degree relatives (33 parents and 23 siblings), and 92 healthy controls (67 younger healthy controls matched to the patients and siblings, and 25 older healthy controls matched to the parents) completed a set of facial emotion perception tasks, including facial emotion discrimination, identification, intensity, valence, and corresponding face identification tasks. The results demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia performed significantly worse than their siblings and younger healthy controls in accuracy in a variety of facial emotion perception tasks, whereas the siblings of the patients performed as well as the corresponding younger healthy controls in all of the facial emotion perception tasks. Patients with schizophrenia also showed significantly reduced speed than younger healthy controls, while siblings of patients did not demonstrate significant differences with both patients and younger healthy controls in speed. Meanwhile, we also found that parents of the schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse than the corresponding older healthy controls in accuracy in terms of facial emotion identification, valence, and the composite index of the facial discrimination, identification, intensity and valence tasks. Moreover, no significant differences were found between the parents of patients and older healthy controls in speed after controlling the years of education and IQ. Taken together, the results suggest that facial emotion perception deficits may serve as potential endophenotypes for schizophrenia. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

How Mood and Task Complexity Affect Children's Recognition of Others’ Emotions

PubMed Central

Cummings, Andrew J.; Rennels, Jennifer L.

2013-01-01

Previous studies examined how mood affects children's accuracy in matching emotional expressions and labels (label-based tasks). This study was the first to assess how induced mood (positive, neutral, or negative) influenced 5- to 8-year-olds’ accuracy and reaction time using both context-based tasks, which required inferring a character's emotion from a vignette, and label-based tasks. Both tasks required choosing one of four facial expressions to respond. Children responded more accurately to label-based questions relative to context-based questions at 5 to 7 years of age, but showed no differences at 8 years of age, and when the emotional expression being identified was happiness, sadness, or surprise, but not disgust. For the context-based questions, children were more accurate at inferring sad and disgusted emotions compared to happy and surprised emotions. Induced positive mood facilitated 5-year-olds’ processing (decreased reaction time) in both tasks compared to induced negative and neutral moods. Results demonstrate how task type and children's mood influence children's emotion processing at different ages. PMID:24489442

Neural bases of different cognitive strategies for facial affect processing in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Fakra, Eric; Salgado-Pineda, Pilar; Delaveau, Pauline; Hariri, Ahmad R; Blin, Olivier

2008-03-01

To examine the neural basis and dynamics of facial affect processing in schizophrenic patients as compared to healthy controls. Fourteen schizophrenic patients and fourteen matched controls performed a facial affect identification task during fMRI acquisition. The emotional task included an intuitive emotional condition (matching emotional faces) and a more cognitively demanding condition (labeling emotional faces). Individual analysis for each emotional condition, and second-level t-tests examining both within-, and between-group differences, were carried out using a random effects approach. Psychophysiological interactions (PPI) were tested for variations in functional connectivity between amygdala and other brain regions as a function of changes in experimental conditions (labeling versus matching). During the labeling condition, both groups engaged similar networks. During the matching condition, schizophrenics failed to activate regions of the limbic system implicated in the automatic processing of emotions. PPI revealed an inverse functional connectivity between prefrontal regions and the left amygdala in healthy volunteers but there was no such change in patients. Furthermore, during the matching condition, and compared to controls, patients showed decreased activation of regions involved in holistic face processing (fusiform gyrus) and increased activation of regions associated with feature analysis (inferior parietal cortex, left middle temporal lobe, right precuneus). Our findings suggest that schizophrenic patients invariably adopt a cognitive approach when identifying facial affect. The distributed neocortical network observed during the intuitive condition indicates that patients may resort to feature-based, rather than configuration-based, processing and may constitute a compensatory strategy for limbic dysfunction.

Right hemisphere specialization for the identification of emotional words and sentences: evidence from stroke patients.

PubMed

Borod, J C; Andelman, F; Obler, L K; Tweedy, J R; Welkowitz, J

1992-09-01

This study examines the contribution of the lexical/verbal channel to emotional processing in 16 right brain-damaged (RBD), 16 left brain-damaged (LBD) and 16 normal control (NC) right-handed adults. Emotional lexical perception tasks were developed; analogous nonemotional tasks were created to control for cognitive and linguistic factors. The three subject groups were matched for gender, age and education. The brain-damaged groups were similar with respect to cerebrovascular etiology, months post-onset, sensory-motor status and lesion location. Parallel emotional and nonemotional tasks included word identification, sentence identification and word discrimination. For both word tasks, RBDs were significantly more impaired than LBDs and NCs in the emotional condition. For all three tasks, RBDs showed a significantly greater performance discrepancy between emotional and nonemotional conditions than did LBDs or NCs. Results were not affected by the valence (i.e. positive/negative) of the stimuli. These findings suggest a dominant role for the right hemisphere in the perception of lexically-based emotional stimuli.

Modulation of the composite face effect by unintended emotion cues.

PubMed

Gray, Katie L H; Murphy, Jennifer; Marsh, Jade E; Cook, Richard

2017-04-01

When upper and lower regions from different emotionless faces are aligned to form a facial composite, observers 'fuse' the two halves together, perceptually. The illusory distortion induced by task-irrelevant ('distractor') halves hinders participants' judgements about task-relevant ('target') halves. This composite-face effect reveals a tendency to integrate feature information from disparate regions of intact upright faces, consistent with theories of holistic face processing. However, observers frequently perceive emotion in ostensibly neutral faces, contrary to the intentions of experimenters. This study sought to determine whether this 'perceived emotion' influences the composite-face effect. In our first experiment, we confirmed that the composite effect grows stronger as the strength of distractor emotion increased. Critically, effects of distractor emotion were induced by weak emotion intensities, and were incidental insofar as emotion cues hindered image matching, not emotion labelling per se . In Experiment 2, we found a correlation between the presence of perceived emotion in a set of ostensibly neutral distractor regions sourced from commonly used face databases, and the strength of illusory distortion they induced. In Experiment 3, participants completed a sequential matching composite task in which half of the distractor regions were rated high and low for perceived emotion, respectively. Significantly stronger composite effects were induced by the high-emotion distractor halves. These convergent results suggest that perceived emotion increases the strength of the composite-face effect induced by supposedly emotionless faces. These findings have important implications for the study of holistic face processing in typical and atypical populations.

Awareness and Regulation of Emotions in Deaf Children

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rieffe, Carolien

2012-01-01

In this study, deaf children's understanding of their own emotions was compared with that of hearing peers. Twenty-six deaf children (mean age 11 years) and 26 hearing children, matched for age and gender, were presented with various tasks that tap into their emotion awareness and regulation (coping) regarding the four basic emotions (happiness,…

Neural Mechanism of Inferring Person's Inner Attitude towards Another Person through Observing the Facial Affect in an Emotional Context.

PubMed

Kim, Ji-Woong; Kim, Jae-Jin; Jeong, Bumseok; Kim, Sung-Eun; Ki, Seon Wan

2010-03-01

The goal of the present study was to identify the brain mechanism involved in the attribution of person's attitude toward another person, using facial affective pictures and pictures displaying an affectively-loaded situation. Twenty four right-handed healthy subjects volunteered for our study. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine brain activation during attitude attribution task as compared to gender matching tasks. We identified activation in the left inferior frontal cortex, left superior temporal sulcus, and left inferior parietal lobule during the attitude attribution task, compared to the gender matching task. This study suggests that mirror neuron system and ventrolateral inferior frontal cortex play a critical role in the attribution of a person's inner attitude towards another person in an emotional situation.

“Who said that?” Matching of low- and high-intensity emotional prosody to facial expressions by adolescents with ASD

PubMed Central

Grossman, Ruth B; Tager-Flusberg, Helen

2012-01-01

Data on emotion processing by individuals with ASD suggest both intact abilities and significant deficits. Signal intensity may be a contributing factor to this discrepancy. We presented low- and high-intensity emotional stimuli in a face-voice matching task to 22 adolescents with ASD and 22 typically developing (TD) peers. Participants heard semantically neutral sentences with happy, surprised, angry, and sad prosody presented at two intensity levels (low, high) and matched them to emotional faces. The facial expression choice was either across- or within-valence. Both groups were less accurate for low-intensity emotions, but the ASD participants' accuracy levels dropped off more sharply. ASD participants were significantly less accurate than their TD peers for trials involving low-intensity emotions and within-valence face contrasts. PMID:22450703

Emotion recognition in Parkinson's disease: Static and dynamic factors.

PubMed

Wasser, Cory I; Evans, Felicity; Kempnich, Clare; Glikmann-Johnston, Yifat; Andrews, Sophie C; Thyagarajan, Dominic; Stout, Julie C

2018-02-01

The authors tested the hypothesis that Parkinson's disease (PD) participants would perform better in an emotion recognition task with dynamic (video) stimuli compared to a task using only static (photograph) stimuli and compared performances on both tasks to healthy control participants. In a within-subjects study, 21 PD participants and 20 age-matched healthy controls performed both static and dynamic emotion recognition tasks. The authors used a 2-way analysis of variance (controlling for individual participant variance) to determine the effect of group (PD, control) on emotion recognition performance in static and dynamic facial recognition tasks. Groups did not significantly differ in their performances on the static and dynamic tasks; however, the trend was suggestive that PD participants performed worse than controls. PD participants may have subtle emotion recognition deficits that are not ameliorated by the addition of contextual cues, similar to those found in everyday scenarios. Consistent with previous literature, the results suggest that PD participants may have underlying emotion recognition deficits, which may impact their social functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Facial emotion recognition is inversely correlated with tremor severity in essential tremor.

PubMed

Auzou, Nicolas; Foubert-Samier, Alexandra; Dupouy, Sandrine; Meissner, Wassilios G

2014-04-01

We here assess limbic and orbitofrontal control in 20 patients with essential tremor (ET) and 18 age-matched healthy controls using the Ekman Facial Emotion Recognition Task and the IOWA Gambling Task. Our results show an inverse relation between facial emotion recognition and tremor severity. ET patients also showed worse performance in joy and fear recognition, as well as subtle abnormalities in risk detection, but these differences did not reach significance after correction for multiple testing.

Effects of Valence and Origin of Emotions in Word Processing Evidenced by Event Related Potential Correlates in a Lexical Decision Task

PubMed Central

Imbir, Kamil K.; Spustek, Tomasz; Żygierewicz, Jarosław

2016-01-01

This paper presents behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional word processing during a lexical decision task (LDT). We showed that valence and origin (two distinct affective properties of stimuli) help to account for the ERP correlates of LDT. The origin of emotion is a factor derived from the emotion duality model. This model distinguishes between the automatic and controlled elicitation of emotional states. The subjects’ task was to discriminate words from pseudo-words. The stimulus words were carefully selected to differ with respect to valence and origin whilst being matched with respect to arousal, concreteness, length and frequency in natural language. Pseudo-words were matched to words with respect to length. The subjects were 32 individuals aged from 19 to 26 years who were invited to participate in an EEG study of lexical decision making. They evaluated a list of words and pseudo-words. We found that valence modulated the amplitude of the FN400 component (290–375 ms) at centro-frontal (Fz, Cz) region, whereas origin modulated the amplitude of the component in the LPC latency range (375–670 ms). The results indicate that the origin of stimuli should be taken into consideration while deliberating on the processing of emotional words. PMID:26973569

Neural mechanism for judging the appropriateness of facial affect.

PubMed

Kim, Ji-Woong; Kim, Jae-Jin; Jeong, Bum Seok; Ki, Seon Wan; Im, Dong-Mi; Lee, Soo Jung; Lee, Hong Shick

2005-12-01

Questions regarding the appropriateness of facial expressions in particular situations arise ubiquitously in everyday social interactions. To determine the appropriateness of facial affect, first of all, we should represent our own or the other's emotional state as induced by the social situation. Then, based on these representations, we should infer the possible affective response of the other person. In this study, we identified the brain mechanism mediating special types of social evaluative judgments of facial affect in which the internal reference is related to theory of mind (ToM) processing. Many previous ToM studies have used non-emotional stimuli, but, because so much valuable social information is conveyed through nonverbal emotional channels, this investigation used emotionally salient visual materials to tap ToM. Fourteen right-handed healthy subjects volunteered for our study. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activation during the judgmental task for the appropriateness of facial affects as opposed to gender matching tasks. We identified activation of a brain network, which includes both medial frontal cortex, left temporal pole, left inferior frontal gyrus, and left thalamus during the judgmental task for appropriateness of facial affect compared to the gender matching task. The results of this study suggest that the brain system involved in ToM plays a key role in judging the appropriateness of facial affect in an emotionally laden situation. In addition, our result supports that common neural substrates are involved in performing diverse kinds of ToM tasks irrespective of perceptual modalities and the emotional salience of test materials.

Benefits of using culturally unfamiliar stimuli in ambiguous emotion identification: A cross-cultural study.

PubMed

Koelkebeck, Katja; Kohl, Waldemar; Luettgenau, Julia; Triantafillou, Susanna; Ohrmann, Patricia; Satoh, Shinji; Minoshita, Seiko

2015-07-30

A novel emotion recognition task that employs photos of a Japanese mask representing a highly ambiguous stimulus was evaluated. As non-Asians perceive and/or label emotions differently from Asians, we aimed to identify patterns of task-performance in non-Asian healthy volunteers with a view to future patient studies. The Noh mask test was presented to 42 adult German participants. Reaction times and emotion attribution patterns were recorded. To control for emotion identification abilities, a standard emotion recognition task was used among others. Questionnaires assessed personality traits. Finally, results were compared to age- and gender-matched Japanese volunteers. Compared to other tasks, German participants displayed slowest reaction times on the Noh mask test, indicating higher demands of ambiguous emotion recognition. They assigned more positive emotions to the mask than Japanese volunteers, demonstrating culture-dependent emotion identification patterns. As alexithymic and anxious traits were associated with slower reaction times, personality dimensions impacted on performance, as well. We showed an advantage of ambiguous over conventional emotion recognition tasks. Moreover, we determined emotion identification patterns in Western individuals impacted by personality dimensions, suggesting performance differences in clinical samples. Due to its properties, the Noh mask test represents a promising tool in the differential diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, e.g. schizophrenia. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Recognition of Schematic Facial Displays of Emotion in Parents of Children with Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Palermo, Mark T.; Pasqualetti, Patrizio; Barbati, Giulia; Intelligente, Fabio; Rossini, Paolo Maria

2006-01-01

Performance on an emotional labeling task in response to schematic facial patterns representing five basic emotions without the concurrent presentation of a verbal category was investigated in 40 parents of children with autism and 40 matched controls. "Autism fathers" performed worse than "autism mothers," who performed worse than controls in…

Perception and Lateralization of Spoken Emotion by Youths with High-Functioning Forms of Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baker, Kimberly F.; Montgomery, Allen A.; Abramson, Ruth

2010-01-01

The perception and the cerebral lateralization of spoken emotions were investigated in children and adolescents with high-functioning forms of autism (HFFA), and age-matched typically developing controls (TDC). A dichotic listening task using nonsense passages was used to investigate the recognition of four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and…

Disruption of emotion and conflict processing in HIV infection with and without alcoholism comorbidity.

PubMed

Schulte, Tilman; Müller-Oehring, Eva M; Sullivan, Edith V; Pfefferbaum, Adolf

2011-05-01

Alcoholism and HIV-1 infection each affect components of selective attention and cognitive control that may contribute to deficits in emotion processing based on closely interacting fronto-parietal attention and frontal-subcortical emotion systems. Here, we investigated whether patients with alcoholism, HIV-1 infection, or both diseases have greater difficulty than healthy controls in resolving conflict from emotional words with different valences. Accordingly, patients with alcoholism (ALC, n = 20), HIV-1 infection (HIV, n = 20), ALC + HIV comorbidity (n = 22), and controls (CTL, n = 16) performed an emotional Stroop Match-to-Sample task, which assessed the contribution of emotion (happy, angry) to cognitive control (Stroop conflict processing). ALC + HIV showed greater Stroop effects than HIV, ALC, or CTL for negative (ANGRY) but not for positive (HAPPY) words, and also when the cue color did not match the Stroop stimulus color; the comorbid group performed similarly to the others when cue and word colors matched. Furthermore, emotionally salient face cues prolonged color-matching responses in all groups. HIV alone, compared with the other three groups, showed disproportionately slowed color-matching time when trials featured angry faces. The enhanced Stroop effects prominent in ALC + HIV suggest difficulty in exercising attentional top-down control on processes that consume attentional capacity, especially when cognitive effort is required to ignore negative emotions.

People with chronic facial pain perform worse than controls at a facial emotion recognition task, but it is not all about the emotion.

PubMed

von Piekartz, H; Wallwork, S B; Mohr, G; Butler, D S; Moseley, G L

2015-04-01

Alexithymia, or a lack of emotional awareness, is prevalent in some chronic pain conditions and has been linked to poor recognition of others' emotions. Recognising others' emotions from their facial expression involves both emotional and motor processing, but the possible contribution of motor disruption has not been considered. It is possible that poor performance on emotional recognition tasks could reflect problems with emotional processing, motor processing or both. We hypothesised that people with chronic facial pain would be less accurate in recognising others' emotions from facial expressions, would be less accurate in a motor imagery task involving the face, and that performance on both tasks would be positively related. A convenience sample of 19 people (15 females) with chronic facial pain and 19 gender-matched controls participated. They undertook two tasks; in the first task, they identified the facial emotion presented in a photograph. In the second, they identified whether the person in the image had a facial feature pointed towards their left or right side, a well-recognised paradigm to induce implicit motor imagery. People with chronic facial pain performed worse than controls at both tasks (Facially Expressed Emotion Labelling (FEEL) task P < 0·001; left/right judgment task P < 0·001). Participants who were more accurate at one task were also more accurate at the other, regardless of group (P < 0·001, r(2)  = 0·523). Participants with chronic facial pain were worse than controls at both the FEEL emotion recognition task and the left/right facial expression task and performance covaried within participants. We propose that disrupted motor processing may underpin or at least contribute to the difficulty that facial pain patients have in emotion recognition and that further research that tests this proposal is warranted. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Reduced Recognition of Dynamic Facial Emotional Expressions and Emotion-Specific Response Bias in Children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Evers, Kris; Steyaert, Jean; Noens, Ilse; Wagemans, Johan

2015-01-01

Emotion labelling was evaluated in two matched samples of 6-14-year old children with and without an autism spectrum disorder (ASD; N = 45 and N = 50, resp.), using six dynamic facial expressions. The Emotion Recognition Task proved to be valuable demonstrating subtle emotion recognition difficulties in ASD, as we showed a general poorer emotion…

An fMRI study of facial emotion processing in patients with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Gur, Raquel E; McGrath, Claire; Chan, Robin M; Schroeder, Lee; Turner, Travis; Turetsky, Bruce I; Kohler, Christian; Alsop, David; Maldjian, Joseph; Ragland, J Daniel; Gur, Ruben C

2002-12-01

Emotion processing deficits are notable in schizophrenia. The authors evaluated cerebral blood flow response in schizophrenia patients during facial emotion processing to test the hypothesis of diminished limbic activation related to emotional relevance of facial stimuli. Fourteen patients with schizophrenia and 14 matched comparison subjects viewed facial displays of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust as well as neutral faces. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal changes as the subjects alternated between tasks of discriminating emotional valence (positive versus negative) and age (over 30 versus under 30) of the faces with an interleaved crosshair reference condition. The groups did not differ in performance on either task. For both tasks, healthy participants showed activation in the fusiform gyrus, occipital lobe, and inferior frontal cortex relative to the resting baseline condition. The increase was greater in the amygdala and hippocampus during the emotional valence discrimination task than during the age discrimination task. In the patients with schizophrenia, minimal focal response was observed for all tasks relative to the resting baseline condition. Contrasting patients and comparison subjects on the emotional valence discrimination task revealed voxels in the left amygdala and bilateral hippocampus in which the comparison subjects had significantly greater activation. Failure to activate limbic regions during emotional valence discrimination may explain emotion processing deficits in patients with schizophrenia. While the lack of limbic recruitment did not significantly impair simple valence discrimination performance in this clinically stable group, it may impact performance of more demanding tasks.

Association between amygdala response to emotional faces and social anxiety in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Kleinhans, Natalia M; Richards, Todd; Weaver, Kurt; Johnson, L Clark; Greenson, Jessica; Dawson, Geraldine; Aylward, Elizabeth

2010-10-01

Difficulty interpreting facial expressions has been reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and is thought to be associated with amygdala abnormalities. To further explore the neural basis of abnormal emotional face processing in ASD, we conducted an fMRI study of emotional face matching in high-functioning adults with ASD and age, IQ, and gender matched controls. In addition, we investigated whether there was a relationship between self-reported social anxiety and fMRI activation. During fMRI scanning, study participants were instructed to match facial expressions depicting fear or anger. The control condition was a comparable shape-matching task. The control group evidenced significantly increased left prefrontal activation and decreased activation in the occipital lobes compared to the ASD group during emotional face matching. Further, within the ASD group, greater social anxiety was associated with increased activation in right amygdala and left middle temporal gyrus, and decreased activation in the fusiform face area. These results indicate that level of social anxiety mediates the neural response to emotional face perception in ASD. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Cambridge Mindreading (CAM) Face-Voice Battery: Testing complex emotion recognition in adults with and without Asperger syndrome.

PubMed

Golan, Ofer; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Hill, Jacqueline

2006-02-01

Adults with Asperger Syndrome (AS) can recognise simple emotions and pass basic theory of mind tasks, but have difficulties recognising more complex emotions and mental states. This study describes a new battery of tasks, testing recognition of 20 complex emotions and mental states from faces and voices. The battery was given to males and females with AS and matched controls. Results showed the AS group performed worse than controls overall, on emotion recognition from faces and voices and on 12/20 specific emotions. Females recognised faces better than males regardless of diagnosis, and males with AS had more difficulties recognising emotions from faces than from voices. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to social functioning in AS.

Childhood anxiety and attention to emotion faces in a modified stroop task.

PubMed

Hadwin, Julie A; Donnelly, Nick; Richards, Anne; French, Christopher C; Patel, Umang

2009-06-01

This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self-report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6-12 years. The results showed an interference of colour matching for angry (relative to neutral) faces in children with elevated SC. The same effect was not found for happy or control faces. In addition, the results suggest that selective attention to angry faces in children with social concern (SC) was not significantly moderated by age.

Inter-hemispheric interaction facilitates face processing.

PubMed

Compton, Rebecca J

2002-01-01

Many recent studies have revealed that interaction between the left and right cerebral hemispheres can aid in task performance, but these studies have tended to examine perception of simple stimuli such as letters, digits or simple shapes, which may have limited naturalistic validity. The present study extends these prior findings to a more naturalistic face perception task. Matching tasks required subjects to indicate when a target face matched one of two probe faces. Matches could be either across-field, requiring inter-hemispheric interaction, or within-field, not requiring inter-hemispheric interaction. Subjects indicated when faces matched in emotional expression (Experiment 1; n=32) or in character identity (Experiment 2; n=32). In both experiments, across-field performance was significantly better than within-field performance, supporting the primary hypothesis. Further, this advantage was greater for the more difficult character identity task. Results offer qualified support for the hypothesis that inter-hemispheric interaction is especially advantageous as task demands increase.

Disruption of Emotion and Conflict Processing in HIV Infection with and without Alcoholism Comorbidity

PubMed Central

Schulte, Tilman; Müller-Oehring, Eva M.; Sullivan, Edith V.; Pfefferbaum, Adolf

2012-01-01

Alcoholism and HIV-1 infection each affect components of selective attention and cognitive control that may contribute to deficits in emotion processing based on closely interacting fronto-parietal attention and frontal-subcortical emotion systems. Here, we investigated whether patients with alcoholism, HIV-1 infection, or both diseases have greater difficulty than healthy controls in resolving conflict from emotional words with different valences. Accordingly, patients with alcoholism (ALC, n = 20), HIV-1 infection (HIV, n = 20), ALC + HIV comorbidity (n = 22), and controls (CTL, n = 16) performed an emotional Stroop Match-to-Sample task, which assessed the contribution of emotion (happy, angry) to cognitive control (Stroop conflict processing). ALC + HIV showed greater Stroop effects than HIV, ALC, or CTL for negative (ANGRY) but not for positive (HAPPY) words, and also when the cue color did not match the Stroop stimulus color; the comorbid group performed similarly to the others when cue and word colors matched. Furthermore, emotionally salient face cues prolonged color-matching responses in all groups. HIV alone, compared with the other three groups, showed disproportionately slowed color-matching time when trials featured angry faces. The enhanced Stroop effects prominent in ALC + HIV suggest difficulty in exercising attentional top-down control on processes that consume attentional capacity, especially when cognitive effort is required to ignore negative emotions. PMID:21418720

The neural correlates of priming emotion and reward systems for conflict processing in alcoholics.

PubMed

Schulte, T; Jung, Y-C; Sullivan, E V; Pfefferbaum, A; Serventi, M; Müller-Oehring, E M

2017-12-01

Emotional dysregulation in alcoholism (ALC) may result from disturbed inhibitory mechanisms. We therefore tested emotion and alcohol cue reactivity and inhibitory processes using negative priming. To test the neural correlates of cue reactivity and negative priming, 26 ALC and 26 age-matched controls underwent functional MRI performing a Stroop color match-to-sample task. In cue reactivity trials, task-irrelevant emotion and alcohol-related pictures were interspersed between color samples and color words. In negative priming trials, pictures primed the semantic content of an alcohol or emotion Stroop word. Behaviorally, both groups showed response facilitation to picture cue trials and response inhibition to primed trials. For cue reactivity to emotion and alcohol pictures, ALC showed midbrain-limbic activation. By contrast, controls activated frontoparietal executive control regions. Greater midbrain-hippocampal activation in ALC correlated with higher amounts of lifetime alcohol consumption and higher anxiety. With negative priming, ALC exhibited frontal cortical but not midbrain-hippocampal activation, similar to the pattern observed in controls. Higher frontal activation to alcohol-priming correlated with less craving and to emotion-priming with fewer depressive symptoms. The findings suggest that neurofunctional systems in ALC can be primed to deal with upcoming emotion- and alcohol-related conflict and can overcome the prepotent midbrain-limbic cue reactivity response.

Emotion Recognition in Faces and the Use of Visual Context in Young People with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wright, Barry; Clarke, Natalie; Jordan, Jo; Young, Andrew W.; Clarke, Paula; Miles, Jeremy; Nation, Kate; Clarke, Leesa; Williams, Christine

2008-01-01

We compared young people with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) with age, sex and IQ matched controls on emotion recognition of faces and pictorial context. Each participant completed two tests of emotion recognition. The first used Ekman series faces. The second used facial expressions in visual context. A control task involved…

Mindfulness based cognitive therapy may improve emotional processing in bipolar disorder: pilot ERP and HRV study.

PubMed

Howells, Fleur M; Laurie Rauch, H G; Ives-Deliperi, Victoria L; Horn, Neil R; Stein, Dan J

2014-06-01

Emotional processing in bipolar disorder (BD) is impaired. We aimed to measure the effects of mindfulness based cognitive-behavioral therapy (MBCT) in BD on emotional processing, as measured by event related potentials (ERP) and by heart rate variability (HRV). ERP and HRV were recorded during the completion of a visual matching task, which included object matching, affect matching, and affect labeling. Individuals with BD (n = 12) were compared with controls (n = 9) to obtain baseline data prior to the individuals with BD undergoing an 8-week MBCT intervention. ERP and HRV recording was repeated after the MBCT intervention in BD. Participants with BD had exaggerated ERP N170 amplitude and increased HRV HF peak compared to controls, particularly during the affect matching condition. After an 8-week MBCT intervention, participants with BD showed attenuation of ERP N170 amplitude and reduced HRV HF peak. Our findings support findings from the literature emphasizing that emotional processing in BD is altered, and suggesting that MBCT may improve emotional processing in BD.

Eye-Gaze Analysis of Facial Emotion Recognition and Expression in Adolescents with ASD.

PubMed

Wieckowski, Andrea Trubanova; White, Susan W

2017-01-01

Impaired emotion recognition and expression in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may contribute to observed social impairment. The aim of this study was to examine the role of visual attention directed toward nonsocial aspects of a scene as a possible mechanism underlying recognition and expressive ability deficiency in ASD. One recognition and two expression tasks were administered. Recognition was assessed in force-choice paradigm, and expression was assessed during scripted and free-choice response (in response to emotional stimuli) tasks in youth with ASD (n = 20) and an age-matched sample of typically developing youth (n = 20). During stimulus presentation prior to response in each task, participants' eye gaze was tracked. Youth with ASD were less accurate at identifying disgust and sadness in the recognition task. They fixated less to the eye region of stimuli showing surprise. A group difference was found during the free-choice response task, such that those with ASD expressed emotion less clearly but not during the scripted task. Results suggest altered eye gaze to the mouth region but not the eye region as a candidate mechanism for decreased ability to recognize or express emotion. Findings inform our understanding of the association between social attention and emotion recognition and expression deficits.

Amygdala alterations during an emotional conflict task in women recovered from anorexia nervosa.

PubMed

Bang, Lasse; Rø, Øyvind; Endestad, Tor

2016-02-28

The pathophysiology of anorexia nervosa (AN) is not completely understood, but research suggests that alterations in brain circuits related to cognitive control and emotion are central. The aim of this study was to explore neural responses to an emotional conflict task in women recovered from AN. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure neural responses to an emotional conflict task in 22 women recovered from AN and 21 age-matched healthy controls. The task involved categorizing affective faces while ignoring affective words. Face and word stimuli were either congruent (non-conflict) or incongruent (conflict). Brain responses to emotional conflict did not differ between groups. However, in response to emotional non-conflict, women recovered from AN relative to healthy controls showed significantly less activation in the bilateral amygdala. Specifically, while emotional non-conflict evoked significant activations of the amygdala in healthy controls, recovered AN women did not show such activations. Similar significant group differences were also observed in the hippocampus and basal ganglia. These results suggest that women recovered from AN are characterized by alterations within emotion-related brain circuits. Recovered women's absence of amygdala and hippocampus activation during non-conflict trials possibly reflects an impaired ability to process emotional significant stimuli. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Enhanced emotional interference on working memory performance in adults with ADHD.

PubMed

Marx, Ivo; Domes, Gregor; Havenstein, Carolin; Berger, Christoph; Schulze, Lars; Herpertz, Sabine C

2011-09-01

Subjects with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from both executive dysfunction and deficits in emotion regulation. However, up to now, there has been no research demonstrating a clear impact of emotional dysregulation on cognitive performance in subjects with ADHD. Male and female adults with ADHD (n=39) and gender- and IQ-matched control subjects (n=40) performed an emotional working memory task (n-back task). In the background of the task, we presented neutral and negative stimuli varied in emotional saliency (negative pictures with low saliency, negative pictures with high saliency), but subjects were instructed to ignore these pictures and to process the working memory task as quickly and as accurately as possible. Compared to control subjects, ADHD patients showed both a general working memory deficit and enhanced distractability by emotionally salient stimuli in terms of lower n-back performance accuracy. In particular, while controls showed impaired WM performance when presented with highly arousing negative background pictures, a comparable decrement was observed in the ADHD group already with lowly arousing pictures. Our results suggest that difficulties in suppressing attention towards emotionally laden stimuli might result from deficient executive control in ADHD.

Individual and interpersonal emotion regulation among adults with substance use disorders and matched controls.

PubMed

Dingle, Genevieve A; Neves, Diana da Costa; Alhadad, Sakinah S J; Hides, Leanne

2018-06-01

Self-report studies show that negative emotional states and ineffective use of emotion regulation strategies are key maintaining factors of substance use disorders (SUD). However, experimental research into emotional processing in adults with SUD is in its infancy. Theoretical conceptualizations of emotion regulation have shifted from a focus on individual (internal) processes to one that encompasses social and interpersonal functions - including the regulation of facial expression of emotion. The purpose of this study was to examine the individual and interpersonal emotion regulation capacity of 35 adults in residential treatment diagnosed with a SUD compared to 35 demographically matched controls (both samples M age  = 25 years; 37% females). Participants completed a facial emotion expression flexibility task while viewing emotive images, as well as the Difficulties of Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and the Social (Emotion) Expectancy Scale (SES). Adults in SUD treatment experienced significantly more emotion regulation difficulties on all DERS subscales than controls. They also reported higher levels of negative self-evaluation and social expectancies not to feel negative emotions (anxiety and depression) compared to controls. Moreover, when viewing emotive images, the treatment sample showed significantly less flexibility of their emotional expression compared to the control sample. These findings demonstrate that the awareness, expression, and regulation of emotions are particularly difficult for people with SUD and this may maintain their substance use and provide an important target for treatment. Compared to matched controls, adults with substance use disorders self-report significantly more difficulties with emotional awareness and regulation. Compared to matched controls, adults with substance use disorders report significantly greater expectancies not to show depression and anxiety. When viewing positive and negative images, adults with substance use disorders are significantly less flexible in their facial expression of emotion than matched controls in response to regulatory instructions. Emotion regulation should be measured and addressed as part of substance use disorder treatment. © 2017 Commonwealth of Australia. British Journal of Clinical Psychology © 2017 The British Psychological Society.

Disentangling Emotion Processes in Borderline Personality Disorder: Physiological and Self-reported Assessment of Biological Vulnerability, Baseline Intensity, and Reactivity to Emotionally-Evocative Stimuli

PubMed Central

Kuo, Janice R.; Linehan, Marsha M.

2014-01-01

This study investigated Linehan’s (1993) theory that individuals meeting criteria for borderline personality disorder (BPD) have high biological vulnerability to emotion dysregulation, including high baseline emotional intensity and high reactivity to emotionally-evocative stimuli. Twenty individuals with BPD, 20 age-matched individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder (SAD), and 20 age-matched normal controls (NC) participated in two separate emotion induction conditions, a standardized condition and a personally-relevant condition. Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), skin conductance response (SCR), and self-report measures were collected throughout the experiment. BPD participants displayed heightened biological vulnerability compared with NC as indicated by reduced basal RSA. BPD participants also exhibited high baseline emotional intensity, characterized by heightened SCR and heightened self-reported negative emotions at baseline. However, the BPD group did not display heightened reactivity as their physiological and self-reported changes from baseline to the emotion inductions tasks were not greater than the other two groups. PMID:19685950

Implicit emotion regulation affects outcome evaluation

PubMed Central

Yang, Qiwei; Tang, Ping; Luo, Wenbo; Luo, Yue-jia

2015-01-01

Efficient implicit emotion regulation processes, which run without awareness, are important for human well-being. In this study, to investigate the influence of implicit emotion regulation on psychological and electrophysiological responses to gains and losses, participants were required to select between two Chinese four-character idioms to match the meaning of the third one before they performed a monetary gambling task. According to whether their meanings were related to emotion regulation, the idioms fell into two categories. Event-related potentials and self-rating emotional experiences to outcome feedback were recorded during the task. Priming emotion regulation reduced subjective emotional experience to both gains and losses and the amplitudes of the feedback-related negativity, while the P3 component was not influenced. According to these results, we suggest that the application of implicit emotion regulation effectively modulated the subjective emotional experience and the motivational salience of current outcomes without the cost of cognitive resources. This study implicates the potential significance of implicit emotion regulation in decision-making processes. PMID:25332404

Face Processing and Facial Emotion Recognition in Adults with Down Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barisnikov, Koviljka; Hippolyte, Loyse; Van der Linden, Martial

2008-01-01

Face processing and facial expression recognition was investigated in 17 adults with Down syndrome, and results were compared with those of a child control group matched for receptive vocabulary. On the tasks involving faces without emotional content, the adults with Down syndrome performed significantly worse than did the controls. However, their…

Neural Correlates of Explicit versus Implicit Facial Emotion Processing in ASD

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Luckhardt, Christina; Kröger, Anne; Cholemkery, Hannah; Bender, Stephan; Freitag, Christine M.

2017-01-01

The underlying neural mechanisms of implicit and explicit facial emotion recognition (FER) were studied in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to matched typically developing controls (TDC). EEG was obtained from N = 21 ASD and N = 16 TDC. Task performance, visual (P100, N170) and cognitive (late positive…

Theory of mind and its relationship with executive functions and emotion recognition in borderline personality disorder.

PubMed

Baez, Sandra; Marengo, Juan; Perez, Ana; Huepe, David; Font, Fernanda Giralt; Rial, Veronica; Gonzalez-Gadea, María Luz; Manes, Facundo; Ibanez, Agustin

2015-09-01

Impaired social cognition has been claimed to be a mechanism underlying the development and maintenance of borderline personality disorder (BPD). One important aspect of social cognition is the theory of mind (ToM), a complex skill that seems to be influenced by more basic processes, such as executive functions (EF) and emotion recognition. Previous ToM studies in BPD have yielded inconsistent results. This study assessed the performance of BPD adults on ToM, emotion recognition, and EF tasks. We also examined whether EF and emotion recognition could predict the performance on ToM tasks. We evaluated 15 adults with BPD and 15 matched healthy controls using different tasks of EF, emotion recognition, and ToM. The results showed that BPD adults exhibited deficits in the three domains, which seem to be task-dependent. Furthermore, we found that EF and emotion recognition predicted the performance on ToM. Our results suggest that tasks that involve real-life social scenarios and contextual cues are more sensitive to detect ToM and emotion recognition deficits in BPD individuals. Our findings also indicate that (a) ToM variability in BPD is partially explained by individual differences on EF and emotion recognition; and (b) ToM deficits of BPD patients are partially explained by the capacity to integrate cues from face, prosody, gesture, and social context to identify the emotions and others' beliefs. © 2014 The British Psychological Society.

Effects of task-irrelevant emotional stimuli on working memory processes in mild cognitive impairment.

PubMed

Berger, Christoph; Erbe, Anna-Katharina; Ehlers, Inga; Marx, Ivo; Hauenstein, Karlheinz; Teipel, Stefan

2015-01-01

Research suggests generally impaired cognitive control functions in working memory (WM) processes in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and incipient Alzheimer's disease (AD). Little is known how emotional salience of task-irrelevant stimuli may modulate cognitive control of WM performance and neurofunctional activation in MCI and AD individuals. We investigated the impact of emotional task-irrelevant visual stimuli on cortical activation during verbal WM. Twelve AD/MCI individuals and 12 age-matched healthy individuals performed a verbal WM (nback-) task with task-irrelevant emotionally neutral and emotionally negative background pictures during fMRI measurement. AD/MCI individuals showed decreased WM performance compared with controls; both AD/MCI and control groups reacted slower during presentation of negative pictures, regardless of WM difficulty. The AD/MCI group showed increased activation in the left hemispheric prefrontal network, higher amygdala and less cerebellar activation with increasing WM task difficulty compared to healthy controls. Correlation analysis between neurofunctional activation and WM performance revealed a negative correlation between task sensitivity and activation in the dorsal anterior cingulum for the healthy controls but not for the AD/MCI group. Our data suggest compensatory activation in prefrontal cortex and amygdala, but also dysfunctional inhibition of distracting information in the AD/MCI group during higher WM task difficulty. Additionally, attentional processes affecting the correlation between WM performance and neurofunctional activation seem to be different between incipient AD and healthy aging.

Short-term visual deprivation reduces interference effects of task-irrelevant facial expressions on affective prosody judgments

PubMed Central

Fengler, Ineke; Nava, Elena; Röder, Brigitte

2015-01-01

Several studies have suggested that neuroplasticity can be triggered by short-term visual deprivation in healthy adults. Specifically, these studies have provided evidence that visual deprivation reversibly affects basic perceptual abilities. The present study investigated the long-lasting effects of short-term visual deprivation on emotion perception. To this aim, we visually deprived a group of young healthy adults, age-matched with a group of non-deprived controls, for 3 h and tested them before and after visual deprivation (i.e., after 8 h on average and at 4 week follow-up) on an audio–visual (i.e., faces and voices) emotion discrimination task. To observe changes at the level of basic perceptual skills, we additionally employed a simple audio–visual (i.e., tone bursts and light flashes) discrimination task and two unimodal (one auditory and one visual) perceptual threshold measures. During the 3 h period, both groups performed a series of auditory tasks. To exclude the possibility that changes in emotion discrimination may emerge as a consequence of the exposure to auditory stimulation during the 3 h stay in the dark, we visually deprived an additional group of age-matched participants who concurrently performed unrelated (i.e., tactile) tasks to the later tested abilities. The two visually deprived groups showed enhanced affective prosodic discrimination abilities in the context of incongruent facial expressions following the period of visual deprivation; this effect was partially maintained until follow-up. By contrast, no changes were observed in affective facial expression discrimination and in the basic perception tasks in any group. These findings suggest that short-term visual deprivation per se triggers a reweighting of visual and auditory emotional cues, which seems to possibly prevail for longer durations. PMID:25954166

A Process Approach to Assessing Children with Learning Difficulties: Merging Assessment and Intervention.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith, Corinne Roth

A multidimensional approach to assessment of children with learning difficulties is examined. The approach explores factors along five dimensions: (1) learner characteristics (motivation, social-emotional maturity, cognitive abilities and styles); (2) task-based contributors (match of tasks to maturational levels and to cognitive style); (3)…

Reprint of "Investigating ensemble perception of emotions in autistic and typical children and adolescents".

PubMed

Karaminis, Themelis; Neil, Louise; Manning, Catherine; Turi, Marco; Fiorentini, Chiara; Burr, David; Pellicano, Elizabeth

2018-01-01

Ensemble perception, the ability to assess automatically the summary of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes, is available early in typical development. This ability might be compromised in autistic children, who are thought to present limitations in maintaining summary statistics representations for the recent history of sensory input. Here we examined ensemble perception of facial emotional expressions in 35 autistic children, 30 age- and ability-matched typical children and 25 typical adults. Participants received three tasks: a) an 'ensemble' emotion discrimination task; b) a baseline (single-face) emotion discrimination task; and c) a facial expression identification task. Children performed worse than adults on all three tasks. Unexpectedly, autistic and typical children were, on average, indistinguishable in their precision and accuracy on all three tasks. Computational modelling suggested that, on average, autistic and typical children used ensemble-encoding strategies to a similar extent; but ensemble perception was related to non-verbal reasoning abilities in autistic but not in typical children. Eye-movement data also showed no group differences in the way children attended to the stimuli. Our combined findings suggest that the abilities of autistic and typical children for ensemble perception of emotions are comparable on average. Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Ensemble perception of emotions in autistic and typical children and adolescents.

PubMed

Karaminis, Themelis; Neil, Louise; Manning, Catherine; Turi, Marco; Fiorentini, Chiara; Burr, David; Pellicano, Elizabeth

2017-04-01

Ensemble perception, the ability to assess automatically the summary of large amounts of information presented in visual scenes, is available early in typical development. This ability might be compromised in autistic children, who are thought to present limitations in maintaining summary statistics representations for the recent history of sensory input. Here we examined ensemble perception of facial emotional expressions in 35 autistic children, 30 age- and ability-matched typical children and 25 typical adults. Participants received three tasks: a) an 'ensemble' emotion discrimination task; b) a baseline (single-face) emotion discrimination task; and c) a facial expression identification task. Children performed worse than adults on all three tasks. Unexpectedly, autistic and typical children were, on average, indistinguishable in their precision and accuracy on all three tasks. Computational modelling suggested that, on average, autistic and typical children used ensemble-encoding strategies to a similar extent; but ensemble perception was related to non-verbal reasoning abilities in autistic but not in typical children. Eye-movement data also showed no group differences in the way children attended to the stimuli. Our combined findings suggest that the abilities of autistic and typical children for ensemble perception of emotions are comparable on average. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Behavioral dissociation between emotional and non-emotional facial expressions in congenital prosopagnosia

PubMed Central

Daini, Roberta; Comparetti, Chiara M.; Ricciardelli, Paola

2014-01-01

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have shown that facial recognition and emotional expressions are dissociable. However, it is unknown if a single system supports the processing of emotional and non-emotional facial expressions. We aimed to understand if individuals with impairment in face recognition from birth (congenital prosopagnosia, CP) can use non-emotional facial expressions to recognize a face as an already seen one, and thus, process this facial dimension independently from features (which are impaired in CP), and basic emotional expressions. To this end, we carried out a behavioral study in which we compared the performance of 6 CP individuals to that of typical development individuals, using upright and inverted faces. Four avatar faces with a neutral expression were presented in the initial phase. The target faces presented in the recognition phase, in which a recognition task was requested (2AFC paradigm), could be identical (neutral) to those of the initial phase or present biologically plausible changes to features, non-emotional expressions, or emotional expressions. After this task, a second task was performed, in which the participants had to detect whether or not the recognized face exactly matched the study face or showed any difference. The results confirmed the CPs' impairment in the configural processing of the invariant aspects of the face, but also showed a spared configural processing of non-emotional facial expression (task 1). Interestingly and unlike the non-emotional expressions, the configural processing of emotional expressions was compromised in CPs and did not improve their change detection ability (task 2). These new results have theoretical implications for face perception models since they suggest that, at least in CPs, non-emotional expressions are processed configurally, can be dissociated from other facial dimensions, and may serve as a compensatory strategy to achieve face recognition. PMID:25520643

Behavioral dissociation between emotional and non-emotional facial expressions in congenital prosopagnosia.

PubMed

Daini, Roberta; Comparetti, Chiara M; Ricciardelli, Paola

2014-01-01

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have shown that facial recognition and emotional expressions are dissociable. However, it is unknown if a single system supports the processing of emotional and non-emotional facial expressions. We aimed to understand if individuals with impairment in face recognition from birth (congenital prosopagnosia, CP) can use non-emotional facial expressions to recognize a face as an already seen one, and thus, process this facial dimension independently from features (which are impaired in CP), and basic emotional expressions. To this end, we carried out a behavioral study in which we compared the performance of 6 CP individuals to that of typical development individuals, using upright and inverted faces. Four avatar faces with a neutral expression were presented in the initial phase. The target faces presented in the recognition phase, in which a recognition task was requested (2AFC paradigm), could be identical (neutral) to those of the initial phase or present biologically plausible changes to features, non-emotional expressions, or emotional expressions. After this task, a second task was performed, in which the participants had to detect whether or not the recognized face exactly matched the study face or showed any difference. The results confirmed the CPs' impairment in the configural processing of the invariant aspects of the face, but also showed a spared configural processing of non-emotional facial expression (task 1). Interestingly and unlike the non-emotional expressions, the configural processing of emotional expressions was compromised in CPs and did not improve their change detection ability (task 2). These new results have theoretical implications for face perception models since they suggest that, at least in CPs, non-emotional expressions are processed configurally, can be dissociated from other facial dimensions, and may serve as a compensatory strategy to achieve face recognition.

Emotion recognition and oxytocin in patients with schizophrenia

PubMed Central

Averbeck, B. B.; Bobin, T.; Evans, S.; Shergill, S. S.

2012-01-01

Background Studies have suggested that patients with schizophrenia are impaired at recognizing emotions. Recently, it has been shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin can have beneficial effects on social behaviors. Method To examine emotion recognition deficits in patients and see whether oxytocin could improve these deficits, we carried out two experiments. In the first experiment we recruited 30 patients with schizophrenia and 29 age- and IQ-matched control subjects, and gave them an emotion recognition task. Following this, we carried out a second experiment in which we recruited 21 patients with schizophrenia for a double-blind, placebo-controlled cross-over study of the effects of oxytocin on the same emotion recognition task. Results In the first experiment we found that patients with schizophrenia had a deficit relative to controls in recognizing emotions. In the second experiment we found that administration of oxytocin improved the ability of patients to recognize emotions. The improvement was consistent and occurred for most emotions, and was present whether patients were identifying morphed or non-morphed faces. Conclusions These data add to a growing literature showing beneficial effects of oxytocin on social–behavioral tasks, as well as clinical symptoms. PMID:21835090

Processing of Facial Expressions of Emotions by Adults with Down Syndrome and Moderate Intellectual Disability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carvajal, Fernando; Fernandez-Alcaraz, Camino; Rueda, Maria; Sarrion, Louise

2012-01-01

The processing of facial expressions of emotions by 23 adults with Down syndrome and moderate intellectual disability was compared with that of adults with intellectual disability of other etiologies (24 matched in cognitive level and 26 with mild intellectual disability). Each participant performed 4 tasks of the Florida Affect Battery and an…

A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Kwanguk; Rosenthal, M. Zachary; Gwaltney, Mary; Jarrold, William; Hatt, Naomi; McIntyre, Nancy; Swain, Lindsay; Solomon, Marjorie; Mundy, Peter

2015-01-01

A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical…

A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Kwanguk; Rosenthal, Zachary; Gwaltney, Mary; Jarrold, William; Lerro, Lindsay; Mundy, Peter

2015-01-01

A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFA SD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development…

Brief report: accuracy and response time for the recognition of facial emotions in a large sample of children with autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Fink, Elian; de Rosnay, Marc; Wierda, Marlies; Koot, Hans M; Begeer, Sander

2014-09-01

The empirical literature has presented inconsistent evidence for deficits in the recognition of basic emotion expressions in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which may be due to the focus on research with relatively small sample sizes. Additionally, it is proposed that although children with ASD may correctly identify emotion expression they rely on more deliberate, more time-consuming strategies in order to accurately recognize emotion expressions when compared to typically developing children. In the current study, we examine both emotion recognition accuracy and response time in a large sample of children, and explore the moderating influence of verbal ability on these findings. The sample consisted of 86 children with ASD (M age = 10.65) and 114 typically developing children (M age = 10.32) between 7 and 13 years of age. All children completed a pre-test (emotion word-word matching), and test phase consisting of basic emotion recognition, whereby they were required to match a target emotion expression to the correct emotion word; accuracy and response time were recorded. Verbal IQ was controlled for in the analyses. We found no evidence of a systematic deficit in emotion recognition accuracy or response time for children with ASD, controlling for verbal ability. However, when controlling for children's accuracy in word-word matching, children with ASD had significantly lower emotion recognition accuracy when compared to typically developing children. The findings suggest that the social impairments observed in children with ASD are not the result of marked deficits in basic emotion recognition accuracy or longer response times. However, children with ASD may be relying on other perceptual skills (such as advanced word-word matching) to complete emotion recognition tasks at a similar level as typically developing children.

Empathic Embarrassment Accuracy in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Adler, Noga; Dvash, Jonathan; Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G

2015-06-01

Empathic accuracy refers to the ability of perceivers to accurately share the emotions of protagonists. Using a novel task assessing embarrassment, the current study sought to compare levels of empathic embarrassment accuracy among individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) with those of matched controls. To assess empathic embarrassment accuracy, we compared the level of embarrassment experienced by protagonists to the embarrassment felt by participants while watching the protagonists. The results show that while the embarrassment ratings of participants and protagonists were highly matched among controls, individuals with ASD failed to exhibit this matching effect. Furthermore, individuals with ASD rated their embarrassment higher than controls when viewing themselves and protagonists on film, but not while performing the task itself. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD tend to have higher ratings of empathic embarrassment, perhaps due to difficulties in emotion regulation that may account for their impaired empathic accuracy and aberrant social behavior. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

An investigation of mental imagery in bipolar disorder: Exploring "the mind's eye".

PubMed

Di Simplicio, Martina; Renner, Fritz; Blackwell, Simon E; Mitchell, Heather; Stratford, Hannah J; Watson, Peter; Myers, Nick; Nobre, Anna C; Lau-Zhu, Alex; Holmes, Emily A

2016-12-01

Mental imagery abnormalities occur across psychopathologies and are hypothesized to drive emotional difficulties in bipolar disorder (BD). A comprehensive assessment of mental imagery in BD is lacking. We aimed to test whether (i) mental imagery abnormalities (abnormalities in cognitive stages and subjective domains) occur in BD relative to non-clinical controls; and (ii) to determine the specificity of any abnormalities in BD relative to depression and anxiety disorders. Participants included 54 subjects in the BD group (depressed/euthymic; n=27 in each subgroup), subjects with unipolar depression (n=26), subjects with anxiety disorders (n=25), and non-clinical controls (n=27) matched for age, gender, ethnicity, education, and premorbid IQ. Experimental tasks assessed cognitive (non-emotional) measures of mental imagery (cognitive stages). Questionnaires, experimental tasks, and a phenomenological interview assessed subjective domains including spontaneous imagery use, interpretation bias, and emotional mental imagery. (i) Compared to non-clinical controls, the BD combined group reported a greater impact of intrusive prospective imagery in daily life, more vivid and "real" negative images (prospective imagery task), and higher self-involvement (picture-word task). The BD combined group showed no clear abnormalities in cognitive stages of mental imagery. (ii) When depressed individuals with BD were compared to the depressed or anxious clinical control groups, no significant differences remained-across all groups, imagery differences were associated with affective lability and anxiety. Compared to non-clinical controls, BD is characterized by abnormalities in aspects of emotional mental imagery within the context of otherwise normal cognitive aspects. When matched for depression and anxiety, these abnormalities are not specific to BD-rather, imagery may reflect a transdiagnostic marker of emotional psychopathology. © 2016 Medical Research Council. Bipolar Disorders Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

'Just can't hide it': a behavioral and lesion study on emotional response modulation after right prefrontal damage.

PubMed

Salas, Christian E; Castro, Osvaldo; Yuen, Kenneth Sl; Radovic, Darinka; d'Avossa, Giovanni; Turnbull, Oliver H

2016-10-01

Historically, emotion regulation problems have been reported as a common consequence of right prefrontal cortex (rPFC) damage. It has been proposed that the rPFC, particularly the rIFG, has a key role inhibiting prepotent reflexive actions, thus contributing to emotion regulation and self-regulation. This study is the first to directly explore this hypothesis, by testing whether damage to the rIFG compromises the voluntary modulation of emotional responses, and whether performance on inhibition tasks is associated with emotion regulation. 10 individuals with unilateral right prefrontal damage and 15 matched healthy controls were compared on a well-known response modulation task. During the task participants had to amplify and suppress their facial emotional expressions, while watching film clips eliciting amusement. Measures of executive control, emotion regulation strategies usage and symptomatology were also collected. As a group, individuals with rPFC damage presented a significantly reduced range of response modulation compared with controls. In addition, performance in the suppression task was associated with measures of cognitive inhibition and suppression usage. Interestingly, these effects were driven primarily by a subgroup of individuals with rPFC damage, all of whom also had damage to the right posterior insula, and who presented a marked impairment in suppressing facial emotional expressions. © The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

‘Just can’t hide it’: a behavioral and lesion study on emotional response modulation after right prefrontal damage

PubMed Central

Castro, Osvaldo; Yuen, Kenneth SL; Radovic, Darinka; d’Avossa, Giovanni; Turnbull, Oliver H.

2016-01-01

Introduction: Historically, emotion regulation problems have been reported as a common consequence of right prefrontal cortex (rPFC) damage. It has been proposed that the rPFC, particularly the rIFG, has a key role inhibiting prepotent reflexive actions, thus contributing to emotion regulation and self-regulation. This study is the first to directly explore this hypothesis, by testing whether damage to the rIFG compromises the voluntary modulation of emotional responses, and whether performance on inhibition tasks is associated with emotion regulation. Method: 10 individuals with unilateral right prefrontal damage and 15 matched healthy controls were compared on a well-known response modulation task. During the task participants had to amplify and suppress their facial emotional expressions, while watching film clips eliciting amusement. Measures of executive control, emotion regulation strategies usage and symptomatology were also collected. Results: As a group, individuals with rPFC damage presented a significantly reduced range of response modulation compared with controls. In addition, performance in the suppression task was associated with measures of cognitive inhibition and suppression usage. Interestingly, these effects were driven primarily by a subgroup of individuals with rPFC damage, all of whom also had damage to the right posterior insula, and who presented a marked impairment in suppressing facial emotional expressions PMID:27317928

Impaired regulation of emotional distractors during working memory load in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Guimond, Synthia; Padani, Shezal; Lutz, Olivia; Eack, Shaun; Thermenos, Heidi; Keshavan, Matcheri

2018-06-01

Schizophrenia (SZ) patients exhibit deficits in emotion regulation that affect their daily functioning. There is evidence that the prefrontal cortex plays an important role in emotion regulation. However, it remains unclear how this brain region is involved in emotion regulation deficits in SZ, and how such deficits impact performance on cognitively demanding tasks. We examined how happy and fearful emotional distractors impact performance on working memory (WM) tasks of varying difficulty (0-back, 2-back), and brain activity using fMRI. Participants were 20 patients with SZ and 20 healthy controls (HC) matched on age, sex, race, and IQ. A significant 3-way interaction showed that SZ patients had lower performance compared to HC when exposed to fearful and happy distractors, but only during the 2-back task. Second-level fMRI between-group analysis revealed that compared to SZ patients, HC showed significantly greater increase in brain activity with WM load in the left IFG (BA 45) when exposed to fearful distractors. Less brain activity in this region was also associated with reduction in SZ patients' performance during higher WM load and the presence of fearful distractors. SZ patients had difficulty in performing a WM task when regulating emotions, and they failed to show the emotion-specific modulation of the left IFG observed in HC. These results suggest that SZ patients have difficulty with emotion regulation demands during effortful cognitive tasks. This also provides us with potential insight on how emotion regulation could be rehabilitated in SZ using cognitive training. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Mother-child language style matching predicts children's and mothers' emotion reactivity.

PubMed

Rasmussen, Hannah F; Borelli, Jessica L; Smiley, Patricia A; Cohen, Chloe; Cheung, Ryan Cheuk Ming; Fox, Schuyler; Marvin, Matthew; Blackard, Betsy

2017-05-15

Co-regulation of behavior occurring within parent-child attachment relationships is thought to be the primary means through which children develop the capacity to regulate emotion, an ability that is protective across development. Existing research on parent-child co-regulation focuses predominantly on parent-infant dyads, and operationalizes co-regulation as the matching of facial expressions; however, matching can occur on other behaviors, including vocal tone, body movement, and language. Studies with young children find that greater matching is associated with children's lower emotion reactivity, but with unknown impacts on parents. In this study we examine a recently-developed metric of behavioral matching, language style matching (LSM), a composite measure of the similarity of function word use in spoken or written language between two or more people. We test whether LSM between mothers and their school-aged children is associated with children's and mothers' physiological and subjective emotion reactivity. Children completed a standardized stressor task while their mothers observed; children's and mother's cortisol and cardiovascular reactivity were assessed, as were their subjective reports of emotion reactivity. Following the stressor, children and mothers completed independent interviews about the experience, later assessed for LSM. Higher mother-child LSM was associated with lower emotion reactivity (lower cortisol reactivity, lower reports of negative emotion) for children, and with higher maternal cardiovascular but not cortisol or subjective reactivity. Further, higher LSM was more strongly associated with lower child cortisol reactivity when mothers were more reactive themselves. We conclude that mother-child LSM, thought to reflect a history of co-regulated interaction, confers protective benefits for children, but heightened reactivity for mothers. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Emotional reactivity and awareness of task performance in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Mograbi, Daniel C; Brown, Richard G; Salas, Christian; Morris, Robin G

2012-07-01

Lack of awareness about performance in tasks is a common feature of Alzheimer's disease. Nevertheless, clinical anecdotes have suggested that patients may show emotional or behavioural responses to the experience of failure despite reporting limited awareness, an aspect which has been little explored experimentally. The current study investigated emotional reactions to success or failure in tasks despite unawareness of performance in Alzheimer's disease. For this purpose, novel computerised tasks which expose participants to systematic success or failure were used in a group of Alzheimer's disease patients (n=23) and age-matched controls (n=21). Two experiments, the first with reaction time tasks and the second with memory tasks, were carried out, and in each experiment two parallel tasks were used, one in a success condition and one in a failure condition. Awareness of performance was measured comparing participant estimations of performance with actual performance. Emotional reactivity was assessed with a self-report questionnaire and rating of filmed facial expressions. In both experiments the results indicated that, relative to controls, Alzheimer's disease patients exhibited impaired awareness of performance, but comparable differential reactivity to failure relative to success tasks, both in terms of self-report and facial expressions. This suggests that affective valence of failure experience is processed despite unawareness of task performance, which might indicate implicit processing of information in neural pathways bypassing awareness. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Incidental threat during visuospatial working memory in adolescent anxiety: an emotional memory-guided saccade task.

PubMed

Mueller, Sven C; Shechner, Tomer; Rosen, Dana; Nelson, Eric E; Pine, Daniel S; Ernst, Monique

2015-04-01

Pediatric anxiety disorders are among the most common psychiatric mental illnesses in children and adolescents, and are associated with abnormal cognitive control in emotional, particularly threat, contexts. In a series of studies using eye movement saccade tasks, we reported anxiety-related alterations in the interplay of inhibitory control with incentives, or with emotional distractors. The present study extends these findings to working memory (WM), and queries the interaction of spatial WM with emotional stimuli in pediatric clinical anxiety. Participants were 33 children/adolescents diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and 22 age-matched healthy comparison youths. Participants completed a novel eye movement task, an affective variant of the memory-guided saccade task. This task assessed the influence of incidental threat on spatial WM processes during high and low cognitive load. Healthy but not anxious children/adolescents showed slowed saccade latencies during incidental threat in low-load but not high-load WM conditions. No other group effects emerged on saccade latency or accuracy. The current data suggest a differential pattern of how emotion interacts with cognitive control in healthy youth relative to anxious youth. These findings extend data from inhibitory processes, reported previously, to spatial WM in pediatric anxiety. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The ties to unbind: age-related differences in feature (un)binding in working memory for emotional faces

PubMed Central

Pehlivanoglu, Didem; Jain, Shivangi; Ariel, Robert; Verhaeghen, Paul

2014-01-01

In the present study, we investigated age-related differences in the processing of emotional stimuli. Specifically, we were interested in whether older adults would show deficits in unbinding emotional expression (i.e., either no emotion, happiness, anger, or disgust) from bound stimuli (i.e., photographs of faces expressing these emotions), as a hyper-binding account of age-related differences in working memory would predict. Younger and older adults completed different N-Back tasks (side-by-side 0-Back, 1-Back, 2-Back) under three conditions: match/mismatch judgments based on either the identity of the face (identity condition), the face’s emotional expression (expression condition), or both identity and expression of the face (both condition). The two age groups performed more slowly and with lower accuracy in the expression condition than in the both condition, indicating the presence of an unbinding process. This unbinding effect was more pronounced in older adults than in younger adults, but only in the 2-Back task. Thus, older adults seemed to have a specific deficit in unbinding in working memory. Additionally, no age-related differences were found in accuracy in the 0-Back task, but such differences emerged in the 1-Back task, and were further magnified in the 2-Back task, indicating independent age-related differences in attention/STM and working memory. Pupil dilation data confirmed that the attention/STM version of the task (1-Back) is more effortful for older adults than younger adults. PMID:24795660

The ties to unbind: age-related differences in feature (un)binding in working memory for emotional faces.

PubMed

Pehlivanoglu, Didem; Jain, Shivangi; Ariel, Robert; Verhaeghen, Paul

2014-01-01

In the present study, we investigated age-related differences in the processing of emotional stimuli. Specifically, we were interested in whether older adults would show deficits in unbinding emotional expression (i.e., either no emotion, happiness, anger, or disgust) from bound stimuli (i.e., photographs of faces expressing these emotions), as a hyper-binding account of age-related differences in working memory would predict. Younger and older adults completed different N-Back tasks (side-by-side 0-Back, 1-Back, 2-Back) under three conditions: match/mismatch judgments based on either the identity of the face (identity condition), the face's emotional expression (expression condition), or both identity and expression of the face (both condition). The two age groups performed more slowly and with lower accuracy in the expression condition than in the both condition, indicating the presence of an unbinding process. This unbinding effect was more pronounced in older adults than in younger adults, but only in the 2-Back task. Thus, older adults seemed to have a specific deficit in unbinding in working memory. Additionally, no age-related differences were found in accuracy in the 0-Back task, but such differences emerged in the 1-Back task, and were further magnified in the 2-Back task, indicating independent age-related differences in attention/STM and working memory. Pupil dilation data confirmed that the attention/STM version of the task (1-Back) is more effortful for older adults than younger adults.

A motivational determinant of facial emotion recognition: regulatory focus affects recognition of emotions in faces.

PubMed

Sassenrath, Claudia; Sassenberg, Kai; Ray, Devin G; Scheiter, Katharina; Jarodzka, Halszka

2014-01-01

Two studies examined an unexplored motivational determinant of facial emotion recognition: observer regulatory focus. It was predicted that a promotion focus would enhance facial emotion recognition relative to a prevention focus because the attentional strategies associated with promotion focus enhance performance on well-learned or innate tasks - such as facial emotion recognition. In Study 1, a promotion or a prevention focus was experimentally induced and better facial emotion recognition was observed in a promotion focus compared to a prevention focus. In Study 2, individual differences in chronic regulatory focus were assessed and attention allocation was measured using eye tracking during the facial emotion recognition task. Results indicated that the positive relation between a promotion focus and facial emotion recognition is mediated by shorter fixation duration on the face which reflects a pattern of attention allocation matched to the eager strategy in a promotion focus (i.e., striving to make hits). A prevention focus did not have an impact neither on perceptual processing nor on facial emotion recognition. Taken together, these findings demonstrate important mechanisms and consequences of observer motivational orientation for facial emotion recognition.

Implicit emotion regulation affects outcome evaluation.

PubMed

Yang, Qiwei; Tang, Ping; Gu, Ruolei; Luo, Wenbo; Luo, Yue-jia

2015-06-01

Efficient implicit emotion regulation processes, which run without awareness, are important for human well-being. In this study, to investigate the influence of implicit emotion regulation on psychological and electrophysiological responses to gains and losses, participants were required to select between two Chinese four-character idioms to match the meaning of the third one before they performed a monetary gambling task. According to whether their meanings were related to emotion regulation, the idioms fell into two categories. Event-related potentials and self-rating emotional experiences to outcome feedback were recorded during the task. Priming emotion regulation reduced subjective emotional experience to both gains and losses and the amplitudes of the feedback-related negativity, while the P3 component was not influenced. According to these results, we suggest that the application of implicit emotion regulation effectively modulated the subjective emotional experience and the motivational salience of current outcomes without the cost of cognitive resources. This study implicates the potential significance of implicit emotion regulation in decision-making processes. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Evidence for Impaired Verbal Identification but Intact Nonverbal Recognition of Fearful Body Postures in Asperger's Syndrome

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doody, John P.; Bull, Peter

2013-01-01

While most studies of emotion recognition in Asperger's Syndrome (AS) have focused solely on the verbal decoding of affective states, the current research employed the novel technique of using both nonverbal matching and verbal labeling tasks to examine the decoding of emotional body postures and facial expressions. AS participants performed…

The influence of self-relevant materials on working memory in dysphoric undergraduates.

PubMed

Dai, Qin; Rahman, Shaoon; Lau, Becky; Sook Kim, Hyang; Deldin, Patricia

2015-10-30

Difficulties in updating working memory (WM) may underlie problems with regulating emotions that contribute to depression. To examine the ability of updating affective materials in WM, 33 dysphoric and 34 non-dysphoric participants were asked to evaluate the self-descriptiveness of emotional adjectives and provide answers to self-relevant questions. Within 3-7 days, they completed a two-back task with a series of self-irrelevant or self-relevant emotional words (they had generated previously) and four conditions (match-set, break-set, perseveration-set, and no-set). After the WM task, an unexpected recall task was administered; controls recalled more positive self-relevant words and intrusions while dysphoric participants recalled more negative self-relevant words and intrusions. In break-set trials of the two-back task, dysphoric individuals showed slower response to self-relevant words regardless of valence. In the match-set and perseveration-set trials, dysphoric participants showed delayed response to self-related negative words. Moreover, longer reaction times for self-relevant negative words were correlated with higher rumination and worse depression. The results suggest that dysphoric undergraduates are interfered more by and have a better memory of self-relevant negative stimuli in WM, which is closely correlated with rumination. This study is among the first to confirm the potential mechanism that could underwrite the involvement of self-schema in effectively regulating negative affect. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Patients with Parkinson's disease display a dopamine therapy related negative bias and an enlarged range in emotional responses to facial emotional stimuli.

PubMed

Lundqvist, Daniel; Svärd, Joakim; Michelgård Palmquist, Åsa; Fischer, Håkan; Svenningsson, Per

2017-09-01

The literature on emotional processing in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients shows mixed results. This may be because of various methodological and/or patient-related differences, such as failing to adjust for cognitive functioning, depression, and/or mood. In the current study, we tested PD patients and healthy controls (HCs) using emotional stimuli across a variety of tasks, including visual search, short-term memory (STM), categorical perception, and emotional stimulus rating. The PD and HC groups were matched on cognitive ability, depression, and mood. We also explored possible relationships between task results and antiparkinsonian treatment effects, as measured by levodopa equivalent dosages (LED), in the PD group. The results show that PD patients use a larger emotional range compared with HCs when reporting their impression of emotional faces on rated emotional valence, arousal, and potency. The results also show that dopaminergic therapy was correlated with stimulus rating results such that PD patients with higher LED scores rated negative faces as less arousing, less negative, and less powerful. Finally, results also show that PD patients display a general slowing effect in the visual search tasks compared with HCs, indicating overall slowed responses. There were no group differences observed in the STM or categorical perception tasks. Our results indicate a relationship between emotional responses, PD, and dopaminergic therapy, in which PD per se is associated with stronger emotional responses, whereas LED levels are negatively correlated with the strength of emotional responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Recognition of schematic facial displays of emotion in parents of children with autism.

PubMed

Palermo, Mark T; Pasqualetti, Patrizio; Barbati, Giulia; Intelligente, Fabio; Rossini, Paolo Maria

2006-07-01

Performance on an emotional labeling task in response to schematic facial patterns representing five basic emotions without the concurrent presentation of a verbal category was investigated in 40 parents of children with autism and 40 matched controls. 'Autism fathers' performed worse than 'autism mothers', who performed worse than controls in decoding displays representing sadness or disgust. This indicates the need to include facial expression decoding tasks in genetic research of autism. In addition, emotional expression interactions between parents and their children with autism, particularly through play, where affect and prosody are 'physiologically' exaggerated, may stimulate development of social competence. Future studies could benefit from a combination of stimuli including photographs and schematic drawings, with and without associated verbal categories. This may allow the subdivision of patients and relatives on the basis of the amount of information needed to understand and process social-emotionally relevant information.

Emotional face processing in pediatric bipolar disorder: evidence for functional impairments in the fusiform gyrus.

PubMed

Perlman, Susan B; Fournier, Jay C; Bebko, Genna; Bertocci, Michele A; Hinze, Amanda K; Bonar, Lisa; Almeida, Jorge R C; Versace, Amelia; Schirda, Claudiu; Travis, Michael; Gill, Mary Kay; Demeter, Christine; Diwadkar, Vaibhav A; Sunshine, Jeffrey L; Holland, Scott K; Kowatch, Robert A; Birmaher, Boris; Axelson, David; Horwitz, Sarah M; Arnold, L Eugene; Fristad, Mary A; Youngstrom, Eric A; Findling, Robert L; Phillips, Mary L

2013-12-01

Pediatric bipolar disorder involves poor social functioning, but the neural mechanisms underlying these deficits are not well understood. Previous neuroimaging studies have found deficits in emotional face processing localized to emotional brain regions. However, few studies have examined dysfunction in other regions of the face processing circuit. This study assessed hypoactivation in key face processing regions of the brain in pediatric bipolar disorder. Youth with a bipolar spectrum diagnosis (n = 20) were matched to a nonbipolar clinical group (n = 20), with similar demographics and comorbid diagnoses, and a healthy control group (n = 20). Youth participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning which employed a task-irrelevant emotion processing design in which processing of facial emotions was not germane to task performance. Hypoactivation, isolated to the fusiform gyrus, was found when viewing animated, emerging facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fearfulness, and especially anger in pediatric bipolar participants relative to matched clinical and healthy control groups. The results of the study imply that differences exist in visual regions of the brain's face processing system and are not solely isolated to emotional brain regions such as the amygdala. Findings are discussed in relation to facial emotion recognition and fusiform gyrus deficits previously reported in the autism literature. Behavioral interventions targeting attention to facial stimuli might be explored as possible treatments for bipolar disorder in youth. Copyright © 2013 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Social approach and emotion recognition in fragile X syndrome.

PubMed

Williams, Tracey A; Porter, Melanie A; Langdon, Robyn

2014-03-01

Evidence is emerging that individuals with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) display emotion recognition deficits, which may contribute to their significant social difficulties. The current study investigated the emotion recognition abilities, and social approachability judgments, of FXS individuals when processing emotional stimuli. Relative to chronological age- (CA-) and mental age- (MA-) matched controls, the FXS group performed significantly more poorly on the emotion recognition tasks, and displayed a bias towards detecting negative emotions. Moreover, after controlling for emotion recognition deficits, the FXS group displayed significantly reduced ratings of social approachability. These findings suggest that a social anxiety pattern, rather than poor socioemotional processing, may best explain the social avoidance observed in FXS.

White matter fiber compromise contributes differentially to attention and emotion processing impairment in alcoholism, HIV-infection, and their comorbidity.

PubMed

Schulte, T; Müller-Oehring, E M; Sullivan, E V; Pfefferbaum, A

2012-10-01

Alcoholism (ALC) and HIV-1 infection (HIV) each affects emotional and attentional processes and integrity of brain white matter fibers likely contributing to functional compromise. The highly prevalent ALC+HIV comorbidity may exacerbate compromise. We used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and an emotional Stroop Match-to-Sample task in 19 ALC, 16 HIV, 15 ALC+HIV, and 15 control participants to investigate whether disruption of fiber system integrity accounts for compromised attentional and emotional processing. The task required matching a cue color to that of an emotional word with faces appearing between the color cue and the Stroop word in half of the trials. Nonmatched cue-word color pairs assessed selective attention, and face-word pairs assessed emotion. Relative to controls, DTI-based fiber tracking revealed lower inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ilf) integrity in HIV and ALC+HIV and lower uncinate fasciculus (uf) integrity in all three patient groups. Controls exhibited Stroop effects to positive face-word emotion, and greater interference was related to greater callosal, cingulum and ilf integrity. By contrast, HIV showed greater interference from negative Stroop words during color-nonmatch trials, correlating with greater uf compromise. For face trials, ALC and ALC+HIV showed greater Stroop-word interference, correlating with lower cingulate and callosal integrity. Thus, in HIV, conflict resolution was diminished when challenging conditions usurped resources needed to manage interference from negative emotion and to disengage attention from wrongly cued colors (nonmatch). In ALC and ALC+HIV, poorer callosal integrity was related to enhanced emotional interference suggesting curtailed interhemispheric exchange needed between preferentially right-hemispheric emotion and left-hemispheric Stroop-word functions. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Attention training normalises combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder effects on emotional Stroop performance using lexically matched word lists.

PubMed

Khanna, Maya M; Badura-Brack, Amy S; McDermott, Timothy J; Shepherd, Alex; Heinrichs-Graham, Elizabeth; Pine, Daniel S; Bar-Haim, Yair; Wilson, Tony W

2015-08-26

We examined two groups of combat veterans, one with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (n = 27) and another without PTSD (n = 16), using an emotional Stroop task (EST) with word lists matched across a series of lexical variables (e.g. length, frequency, neighbourhood size, etc.). Participants with PTSD exhibited a strong EST effect (longer colour-naming latencies for combat-relevant words as compared to neutral words). Veterans without PTSD produced no such effect, t < .918, p > .37. Participants with PTSD then completed eight sessions of attention training (Attention Control Training or Attention Bias Modification Training) with a dot-probe task utilising threatening and neutral faces. After training, participants-especially those undergoing Attention Control Training-no longer produced longer colour-naming latencies for combat-related words as compared to other words, indicating normalised attention allocation processes after treatment.

Recognising 'social' and 'non-social' emotions in self and others: a study of autism.

PubMed

Williams, David; Happé, Francesca

2010-07-01

Studies of emotion processing in autism have produced mixed results, with fewer studies observing autism-specific deficits than might be imagined. In the current study, 21 individuals with autism and 21 age- and ability-matched, learning disabled comparison participants were tested for their ability to (a) recognise, in others, expressions of 'social' emotions (e.g., embarrassment) and 'non-social' emotions (e.g., happiness) and; (b) report their own previous experiences of each of these emotions. In line with predictions, amongst both groups of participants, social emotions were more difficult to recognise and report than non-social emotions. Also amongst both groups, the ability to report social emotion-experience was significantly associated with the ability to recognise social emotions in others, independent of age and verbal ability. However, contrary to predictions, no between-group differences in levels or patterns of performance on the experimental tasks were observed. In light of previous research, these results suggest either that emotion-processing is not as specifically impaired in autism as is traditionally thought to be the case, or that individuals with autism are implementing compensatory strategies to succeed on experimental tasks in the absence of emotion-processing competence.

Social incentives improve deliberative but not procedural learning in older adults.

PubMed

Gorlick, Marissa A; Maddox, W Todd

2015-01-01

Age-related deficits are seen across tasks where learning depends on asocial feedback processing, however plasticity has been observed in some of the same tasks in social contexts suggesting a novel way to attenuate deficits. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests this plasticity is due to a deliberative motivational shift toward achieving well-being with age (positivity effect) that reverses when executive processes are limited (negativity effect). The present study examined the interaction of feedback valence (positive, negative) and social salience (emotional face feedback - happy; angry, asocial point feedback - gain; loss) on learning in a deliberative task that challenges executive processes and a procedural task that does not. We predict that angry face feedback will improve learning in a deliberative task when executive function is challenged. We tested two competing hypotheses regarding the interactive effects of deliberative emotional biases on automatic feedback processing: (1) If deliberative emotion regulation and automatic feedback are interactive we expect happy face feedback to improve learning and angry face feedback to impair learning in older adults because cognitive control is available. (2) If deliberative emotion regulation and automatic feedback are not interactive we predict that emotional face feedback will not improve procedural learning regardless of valence. Results demonstrate that older adults show persistent deficits relative to younger adults during procedural category learning suggesting that deliberative emotional biases do not interact with automatic feedback processing. Interestingly, a subgroup of older adults identified as potentially using deliberative strategies tended to learn as well as younger adults with angry relative to happy feedback, matching the pattern observed in the deliberative task. Results suggest that deliberative emotional biases can improve deliberative learning, but have no effect on procedural learning.

Conflict adaptation and congruency sequence effects to social-emotional stimuli in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Worsham, Whitney; Gray, Whitney E; Larson, Michael J; South, Mikle

2015-11-01

The modification of performance following conflict can be measured using conflict adaptation tasks thought to measure the change in the allocation of cognitive resources in order to reduce conflict interference and improve performance. While previous studies have suggested atypical processing during nonsocial cognitive control tasks, conflict adaptation (i.e. congruency sequence effects) for social-emotional stimuli have not been previously studied in autism spectrum disorder. A total of 32 participants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and 27 typically developing matched controls completed an emotional Stroop conflict task that required the classification of facial affect while simultaneously ignoring an overlaid affective word. Both groups showed behavioral evidence for emotional conflict adaptation based on response times and accuracy rates. However, the autism spectrum disorder group demonstrated a speed-accuracy trade-off manifested through significantly faster response times and decreased accuracy rates on trials containing conflict between the emotional face and the overlaid emotional word. Reduced selective attention toward socially relevant information may bias individuals with autism spectrum disorder toward more rapid processing and decision making even when conflict is present. Nonetheless, the loss of important information from the social stimuli reduces decision-making accuracy, negatively affecting the ability to adapt both cognitively and emotionally when conflict arises. © The Author(s) 2014.

Impaired cognition and decision-making in bipolar depression but no 'affective bias' evident.

PubMed

Rubinsztein, J S; Michael, A; Underwood, B R; Tempest, M; Sahakian, B J

2006-05-01

Depression is usually the predominant affective state in bipolar disorder. There are few studies, with discrepant views, examining the extent of cognitive impairment in patients with bipolar depression. To our knowledge, there are no previous studies examining decision-making ability or whether there is an affective attentional bias in bipolar depression. We ascertained 24 depressed bipolar I patients from acute psychiatric hospital wards and out-patient clinics and 26 age- and IQ-matched healthy controls. Using computerized tests we evaluated their performance on 'neutral' (non-emotional) cognitive tasks (i.e. memory, attention and executive function) and on novel tasks of emotional cognition (i.e. the decision-making task and the affective go/no-go task). Accuracy measures were significantly impaired on tests of visual and spatial recognition and attentional set-shifting in bipolar depression compared with age- and IQ-matched controls. The quality of decision-making was also significantly impaired in the patients. A mood-congruent attentional bias for 'sad' targets was not evident on the affective go/no-go task. We found widespread evidence of significant cognitive impairment and impaired quality of decision-making in symptomatically severe depressed bipolar patients. This cognitive impairment may contribute to difficulties with daily living, decision-making and the ability to engage and comply with psychological and drug treatments.

Test-retest reliability of fMRI-based graph theoretical properties during working memory, emotion processing, and resting state.

PubMed

Cao, Hengyi; Plichta, Michael M; Schäfer, Axel; Haddad, Leila; Grimm, Oliver; Schneider, Michael; Esslinger, Christine; Kirsch, Peter; Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas; Tost, Heike

2014-01-01

The investigation of the brain connectome with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and graph theory analyses has recently gained much popularity, but little is known about the robustness of these properties, in particular those derived from active fMRI tasks. Here, we studied the test-retest reliability of brain graphs calculated from 26 healthy participants with three established fMRI experiments (n-back working memory, emotional face-matching, resting state) and two parcellation schemes for node definition (AAL atlas, functional atlas proposed by Power et al.). We compared the intra-class correlation coefficients (ICCs) of five different data processing strategies and demonstrated a superior reliability of task-regression methods with condition-specific regressors. The between-task comparison revealed significantly higher ICCs for resting state relative to the active tasks, and a superiority of the n-back task relative to the face-matching task for global and local network properties. While the mean ICCs were typically lower for the active tasks, overall fair to good reliabilities were detected for global and local connectivity properties, and for the n-back task with both atlases, smallworldness. For all three tasks and atlases, low mean ICCs were seen for the local network properties. However, node-specific good reliabilities were detected for node degree in regions known to be critical for the challenged functions (resting-state: default-mode network nodes, n-back: fronto-parietal nodes, face-matching: limbic nodes). Between-atlas comparison demonstrated significantly higher reliabilities for the functional parcellations for global and local network properties. Our findings can inform the choice of processing strategies, brain atlases and outcome properties for fMRI studies using active tasks, graph theory methods, and within-subject designs, in particular future pharmaco-fMRI studies. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

fMRI of parents of children with Asperger Syndrome: a pilot study.

PubMed

Baron-Cohen, Simon; Ring, Howard; Chitnis, Xavier; Wheelwright, Sally; Gregory, Lloyd; Williams, Steve; Brammer, Mick; Bullmore, Ed

2006-06-01

People with autism or Asperger Syndrome (AS) show altered patterns of brain activity during visual search and emotion recognition tasks. Autism and AS are genetic conditions and parents may show the 'broader autism phenotype.' (1) To test if parents of children with AS show atypical brain activity during a visual search and an empathy task; (2) to test for sex differences during these tasks at the neural level; (3) to test if parents of children with autism are hyper-masculinized, as might be predicted by the 'extreme male brain' theory. We used fMRI during a visual search task (the Embedded Figures Test (EFT)) and an emotion recognition test (the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' (or Eyes) test). Twelve parents of children with AS, vs. 12 sex-matched controls. Factorial analysis was used to map main effects of sex, group (parents vs. controls), and sexxgroup interaction on brain function. An ordinal ANOVA also tested for regions of brain activity where females>males>fathers=mothers, to test for parental hyper-masculinization. RESULTS ON EFT TASK: Female controls showed more activity in extrastriate cortex than male controls, and both mothers and fathers showed even less activity in this area than sex-matched controls. There were no differences in group activation between mothers and fathers of children with AS. The ordinal ANOVA identified two specific regions in visual cortex (right and left, respectively) that showed the pattern Females>Males>Fathers=Mothers, both in BA 19. RESULTS ON EYES TASK: Male controls showed more activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus than female controls, and both mothers and fathers showed even more activity in this area compared to sex-matched controls. Female controls showed greater bilateral inferior frontal activation than males. This was not seen when comparing mothers to males, or mothers to fathers. The ordinal ANOVA identified two specific regions that showed the pattern Females>Males>Mothers=Fathers: left medial temporal gyrus (BA 21) and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BA 44). Parents of children with AS show atypical brain function during both visual search and emotion recognition, in the direction of hyper-masculinization of the brain. Because of the small sample size, and lack of age-matching between parents and controls, such results constitute a pilot study that needs replicating with larger samples.

Keep calm! Gender differences in mental rotation performance are modulated by habitual expressive suppression.

PubMed

Fladung, Anne-Katharina; Kiefer, Markus

2016-11-01

Men have been frequently found to perform more accurately than women in mental rotation tasks. However, men and women also differ with regard to the habitual use of emotion regulation strategies, particularly with regard to expressive suppression, i.e., the suppression of emotional expression in behavior. As emotional suppression is more often used by men, emotion regulation strategies might be a variable modulating gender differences in mental rotation performance. The present study, therefore, examined the influences of gender and emotion regulation strategies on mental rotation performance accuracy and feedback processing. Twenty-eight men and 28 women matched for relevant demographic variables performed mental rotation tasks of varying difficulty over a prolonged time. Emotional feedback was given immediately after each trial. Results showed that women reported to use expressive suppression less frequently than men. Women made more errors in the mental rotation task than men confirming earlier demonstrations of gender differences. Furthermore, women were more impaired by the negative feedback as indicated by the increased likelihood of subsequent errors compared with men. Task performance of women not habitually using expressive suppression was most inferior and most strongly influenced by failure feedback compared with men. Women using expressive suppression more habitually did not significantly differ in mental rotation accuracy and feedback processing from men. Hence, expressive suppression reduces gender differences in mental rotation accuracy by improving cognitive performance following failure feedback.

Recognition of facial expressions of emotion by adults with intellectual disability: Is there evidence for the emotion specificity hypothesis?

PubMed

Scotland, Jennifer L; McKenzie, Karen; Cossar, Jill; Murray, Aja; Michie, Amanda

2016-01-01

This study aimed to evaluate the emotion recognition abilities of adults (n=23) with an intellectual disability (ID) compared with a control group of children (n=23) without ID matched for estimated cognitive ability. The study examined the impact of: task paradigm, stimulus type and preferred processing style (global/local) on accuracy. We found that, after controlling for estimated cognitive ability, the control group performed significantly better than the individuals with ID. This provides some support for the emotion specificity hypothesis. Having a more local processing style did not significantly mediate the relation between having ID and emotion recognition, but did significantly predict emotion recognition ability after controlling for group. This suggests that processing style is related to emotion recognition independently of having ID. The availability of contextual information improved emotion recognition for people with ID when compared with line drawing stimuli, and identifying a target emotion from a choice of two was relatively easier for individuals with ID, compared with the other task paradigms. The results of the study are considered in the context of current theories of emotion recognition deficits in individuals with ID. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Major depression is associated with impaired processing of emotion in music as well as in facial and vocal stimuli.

PubMed

Naranjo, C; Kornreich, C; Campanella, S; Noël, X; Vandriette, Y; Gillain, B; de Longueville, X; Delatte, B; Verbanck, P; Constant, E

2011-02-01

The processing of emotional stimuli is thought to be negatively biased in major depression. This study investigates this issue using musical, vocal and facial affective stimuli. 23 depressed in-patients and 23 matched healthy controls were recruited. Affective information processing was assessed through musical, vocal and facial emotion recognition tasks. Depression, anxiety level and attention capacity were controlled. The depressed participants demonstrated less accurate identification of emotions than the control group in all three sorts of emotion-recognition tasks. The depressed group also gave higher intensity ratings than the controls when scoring negative emotions, and they were more likely to attribute negative emotions to neutral voices and faces. Our in-patient group might differ from the more general population of depressed adults. They were all taking anti-depressant medication, which may have had an influence on their emotional information processing. Major depression is associated with a general negative bias in the processing of emotional stimuli. Emotional processing impairment in depression is not confined to interpersonal stimuli (faces and voices), being also present in the ability to feel music accurately. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Salience network response to changes in emotional expressions of others is heightened during early adolescence: relevance for social functioning.

PubMed

Rosen, Maya L; Sheridan, Margaret A; Sambrook, Kelly A; Dennison, Meg J; Jenness, Jessica L; Askren, Mary K; Meltzoff, Andrew N; McLaughlin, Katie A

2018-05-01

Adolescence is a unique developmental period when the salience of social and emotional information becomes particularly pronounced. Although this increased sensitivity to social and emotional information has frequently been considered with respect to risk behaviors and psychopathology, evidence suggests that increased adolescent sensitivity to social and emotional cues may confer advantages. For example, greater sensitivity to shifts in the emotions of others is likely to promote flexible and adaptive social behavior. In this study, a sample of 54 children and adolescents (age 8-19 years) performed a delayed match-to-sample task for emotional faces while undergoing fMRI scanning. Recruitment of the anterior cingulate and anterior insula when the emotion of the probe face did not match the emotion held in memory followed a quadratic developmental pattern that peaked during early adolescence. These findings indicate meaningful developmental variation in the neural mechanisms underlying sensitivity to changes in the emotional expressions. Across all participants, greater activation of this network for changes in emotional expression was associated with less social anxiety and fewer social problems. These results suggest that the heightened salience of social and emotional information during adolescence may confer important advantages for social behavior, providing sensitivity to others' emotions that facilitates flexible social responding. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The contribution of sound intensity in vocal emotion perception: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

PubMed

Chen, Xuhai; Yang, Jianfeng; Gan, Shuzhen; Yang, Yufang

2012-01-01

Although its role is frequently stressed in acoustic profile for vocal emotion, sound intensity is frequently regarded as a control parameter in neurocognitive studies of vocal emotion, leaving its role and neural underpinnings unclear. To investigate these issues, we asked participants to rate the angry level of neutral and angry prosodies before and after sound intensity modification in Experiment 1, and recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) for mismatching emotional prosodies with and without sound intensity modification and for matching emotional prosodies while participants performed emotional feature or sound intensity congruity judgment in Experiment 2. It was found that sound intensity modification had significant effect on the rating of angry level for angry prosodies, but not for neutral ones. Moreover, mismatching emotional prosodies, relative to matching ones, induced enhanced N2/P3 complex and theta band synchronization irrespective of sound intensity modification and task demands. However, mismatching emotional prosodies with reduced sound intensity showed prolonged peak latency and decreased amplitude in N2/P3 complex and smaller theta band synchronization. These findings suggest that though it cannot categorically affect emotionality conveyed in emotional prosodies, sound intensity contributes to emotional significance quantitatively, implying that sound intensity should not simply be taken as a control parameter and its unique role needs to be specified in vocal emotion studies.

The Contribution of Sound Intensity in Vocal Emotion Perception: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

PubMed Central

Chen, Xuhai; Yang, Jianfeng; Gan, Shuzhen; Yang, Yufang

2012-01-01

Although its role is frequently stressed in acoustic profile for vocal emotion, sound intensity is frequently regarded as a control parameter in neurocognitive studies of vocal emotion, leaving its role and neural underpinnings unclear. To investigate these issues, we asked participants to rate the angry level of neutral and angry prosodies before and after sound intensity modification in Experiment 1, and recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) for mismatching emotional prosodies with and without sound intensity modification and for matching emotional prosodies while participants performed emotional feature or sound intensity congruity judgment in Experiment 2. It was found that sound intensity modification had significant effect on the rating of angry level for angry prosodies, but not for neutral ones. Moreover, mismatching emotional prosodies, relative to matching ones, induced enhanced N2/P3 complex and theta band synchronization irrespective of sound intensity modification and task demands. However, mismatching emotional prosodies with reduced sound intensity showed prolonged peak latency and decreased amplitude in N2/P3 complex and smaller theta band synchronization. These findings suggest that though it cannot categorically affect emotionality conveyed in emotional prosodies, sound intensity contributes to emotional significance quantitatively, implying that sound intensity should not simply be taken as a control parameter and its unique role needs to be specified in vocal emotion studies. PMID:22291928

Inference generation during discourse and its relation to social competence: an online investigation of abilities of children with and without language impairment.

PubMed

Ford, Janet A; Milosky, Linda M

2008-04-01

This study examined whether young children with typical language development (TL) and children with language impairment (LI) make emotion inferences online during the process of discourse comprehension, identified variables that predict emotion inferencing, and explored the relationship of these variables to social competence. Preschool children (16 TL and 16 LI) watched narrated videos designed to activate knowledge about a particular emotional state. Following each story, children named a facial expression that either matched or did not match the anticipated emotion. Several experimental tasks examined linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities. Finally, each child's teacher completed a measure of social competence. Children with TL named expressions significantly more slowly in the mismatched condition than in the matched condition, whereas children with LI did not differ in response times between the conditions. Language and vocal response time measures were related to emotion inferencing ability, and this ability predicted social competence scores. The findings suggest that children with TL are inferring emotions during the comprehension process, whereas children with LI often fail to make these inferences. Making emotion inferences is related to discourse comprehension and to social competence in children. The current findings provide evidence that language and vocal response time measures predicted inferencing ability and suggest that additional factors may influence discourse inferencing and social competence.

Cultural relativity in perceiving emotion from vocalizations.

PubMed

Gendron, Maria; Roberson, Debi; van der Vyver, Jacoba Marieta; Barrett, Lisa Feldman

2014-04-01

A central question in the study of human behavior is whether certain emotions, such as anger, fear, and sadness, are recognized in nonverbal cues across cultures. We predicted and found that in a concept-free experimental task, participants from an isolated cultural context (the Himba ethnic group from northwestern Namibia) did not freely label Western vocalizations with expected emotion terms. Responses indicate that Himba participants perceived more basic affective properties of valence (positivity or negativity) and to some extent arousal (high or low activation). In a second, concept-embedded task, we manipulated whether the target and foil on a given trial matched in both valence and arousal, neither valence nor arousal, valence only, or arousal only. Himba participants achieved above-chance accuracy only when foils differed from targets in valence only. Our results indicate that the voice can reliably convey affective meaning across cultures, but that perceptions of emotion from the voice are culturally variable.

Content specificity of attentional bias to threat in post-traumatic stress disorder.

PubMed

Zinchenko, A; Al-Amin, M M; Alam, M M; Mahmud, W; Kabir, N; Reza, H M; Burne, T H J

2017-08-01

Attentional bias to affective information and reduced cognitive control may maintain the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and impair cognitive functioning. However, the role of content specificity of affective stimuli (e.g., trauma-related, emotional trauma-unrelated) in the observed attentional bias and cognitive control is less clear, as this has not been tested simultaneously before. Therefore, we examined the content specificity of attentional bias to threat in PTSD. PTSD participants (survivors of a multistory factory collapse, n=30) and matched controls (n=30) performed an Eriksen Flanker task. They identified the direction of a centrally presented target arrow, which was flanked by several task-irrelevant distractor arrows pointed to the same (congruent) or opposite direction (incongruent). Additionally, participants were presented with a picture of a face (neutral, emotional) or building (neutral=normal, emotional=collapsed multistory factory) as a task-irrelevant background image. We found that PTSD participants produced overall larger conflict effects and longer reaction times (RT) to emotional than to neutral stimuli relative to their healthy counterparts. Moreover, PTSD, but not healthy participants showed a stimulus specific dissociation in processing emotional stimuli. Emotional faces elicited longer RTs compared to neutral faces, while emotional buildings elicited faster responses, compared to neutral buildings. PTSD patients show a content-sensitive attentional bias to emotional information and impaired cognitive control. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Functional neuroanatomy associated with the interaction between emotion and cognition in explicit memory tasks in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.

PubMed

Moon, Chung-Man; Yang, Jong-Chul; Jeong, Gwang-Woo

2017-01-01

The functional neuroanatomy for explicit memory in conjunction with the major anxiety symptoms in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) has not yet been clearly identified. To investigate the brain activation patterns on the interaction between emotional and cognitive function during the explicit memory tasks, as well as its correlation with clinical characteristics in GAD. The participants comprised GAD patients and age-matched healthy controls. The fMR images were obtained while the participants performed an explicit memory task with neutral and anxiety-inducing words. Patients showed significantly decreased functional activities in the putamen, head of the caudate nucleus, hippocampus, and middle cingulate gyrus during the memory tasks with the neutral and anxiety-inducing words, whereas the precentral gyrus and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex were significantly increased only in the memory tasks with the anxiety-inducing words. Also, the blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes in the hippocampus were positively correlated with the recognition accuracy for both neutral and anxiety-inducing words. This study identified the brain areas associated with the interaction between emotional regulation and cognitive function in the explicit memory tasks in patients with GAD. These findings would be helpful to understand the neural mechanism on the explicit memory-related cognitive deficits and emotional dysfunction with GAD symptoms. © The Foundation Acta Radiologica 2016.

Differences in pride and shame in maltreated and nonmaltreated preschoolers.

PubMed

Alessandri, S M; Lewis, M

1996-08-01

This study examined the expression of shame and pride in maltreated and nonmaltreated preschool children. 84 4-5-year-old children and their mothers participated in the study: 42 had a history of child maltreatment and 42 served as matched controls. Children were presented with easy and difficult tasks and their emotional responses of shame and pride were observed. No shame was shown when subjects succeeded on the tasks and no pride was shown when they failed. Maltreating mothers offered more negative feedback, particularly to their daughters, than nonmaltreating mothers. Maltreated girls showed more shame when they failed and less pride when they succeeded than nonmaltreated girls. The relation between differential socialization practices and the self-conscious emotions is explored as it relates to observed gender differences in emotionality and self-concept.

What is Research Anyway?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Loeffler, Margaret

1998-01-01

Maintains that Montessori educators should become "scientific pedagogues" who look upon their classrooms as ongoing educational experiments, and that their task is to match strategies, content, and emotional understanding to the children's developmental needs, interests, and culture. Describes components of successful research within the…

The Influence of Emotional Stimuli on Attention Orienting and Inhibitory Control in Pediatric Anxiety

PubMed Central

Mueller, Sven C.; Hardin, Michael G.; Mogg, Karin; Benson, Valerie; Bradley, Brendan P.; Reinholdt-Dunne, Marie Louise; Liversedge, Simon P.; Pine, Daniel S.; Ernst, Monique

2012-01-01

Background Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on orienting and inhibition, similar studies have yet to be conducted in youths. Methods Participants were 22 children/adolescents diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and 22 age-matched healthy comparison youths. Participants completed an emotion-modified antisaccade task that was similar to those used in studies of high-trait anxious adults. This task probed the influence of abruptly appearing neutral, happy, angry, or fear stimuli on orienting (prosaccade) or inhibitory (antisaccade) responses. Results Anxious compared to healthy children showed facilitated orienting towards angry stimuli. With respect to inhibitory processes, threat-related information improved antisaccade accuracy in healthy but not anxious youth. These findings were not linked to individual levels of reported anxiety or specific anxiety disorders. Conclusions Findings suggest that anxious relative to healthy children manifest enhanced orienting towards threat-related stimuli. Additionally, the current findings suggest that threat may modulate inhibitory control during adolescent development. PMID:22409260

Neural correlates of the emotional Stroop task in panic disorder patients: an event-related fMRI study.

PubMed

Dresler, Thomas; Hindi Attar, Catherine; Spitzer, Carsten; Löwe, Bernd; Deckert, Jürgen; Büchel, Christian; Ehlis, Ann-Christine; Fallgatter, Andreas J

2012-12-01

Although being a standard tool to assess interference effects of disorder-specific words in clinical samples, the neural underpinnings of the emotional Stroop task are still not well understood and have hardly been investigated in experimental case-control studies. We therefore used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the attentional bias toward panic-related words in panic disorder (PD) patients and healthy controls. Twenty PD patients (with or without agoraphobia) and 23 healthy controls matched for age and gender performed an event-related emotional Stroop task with panic-related and neutral words while undergoing 3 Tesla fMRI. On the behavioral level, PD patients showed a significant emotional Stroop effect, i.e. color-naming of panic-related words was prolonged compared to neutral words. This effect was not observed in the control group. PD patients further differed from controls on the neural level in showing increased BOLD activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus in response to panic-related relative to neutral words. PD patients showed the expected attentional bias, i.e. an altered processing of disorder-specific stimuli. This emotional Stroop effect was paralleled by increased activation in the left prefrontal cortex which may indicate altered processing of emotional stimulus material. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Multisensory emotion perception in congenitally, early, and late deaf CI users

PubMed Central

Nava, Elena; Villwock, Agnes K.; Büchner, Andreas; Lenarz, Thomas; Röder, Brigitte

2017-01-01

Emotions are commonly recognized by combining auditory and visual signals (i.e., vocal and facial expressions). Yet it is unknown whether the ability to link emotional signals across modalities depends on early experience with audio-visual stimuli. In the present study, we investigated the role of auditory experience at different stages of development for auditory, visual, and multisensory emotion recognition abilities in three groups of adolescent and adult cochlear implant (CI) users. CI users had a different deafness onset and were compared to three groups of age- and gender-matched hearing control participants. We hypothesized that congenitally deaf (CD) but not early deaf (ED) and late deaf (LD) CI users would show reduced multisensory interactions and a higher visual dominance in emotion perception than their hearing controls. The CD (n = 7), ED (deafness onset: <3 years of age; n = 7), and LD (deafness onset: >3 years; n = 13) CI users and the control participants performed an emotion recognition task with auditory, visual, and audio-visual emotionally congruent and incongruent nonsense speech stimuli. In different blocks, participants judged either the vocal (Voice task) or the facial expressions (Face task). In the Voice task, all three CI groups performed overall less efficiently than their respective controls and experienced higher interference from incongruent facial information. Furthermore, the ED CI users benefitted more than their controls from congruent faces and the CD CI users showed an analogous trend. In the Face task, recognition efficiency of the CI users and controls did not differ. Our results suggest that CI users acquire multisensory interactions to some degree, even after congenital deafness. When judging affective prosody they appear impaired and more strongly biased by concurrent facial information than typically hearing individuals. We speculate that limitations inherent to the CI contribute to these group differences. PMID:29023525

Multisensory emotion perception in congenitally, early, and late deaf CI users.

PubMed

Fengler, Ineke; Nava, Elena; Villwock, Agnes K; Büchner, Andreas; Lenarz, Thomas; Röder, Brigitte

2017-01-01

Emotions are commonly recognized by combining auditory and visual signals (i.e., vocal and facial expressions). Yet it is unknown whether the ability to link emotional signals across modalities depends on early experience with audio-visual stimuli. In the present study, we investigated the role of auditory experience at different stages of development for auditory, visual, and multisensory emotion recognition abilities in three groups of adolescent and adult cochlear implant (CI) users. CI users had a different deafness onset and were compared to three groups of age- and gender-matched hearing control participants. We hypothesized that congenitally deaf (CD) but not early deaf (ED) and late deaf (LD) CI users would show reduced multisensory interactions and a higher visual dominance in emotion perception than their hearing controls. The CD (n = 7), ED (deafness onset: <3 years of age; n = 7), and LD (deafness onset: >3 years; n = 13) CI users and the control participants performed an emotion recognition task with auditory, visual, and audio-visual emotionally congruent and incongruent nonsense speech stimuli. In different blocks, participants judged either the vocal (Voice task) or the facial expressions (Face task). In the Voice task, all three CI groups performed overall less efficiently than their respective controls and experienced higher interference from incongruent facial information. Furthermore, the ED CI users benefitted more than their controls from congruent faces and the CD CI users showed an analogous trend. In the Face task, recognition efficiency of the CI users and controls did not differ. Our results suggest that CI users acquire multisensory interactions to some degree, even after congenital deafness. When judging affective prosody they appear impaired and more strongly biased by concurrent facial information than typically hearing individuals. We speculate that limitations inherent to the CI contribute to these group differences.

The Effects of Valence and Arousal on Associative Working Memory and Long-Term Memory

PubMed Central

Bergmann, Heiko C.; Rijpkema, Mark; Fernández, Guillén; Kessels, Roy P. C.

2012-01-01

Background Emotion can either facilitate or impair memory, depending on what, when and how memory is tested and whether the paradigm at hand is administered as a working memory (WM) or a long-term memory (LTM) task. Whereas emotionally arousing single stimuli are more likely to be remembered, memory for the relationship between two or more component parts (i.e., relational memory) appears to be worse in the presence of emotional stimuli, at least in some relational memory tasks. The current study investigated the effects of both valence (neutral vs. positive vs. negative) and arousal (low vs. high) in an inter-item WM binding and LTM task. Methodology/Principal Findings A five-pair delayed-match-to-sample (WM) task was administered. In each trial, study pairs consisted of one neutral picture and a second picture of which the emotional qualities (valence and arousal levels) were manipulated. These pairs had to be remembered across a delay interval of 10 seconds. This was followed by a probe phase in which five pairs were tested. After completion of this task, an unexpected single item LTM task as well as an LTM task for the pairs was assessed. As expected, emotional arousal impaired WM processing. This was reflected in lower accuracy for pairs consisting of high-arousal pictures compared to pairs with low-arousal pictures. A similar effect was found for the associative LTM task. However, the arousal effect was modulated by affective valence for the WM but not the LTM task; pairs with low-arousal negative pictures were not processed as well in the WM task. No significant differences were found for the single-item LTM task. Conclusions/Significance The present study provides additional evidence that processes during initial perception/encoding and post-encoding processes, the time interval between study and test and the interaction between valence and arousal might modulate the effects of “emotion” on associative memory. PMID:23300724

False belief attribution in children with Williams syndrome: the answer is in the emotion.

PubMed

Campos, R; Martínez-Castilla, P; Sotillo, M

2017-11-01

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) show difficulties in attributing false beliefs, whereas they are better at attributing emotions. This study examines whether being asked about the emotion linked to a false belief, instead of explicitly about the belief, facilitates performance on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Thirty children with WS and 90 typically developing children, who were individually matched on mental age (50-112 months), were administered six explicit (i.e. questions on belief) and six implicit (i.e. questions on emotion) trials of false belief tasks. Theory of mind competences were related to cognitive development. Children with WS performed comparably to typically developing children on the emotion questions. Correct answers to questions on emotion reveal an implicit understanding of false belief. The Representational redescription process could be impaired in the domain of ToM in this population. This finding has relevant implications for the design of supports aiming to optimise the development of ToM competences in individuals with WS. © 2017 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Cerebellar damage impairs the self-rating of regret feeling in a gambling task

PubMed Central

Clausi, Silvia; Coricelli, Giorgio; Pisotta, Iolanda; Pavone, Enea Francesco; Lauriola, Marco; Molinari, Marco; Leggio, Maria

2015-01-01

Anatomical, clinical, and neuroimaging evidence implicates the cerebellum in processing emotions and feelings. Moreover recent studies showed a cerebellar involvement in pathologies such as autism, schizophrenia and alexithymia, in which emotional processing have been found altered. However, cerebellar function in the modulation of emotional responses remains debated. In this study, emotions that are involved directly in decision-making were examined in 15 patients (six males; age range 17–60 years) affected by cerebellar damage and 15 well matched healthy controls. We used a gambling task, in which subjects’ choices and evaluation of outcomes with regard to their anticipated and actual emotional impact were analyzed. Emotions, such as regret and relief, were elicited, based on the outcome of the unselected gamble. Interestingly, despite their ability to avoid regret in subsequent choices, patients affected by cerebellar lesions were significantly impaired in evaluating the feeling of regret subjectively. These results demonstrate that the cerebellum is involved in conscious recognizing of negative feelings caused by the sense of self-responsibility for an incorrect decision. PMID:25999829

Moral Cognition and Multiple Sclerosis: A Neuropsychological Study.

PubMed

Realmuto, Sabrina; Dodich, Alessandra; Meli, Riccardo; Canessa, Nicola; Ragonese, Paolo; Salemi, Giuseppe; Cerami, Chiara

2018-05-30

Recent literature proved that social cognition impairments may characterize the neuropsychological profile of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients. However, little is still known about moral cognition in MS. In this study, we evaluated non-social, social, and moral cognitive performances in 45 relapsing-remitting MS patients. Patients underwent the Brief International Cognitive Assessment for Multiple Sclerosis battery, the Cognitive Estimation and Stroop tasks, the Ekman-60 Faces test, the Reading the Mind in the Eye and Story-based Empathy task. Additionally, a task of moral dilemmas including both "instrumental" and "incidental" conditions was administered to patients. Forty-five age-, gender- and education-matched healthy control subjects (HC) were enrolled for comparisons. The majority of patients (i.e., 77.6%) showed deficits at non-social tasks, particularly in the executive domains. A subset of MS sample (i.e., 24%) presented with emotion recognition and socio-affective processing impairments. Overall, MS patients showed comparable levels of moral judgment with respect to HC. The rate of yes/no response in resolution of moral dilemmas and scores of attribution of emotional valence were comparable between groups. Nevertheless, lower moral permissibility and emotional arousal, particularly for the instrumental dilemmas, characterized the MS profile. Significant correlations between the attribution of emotional valence to moral actions and mentalizing scores emerged. Our findings expand current literature on MS supporting not only deficits in executive and socio-emotional domains but also low levels of permissibility of immoral actions and emotional detachment in the moral judgment process.

Altered neural processing of emotional faces in remitted Cushing's disease.

PubMed

Bas-Hoogendam, Janna Marie; Andela, Cornelie D; van der Werff, Steven J A; Pannekoek, J Nienke; van Steenbergen, Henk; Meijer, Onno C; van Buchem, Mark A; Rombouts, Serge A R B; van der Mast, Roos C; Biermasz, Nienke R; van der Wee, Nic J A; Pereira, Alberto M

2015-09-01

Patients with long-term remission of Cushing's disease (CD) demonstrate residual psychological complaints. At present, it is not known how previous exposure to hypercortisolism affects psychological functioning in the long-term. Earlier magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies demonstrated abnormalities of brain structure and resting-state connectivity in patients with long-term remission of CD, but no data are available on functional alterations in the brain during the performance of emotional or cognitive tasks in these patients. We performed a cross-sectional functional MRI study, investigating brain activation during emotion processing in patients with long-term remission of CD. Processing of emotional faces versus a non-emotional control condition was examined in 21 patients and 21 matched healthy controls. Analyses focused on activation and connectivity of two a priori determined regions of interest: the amygdala and the medial prefrontal-orbitofrontal cortex (mPFC-OFC). We also assessed psychological functioning, cognitive failure, and clinical disease severity. Patients showed less mPFC activation during processing of emotional faces compared to controls, whereas no differences were found in amygdala activation. An exploratory psychophysiological interaction analysis demonstrated decreased functional coupling between the ventromedial PFC and posterior cingulate cortex (a region structurally connected to the PFC) in CD-patients. The present study is the first to show alterations in brain function and task-related functional coupling in patients with long-term remission of CD relative to matched healthy controls. These alterations may, together with abnormalities in brain structure, be related to the persisting psychological morbidity in patients with CD after long-term remission. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Smiling faces and cash bonuses: Exploring common affective coding across positive and negative emotional and motivational stimuli using fMRI.

PubMed

Park, Haeme R P; Kostandyan, Mariam; Boehler, C Nico; Krebs, Ruth M

2018-06-01

Although it is clear that emotional and motivational manipulations yield a strong influence on cognition and behaviour, these domains have mostly been investigated in independent research lines. Therefore, it remains poorly understood how far these affective manipulations overlap in terms of their underlying neural activations, especially in light of previous findings that suggest a shared valence mechanism across multiple affective processing domains (e.g., monetary incentives, primary rewards, emotional events). This is particularly interesting considering the commonality between emotional and motivational constructs in terms of their basic affective nature (positive vs. negative), but dissociations in terms of instrumentality, in that only reward-related stimuli are typically associated with performance-contingent outcomes. Here, we aimed to examine potential common neural processes triggered by emotional and motivational stimuli in matched tasks within participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Across tasks, we found shared valence effects in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus (part of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), with increased activity for positive and negative stimuli, respectively. Despite this commonality, emotion and reward tasks featured differential behavioural patterns in that negative valence effects (performance costs) were exclusive to emotional stimuli, while positive valence effects (performance benefits) were only observed for reward-related stimuli. Overall, our data suggest a common affective coding mechanism across different task domains and support the idea that monetary incentives entail signed basic valence signals, above and beyond the instruction to perform both gain and loss trials as accurately as possible to maximise the outcome.

Amygdala reactivity in healthy adults is correlated with prefrontal cortical thickness.

PubMed

Foland-Ross, Lara C; Altshuler, Lori L; Bookheimer, Susan Y; Lieberman, Matthew D; Townsend, Jennifer; Penfold, Conor; Moody, Teena; Ahlf, Kyle; Shen, Jim K; Madsen, Sarah K; Rasser, Paul E; Toga, Arthur W; Thompson, Paul M

2010-12-08

Recent evidence suggests that putting feelings into words activates the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and suppresses the response of the amygdala, potentially helping to alleviate emotional distress. To further elucidate the relationship between brain structure and function in these regions, structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data were collected from a sample of 20 healthy human subjects. Structural MRI data were processed using cortical pattern-matching algorithms to produce spatially normalized maps of cortical thickness. During functional scanning, subjects cognitively assessed an emotional target face by choosing one of two linguistic labels (label emotion condition) or matched geometric forms (control condition). Manually prescribed regions of interest for the left amygdala were used to extract percentage signal change in this region occurring during the contrast of label emotion versus match forms. A correlation analysis between left amygdala activation and cortical thickness was then performed along each point of the cortical surface, resulting in a color-coded r value at each cortical point. Correlation analyses revealed that gray matter thickness in left ventromedial PFC was inversely correlated with task-related activation in the amygdala. These data add support to a general role of the ventromedial PFC in regulating activity of the amygdala.

Working memory for social cues recruits orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of delayed matching to sample for emotional expressions.

PubMed

LoPresti, Matthew L; Schon, Karin; Tricarico, Marisa D; Swisher, Jascha D; Celone, Kim A; Stern, Chantal E

2008-04-02

During everyday interactions, we continuously monitor and maintain information about different individuals and their changing emotions in memory. Yet to date, working memory (WM) studies have primarily focused on mechanisms for maintaining face identity, but not emotional expression, and studies investigating the neural basis of emotion have focused on transient activity, not delay related activity. The goal of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate WM for two critical social cues: identity and emotion. Subjects performed a delayed match-to-sample task that required them to match either the emotional expression or the identity of a face after a 10 s delay. Neuroanatomically, our predictions focused on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the amygdala, as these regions have previously been implicated in emotional processing and long-term memory, and studies have demonstrated sustained OFC and medial temporal lobe activity during visual WM. Consistent with previous studies, transient activity during the sample period representing emotion and identity was found in the superior temporal sulcus and inferior occipital cortex, respectively. Sustained delay-period activity was evident in OFC, amygdala, and hippocampus, for both emotion and identity trials. These results suggest that, although initial processing of emotion and identity is accomplished in anatomically segregated temporal and occipital regions, sustained delay related memory for these two critical features is held by the OFC, amygdala and hippocampus. These regions share rich connections, and have been shown previously to be necessary for binding features together in long-term memory. Our results suggest a role for these regions in active maintenance as well.

Disrupted neural processing of emotional faces in psychopathy.

PubMed

Contreras-Rodríguez, Oren; Pujol, Jesus; Batalla, Iolanda; Harrison, Ben J; Bosque, Javier; Ibern-Regàs, Immaculada; Hernández-Ribas, Rosa; Soriano-Mas, Carles; Deus, Joan; López-Solà, Marina; Pifarré, Josep; Menchón, José M; Cardoner, Narcís

2014-04-01

Psychopaths show a reduced ability to recognize emotion facial expressions, which may disturb the interpersonal relationship development and successful social adaptation. Behavioral hypotheses point toward an association between emotion recognition deficits in psychopathy and amygdala dysfunction. Our prediction was that amygdala dysfunction would combine deficient activation with disturbances in functional connectivity with cortical regions of the face-processing network. Twenty-two psychopaths and 22 control subjects were assessed and functional magnetic resonance maps were generated to identify both brain activation and task-induced functional connectivity using psychophysiological interaction analysis during an emotional face-matching task. Results showed significant amygdala activation in control subjects only, but differences between study groups did not reach statistical significance. In contrast, psychopaths showed significantly increased activation in visual and prefrontal areas, with this latest activation being associated with psychopaths' affective-interpersonal disturbances. Psychophysiological interaction analyses revealed a reciprocal reduction in functional connectivity between the left amygdala and visual and prefrontal cortices. Our results suggest that emotional stimulation may evoke a relevant cortical response in psychopaths, but a disruption in the processing of emotional faces exists involving the reciprocal functional interaction between the amygdala and neocortex, consistent with the notion of a failure to integrate emotion into cognition in psychopathic individuals.

Intonation processing deficits of emotional words among Mandarin Chinese speakers with congenital amusia: an ERP study.

PubMed

Lu, Xuejing; Ho, Hao Tam; Liu, Fang; Wu, Daxing; Thompson, William F

2015-01-01

Congenital amusia is a disorder that is known to affect the processing of musical pitch. Although individuals with amusia rarely show language deficits in daily life, a number of findings point to possible impairments in speech prosody that amusic individuals may compensate for by drawing on linguistic information. Using EEG, we investigated (1) whether the processing of speech prosody is impaired in amusia and (2) whether emotional linguistic information can compensate for this impairment. Twenty Chinese amusics and 22 matched controls were presented pairs of emotional words spoken with either statement or question intonation while their EEG was recorded. Their task was to judge whether the intonations were the same. Amusics exhibited impaired performance on the intonation-matching task for emotional linguistic information, as their performance was significantly worse than that of controls. EEG results showed a reduced N2 response to incongruent intonation pairs in amusics compared with controls, which likely reflects impaired conflict processing in amusia. However, our EEG results also indicated that amusics were intact in early sensory auditory processing, as revealed by a comparable N1 modulation in both groups. We propose that the impairment in discriminating speech intonation observed among amusic individuals may arise from an inability to access information extracted at early processing stages. This, in turn, could reflect a disconnection between low-level and high-level processing.

Intonation processing deficits of emotional words among Mandarin Chinese speakers with congenital amusia: an ERP study

PubMed Central

Lu, Xuejing; Ho, Hao Tam; Liu, Fang; Wu, Daxing; Thompson, William F.

2015-01-01

Background: Congenital amusia is a disorder that is known to affect the processing of musical pitch. Although individuals with amusia rarely show language deficits in daily life, a number of findings point to possible impairments in speech prosody that amusic individuals may compensate for by drawing on linguistic information. Using EEG, we investigated (1) whether the processing of speech prosody is impaired in amusia and (2) whether emotional linguistic information can compensate for this impairment. Method: Twenty Chinese amusics and 22 matched controls were presented pairs of emotional words spoken with either statement or question intonation while their EEG was recorded. Their task was to judge whether the intonations were the same. Results: Amusics exhibited impaired performance on the intonation-matching task for emotional linguistic information, as their performance was significantly worse than that of controls. EEG results showed a reduced N2 response to incongruent intonation pairs in amusics compared with controls, which likely reflects impaired conflict processing in amusia. However, our EEG results also indicated that amusics were intact in early sensory auditory processing, as revealed by a comparable N1 modulation in both groups. Conclusion: We propose that the impairment in discriminating speech intonation observed among amusic individuals may arise from an inability to access information extracted at early processing stages. This, in turn, could reflect a disconnection between low-level and high-level processing. PMID:25914659

Memory and emotion processing performance contributes to the diagnosis of non-semantic primary progressive aphasia syndromes.

PubMed

Piguet, Olivier; Leyton, Cristian E; Gleeson, Liam D; Hoon, Chris; Hodges, John R

2015-01-01

The two non-semantic variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA), nonfluent/agrammatic PPA (nfv-PPA) and logopenic variant PPA (lv-PPA), share language features despite their different underlying pathology, and may be difficult to distinguish for non-language experts. To improve diagnostic accuracy of nfv-PPA and lv-PPA using tasks measuring non-language cognition and emotion processing. Thirty-eight dementia patients meeting diagnostic criteria for PPA (nfv-PPA 20, lv-PPA 18) and 21 matched healthy Controls underwent a comprehensive assessment of cognition and emotion processing, as well as a high-resolution structural MRI and a PiB-PET scan, a putative biomarker of Alzheimer's disease. Task performances were compared between the groups and those found to differ significantly were entered into a logistic regression analysis. Analyses revealed a double dissociation between nfv-PPA and lv-PPA. nfv-PPA exhibited significant emotion processing disturbance compared to lv-PPA and Controls. In contrast, only the lv-PPA group was significantly impaired on tasks of episodic memory. Logistic regression analyses showed that 87% of patients were correctly classified using emotion processing and episodic memory composite scores, together with a measure of visuospatial ability. Non-language presenting features can help differentiate between the two non-semantic PPA syndromes, with a double dissociation observed on tasks of episodic memory and emotion processing. Based on performance on these tasks, we propose a decision tree as a complementary method to differentiate between the two non-semantic variants. These findings have important clinical implications, with identification of patients who may potentially benefit existing therapeutic interventions currently available for Alzheimer's disease.

The influence of emotional stimuli on attention orienting and inhibitory control in pediatric anxiety.

PubMed

Mueller, Sven C; Hardin, Michael G; Mogg, Karin; Benson, Valerie; Bradley, Brendan P; Reinholdt-Dunne, Marie Louise; Liversedge, Simon P; Pine, Daniel S; Ernst, Monique

2012-08-01

Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in children and adolescents, and are associated with aberrant emotion-related attention orienting and inhibitory control. While recent studies conducted with high-trait anxious adults have employed novel emotion-modified antisaccade tasks to examine the influence of emotional information on orienting and inhibition, similar studies have yet to be conducted in youths. Participants were 22 children/adolescents diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and 22 age-matched healthy comparison youths. Participants completed an emotion-modified antisaccade task that was similar to those used in studies of high-trait anxious adults. This task probed the influence of abruptly appearing neutral, happy, angry, or fear stimuli on orienting (prosaccade) or inhibitory (antisaccade) responses. Anxious compared to healthy children showed facilitated orienting toward angry stimuli. With respect to inhibitory processes, threat-related information improved antisaccade accuracy in healthy but not anxious youth. These findings were not linked to individual levels of reported anxiety or specific anxiety disorders. Findings suggest that anxious relative to healthy children manifest enhanced orienting toward threat-related stimuli. In addition, the current findings suggest that threat may modulate inhibitory control during adolescent development. © 2012 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry © 2012 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

The autistic child's appraisal of expressions of emotion.

PubMed

Hobson, R P

1986-05-01

Groups of MA-matched autistic, normal and non-autistic retarded children were tested for their ability to choose drawn and photographed facial expressions of emotion to "go with" a person videotaped in gestures, vocalizations and contexts indicative of four emotional states. Although both autistic and control subjects were adept in choosing drawings of non-personal objects to correspond with videotaped cues, the autistic children were markedly impaired in selecting the appropriate faces for the videotaped expressions and contexts. Within the autistic group, the children's performance in this task of emotion recognition was related to MA. It is suggested that autistic children have difficulty in recognizing how different expressions of particular emotions are associated with each other, and that this might contribute to their failure to understand the emotional states of other people.

Enhancing emotion recognition in children with autism spectrum conditions: an intervention using animated vehicles with real emotional faces.

PubMed

Golan, Ofer; Ashwin, Emma; Granader, Yael; McClintock, Suzy; Day, Kate; Leggett, Victoria; Baron-Cohen, Simon

2010-03-01

This study evaluated The Transporters, an animated series designed to enhance emotion comprehension in children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). n = 20 children with ASC (aged 4-7) watched The Transporters everyday for 4 weeks. Participants were tested before and after intervention on emotional vocabulary and emotion recognition at three levels of generalization. Two matched control groups of children (ASC group, n = 18 and typically developing group, n = 18) were also assessed twice without any intervention. The intervention group improved significantly more than the clinical control group on all task levels, performing comparably to typical controls at Time 2. We conclude that using The Transporters significantly improves emotion recognition in children with ASC. Future research should evaluate the series' effectiveness with lower-functioning individuals.

A Shared Neural Substrate for Mentalizing and the Affective Component of Sentence Comprehension

PubMed Central

Hervé, Pierre-Yves; Razafimandimby, Annick; Jobard, Gaël; Tzourio-Mazoyer, Nathalie

2013-01-01

Using event-related fMRI in a sample of 42 healthy participants, we compared the cerebral activity maps obtained when classifying spoken sentences based on the mental content of the main character (belief, deception or empathy) or on the emotional tonality of the sentence (happiness, anger or sadness). To control for the effects of different syntactic constructions (such as embedded clauses in belief sentences), we subtracted from each map the BOLD activations obtained during plausibility judgments on structurally matching sentences, devoid of emotions or ToM. The obtained theory of mind (ToM) and emotional speech comprehension networks overlapped in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate cortex, right anterior temporal lobe, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and in the left inferior frontal sulcus. These regions form a ToM network, which contributes to the emotional component of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared with the ToM task, in which the sentences were enounced on a neutral tone, the emotional sentence classification task, in which the sentences were play-acted, was associated with a greater activity in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus, in line with the presence of emotional prosody. Besides, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was more active during emotional than ToM sentence processing. This region may link mental state representations with verbal and prosodic emotional cues. Compared with emotional sentence classification, ToM was associated with greater activity in the caudate nucleus, paracingulate cortex, and superior frontal and parietal regions, in line with behavioral data showing that ToM sentence comprehension was a more demanding task. PMID:23342148

Differential amygdala response during facial recognition in patients with schizophrenia: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Kosaka, H; Omori, M; Murata, T; Iidaka, T; Yamada, H; Okada, T; Takahashi, T; Sadato, N; Itoh, H; Yonekura, Y; Wada, Y

2002-09-01

Human lesion or neuroimaging studies suggest that amygdala is involved in facial emotion recognition. Although impairments in recognition of facial and/or emotional expression have been reported in schizophrenia, there are few neuroimaging studies that have examined differential brain activation during facial recognition between patients with schizophrenia and normal controls. To investigate amygdala responses during facial recognition in schizophrenia, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study with 12 right-handed medicated patients with schizophrenia and 12 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. The experiment task was a type of emotional intensity judgment task. During the task period, subjects were asked to view happy (or angry/disgusting/sad) and neutral faces simultaneously presented every 3 s and to judge which face was more emotional (positive or negative face discrimination). Imaging data were investigated in voxel-by-voxel basis for single-group analysis and for between-group analysis according to the random effect model using Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). No significant difference in task accuracy was found between the schizophrenic and control groups. Positive face discrimination activated the bilateral amygdalae of both controls and schizophrenics, with more prominent activation of the right amygdala shown in the schizophrenic group. Negative face discrimination activated the bilateral amygdalae in the schizophrenic group whereas the right amygdala alone in the control group, although no significant group difference was found. Exaggerated amygdala activation during emotional intensity judgment found in the schizophrenic patients may reflect impaired gating of sensory input containing emotion. Copyright 2002 Elsevier Science B.V.

Understanding emotions in others: mirror neuron dysfunction in children with autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Dapretto, Mirella; Davies, Mari S; Pfeifer, Jennifer H; Scott, Ashley A; Sigman, Marian; Bookheimer, Susan Y; Iacoboni, Marco

2006-01-01

To examine mirror neuron abnormalities in autism, high-functioning children with autism and matched controls underwent fMRI while imitating and observing emotional expressions. Although both groups performed the tasks equally well, children with autism showed no mirror neuron activity in the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis). Notably, activity in this area was inversely related to symptom severity in the social domain, suggesting that a dysfunctional 'mirror neuron system' may underlie the social deficits observed in autism.

Social cognition in schizophrenia: cognitive and affective factors.

PubMed

Ziv, Ido; Leiser, David; Levine, Joseph

2011-01-01

Social cognition refers to how people conceive, perceive, and draw inferences about mental and emotional states of others in the social world. Previous studies suggest that the concept of social cognition involves several abilities, including those related to affect and cognition. The present study analyses the deficits of individuals with schizophrenia in two areas of social cognition: Theory of Mind (ToM) and emotion recognition and processing. Examining the impairment of these abilities in patients with schizophrenia has the potential to elucidate the neurophysiological regions involved in social cognition and may also have the potential to aid rehabilitation. Two experiments were conducted. Both included the same five tasks: first- and second-level false-belief ToM tasks, emotion inferencing, understanding of irony, and matrix reasoning (a WAIS-R subtest). The matrix reasoning task was administered to evaluate and control for the association of the other tasks with analytic reasoning skills. Experiment 1 involved factor analysis of the task performance of 75 healthy participants. Experiment 2 compared 30 patients with schizophrenia to an equal number of matched controls. Results. (1) The five tasks were clearly divided into two factors corresponding to the two areas of social cognition, ToM and emotion recognition and processing. (2) Schizophrenics' performance was impaired on all tasks, particularly on those loading heavily on the analytic component (matrix reasoning and second-order ToM). (3) Matrix reasoning, second-level ToM (ToM2), and irony were found to distinguish patients from controls, even when all other tasks that revealed significant impairment in the patients' performance were taken into account. The two areas of social cognition examined are related to distinct factors. The mechanism for answering ToM questions (especially ToM2) depends on analytic reasoning capabilities, but the difficulties they present to individuals with schizophrenia are due to other components as well. The impairment in social cognition in schizophrenia stems from deficiencies in several mechanisms, including the ability to think analytically and to process emotion information and cues.

Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

PubMed Central

Bahn, Daniela; Vesker, Michael; García Alanis, José C.; Schwarzer, Gudrun; Kauschke, Christina

2017-01-01

Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword) and emotional categorization (positive or negative). Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative) matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not. This age-related valence effect in emotion word processing will be discussed with respect to linguistic and methodological aspects. PMID:28798706

The perception and identification of facial emotions in individuals with autism spectrum disorders using the Let's Face It! Emotion Skills Battery.

PubMed

Tanaka, James W; Wolf, Julie M; Klaiman, Cheryl; Koenig, Kathleen; Cockburn, Jeffrey; Herlihy, Lauren; Brown, Carla; Stahl, Sherin S; South, Mikle; McPartland, James C; Kaiser, Martha D; Schultz, Robert T

2012-12-01

Although impaired social-emotional ability is a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the perceptual skills and mediating strategies contributing to the social deficits of autism are not well understood. A perceptual skill that is fundamental to effective social communication is the ability to accurately perceive and interpret facial emotions. To evaluate the expression processing of participants with ASD, we designed the Let's Face It! Emotion Skills Battery (LFI! Battery), a computer-based assessment composed of three subscales measuring verbal and perceptual skills implicated in the recognition of facial emotions. We administered the LFI! Battery to groups of participants with ASD and typically developing control (TDC) participants that were matched for age and IQ. On the Name Game labeling task, participants with ASD (N = 68) performed on par with TDC individuals (N = 66) in their ability to name the facial emotions of happy, sad, disgust and surprise and were only impaired in their ability to identify the angry expression. On the Matchmaker Expression task that measures the recognition of facial emotions across different facial identities, the ASD participants (N = 66) performed reliably worse than TDC participants (N = 67) on the emotions of happy, sad, disgust, frighten and angry. In the Parts-Wholes test of perceptual strategies of expression, the TDC participants (N = 67) displayed more holistic encoding for the eyes than the mouths in expressive faces whereas ASD participants (N = 66) exhibited the reverse pattern of holistic recognition for the mouth and analytic recognition of the eyes. In summary, findings from the LFI! Battery show that participants with ASD were able to label the basic facial emotions (with the exception of angry expression) on par with age- and IQ-matched TDC participants. However, participants with ASD were impaired in their ability to generalize facial emotions across different identities and showed a tendency to recognize the mouth feature holistically and the eyes as isolated parts. © 2012 The Authors. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry © 2012 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

Distant influences of amygdala lesion on visual cortical activation during emotional face processing.

PubMed

Vuilleumier, Patrik; Richardson, Mark P; Armony, Jorge L; Driver, Jon; Dolan, Raymond J

2004-11-01

Emotional visual stimuli evoke enhanced responses in the visual cortex. To test whether this reflects modulatory influences from the amygdala on sensory processing, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human patients with medial temporal lobe sclerosis. Twenty-six patients with lesions in the amygdala, the hippocampus or both, plus 13 matched healthy controls, were shown pictures of fearful or neutral faces in task-releant or task-irrelevant positions on the display. All subjects showed increased fusiform cortex activation when the faces were in task-relevant positions. Both healthy individuals and those with hippocampal damage showed increased activation in the fusiform and occipital cortex when they were shown fearful faces, but this was not the case for individuals with damage to the amygdala, even though visual areas were structurally intact. The distant influence of the amygdala was also evidenced by the parametric relationship between amygdala damage and the level of emotional activation in the fusiform cortex. Our data show that combining the fMRI and lesion approaches can help reveal the source of functional modulatory influences between distant but interconnected brain regions.

Validation of Autonomic and Endocrine Reactivity to a Laboratory Stressor in Young Children

PubMed Central

Roos, Leslie E.; Giuliano, Ryan J.; Beauchamp, Kathryn G.; Gunnar, Megan; Amidon, Brigette; Fisher, Philip A.

2017-01-01

The validation of laboratory paradigms that reliably induce a stress response [including hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and autonomic nervous system (ANS) activation], is critical for understanding how children’s stress-response systems support emotional and cognitive function. Early childhood research to date is markedly limited, given the difficulty in establishing paradigms that reliably induce a cortisol response. Furthermore, research to date has not included a control condition or examined concurrent ANS reactivity. We addressed these limitations by characterizing the extent to which a modified matching task stressor paradigm induces HPA and ANS activation, beyond a closely matched control condition. Modifications include an unfamiliar and unfriendly assessor to increase the stressful nature of the task. Results validate the matching task as a laboratory stressor, with significant differences in HPA and ANS responsivity between conditions. The Stressor group exhibited a cortisol increase post-stressor, while the Control group was stable over time. Children in both conditions exhibited reduced parasympathetic activity to the first-half of the task, but in the second-half, only children in the Stressor condition, who were experiencing exaggerated signals of failure, exhibited further parasympathetic decline. The Stressor condition induced higher sympathetic activity (versus Control) throughout the task, with exaggerated second-half differences. Within the Stressor condition, responsivity was convergent across systems, with greater cortisol reactivity correlated with the magnitude of parasympathetic withdrawal and sympathetic engagement. Future research employing the matching task will facilitate understanding the role of HPA and ANS function in development. PMID:28024268

Mathematics anxiety reduces default mode network deactivation in response to numerical tasks.

PubMed

Pletzer, Belinda; Kronbichler, Martin; Nuerk, Hans-Christoph; Kerschbaum, Hubert H

2015-01-01

Mathematics anxiety is negatively related to mathematics performance, thereby threatening the professional success. Preoccupation with the emotional content of the stimuli may consume working memory resources, which may be reflected in decreased deactivation of areas associated with the default mode network (DMN) activated during self-referential and emotional processing. The common problem is that math anxiety is usually associated with poor math performance, so that any group differences are difficult to interpret. Here we compared the BOLD-response of 18 participants with high (HMAs) and 18 participants with low mathematics anxiety (LMAs) matched for their mathematical performance to two numerical tasks (number comparison, number bisection). During both tasks, we found stronger deactivation within the DMN in LMAs compared to HMAs, while BOLD-response in task-related activation areas did not differ between HMAs and LMAs. The difference in DMN deactivation between the HMA and LMA group was more pronounced in stimuli with additional requirement on inhibitory functions, but did not differ between number magnitude processing and arithmetic fact retrieval.

Mathematics anxiety reduces default mode network deactivation in response to numerical tasks

PubMed Central

Pletzer, Belinda; Kronbichler, Martin; Nuerk, Hans-Christoph; Kerschbaum, Hubert H.

2015-01-01

Mathematics anxiety is negatively related to mathematics performance, thereby threatening the professional success. Preoccupation with the emotional content of the stimuli may consume working memory resources, which may be reflected in decreased deactivation of areas associated with the default mode network (DMN) activated during self-referential and emotional processing. The common problem is that math anxiety is usually associated with poor math performance, so that any group differences are difficult to interpret. Here we compared the BOLD-response of 18 participants with high (HMAs) and 18 participants with low mathematics anxiety (LMAs) matched for their mathematical performance to two numerical tasks (number comparison, number bisection). During both tasks, we found stronger deactivation within the DMN in LMAs compared to HMAs, while BOLD-response in task-related activation areas did not differ between HMAs and LMAs. The difference in DMN deactivation between the HMA and LMA group was more pronounced in stimuli with additional requirement on inhibitory functions, but did not differ between number magnitude processing and arithmetic fact retrieval. PMID:25954179

From neural signatures of emotional modulation to social cognition: individual differences in healthy volunteers and psychiatric participants

PubMed Central

Aguado, Jaume; Baez, Sandra; Huepe, David; Lopez, Vladimir; Ortega, Rodrigo; Sigman, Mariano; Mikulan, Ezequiel; Lischinsky, Alicia; Torrente, Fernando; Cetkovich, Marcelo; Torralva, Teresa; Bekinschtein, Tristan; Manes, Facundo

2014-01-01

It is commonly assumed that early emotional signals provide relevant information for social cognition tasks. The goal of this study was to test the association between (a) cortical markers of face emotional processing and (b) social-cognitive measures, and also to build a model which can predict this association (a and b) in healthy volunteers as well as in different groups of psychiatric patients. Thus, we investigated the early cortical processing of emotional stimuli (N170, using a face and word valence task) and their relationship with the social-cognitive profiles (SCPs, indexed by measures of theory of mind, fluid intelligence, speed processing and executive functions). Group comparisons and individual differences were assessed among schizophrenia (SCZ) patients and their relatives, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), individuals with euthymic bipolar disorder (BD) and healthy participants (educational level, handedness, age and gender matched). Our results provide evidence of emotional N170 impairments in the affected groups (SCZ and relatives, ADHD and BD) as well as subtle group differences. Importantly, cortical processing of emotional stimuli predicted the SCP, as evidenced by a structural equation model analysis. This is the first study to report an association model of brain markers of emotional processing and SCP. PMID:23685775

Emotional and cognitive social processes are impaired in Parkinson's disease and are related to behavioral disorders.

PubMed

Narme, Pauline; Mouras, Harold; Roussel, Martine; Duru, Cécile; Krystkowiak, Pierre; Godefroy, Olivier

2013-03-01

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with behavioral disorders that can affect social functioning but are poorly understood. Since emotional and cognitive social processes are known to be crucial in social relationships, impairment of these processes may account for the emergence of behavioral disorders. We used a systematic battery of tests to assess emotional processes and social cognition in PD patients and relate our findings to conventional neuropsychological data (especially behavioral disorders). Twenty-three PD patients and 46 controls (matched for age and educational level) were included in the study and underwent neuropsychological testing, including an assessment of the behavioral and cognitive components of executive function. Emotional and cognitive social processes were assessed with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index caregiver-administered questionnaire (as a measure of empathy), a facial emotion recognition task and two theory of mind (ToM) tasks. When compared with controls, PD patients showed low levels of empathy (p = .006), impaired facial emotion recognition (which persisted after correction for perceptual abilities) (p = .001), poor performance in a second-order ToM task (p = .008) that assessed both cognitive (p = .004) and affective (p = .03) inferences and, lastly, frequent dysexecutive behavioral disorders (in over 40% of the patients). Overall, impaired emotional and cognitive social functioning was observed in 17% of patients and was related to certain cognitive dysexecutive disorders. In terms of behavioral dysexecutive disorders, social behavior disorders were related to impaired emotional and cognitive social functioning (p = .04) but were independent of cognitive impairments. Emotional and cognitive social processes were found to be impaired in Parkinson's disease. This impairment may account for the emergence of social behavioral disorders. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.

Emotion perception after moderate-severe traumatic brain injury: The valence effect and the role of working memory, processing speed, and nonverbal reasoning.

PubMed

Rosenberg, Hannah; Dethier, Marie; Kessels, Roy P C; Westbrook, R Frederick; McDonald, Skye

2015-07-01

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) impairs emotion perception. Perception of negative emotions (sadness, disgust, fear, and anger) is reportedly affected more than positive (happiness and surprise) ones. It has been argued that this reflects a specialized neural network underpinning negative emotions that is vulnerable to brain injury. However, studies typically do not equate for differential difficulty between emotions. We aimed to examine whether emotion recognition deficits in people with TBI were specific to negative emotions, while equating task difficulty, and to determine whether perception deficits might be accounted for by other cognitive processes. Twenty-seven people with TBI and 28 matched control participants identified 6 basic emotions at 2 levels of intensity (a) the conventional 100% intensity and (b) "equated intensity"-that is, an intensity that yielded comparable accuracy rates across emotions in controls. (a) At 100% intensity, the TBI group was impaired in recognizing anger, fear, and disgust but not happiness, surprise, or sadness and performed worse on negative than positive emotions. (b) At equated intensity, the TBI group was poorer than controls overall but not differentially poorer in recognizing negative emotions. Although processing speed and nonverbal reasoning were associated with emotion accuracy, injury severity by itself was a unique predictor. When task difficulty is taken into account, individuals with TBI show impairment in recognizing all facial emotions. There was no evidence for a specific impairment for negative emotions or any particular emotion. Impairment was accounted for by injury severity rather than being a secondary effect of reduced neuropsychological functioning. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Social cognition dysfunctions in patients with epilepsy: Evidence from patients with temporal lobe and idiopathic generalized epilepsies.

PubMed

Realmuto, Sabrina; Zummo, Leila; Cerami, Chiara; Agrò, Luigi; Dodich, Alessandra; Canessa, Nicola; Zizzo, Andrea; Fierro, Brigida; Daniele, Ornella

2015-06-01

Despite an extensive literature on cognitive impairments in focal and generalized epilepsy, only a few number of studies specifically explored social cognition disorders in epilepsy syndromes. The aim of our study was to investigate social cognition abilities in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). Thirty-nine patients (21 patients with TLE and 18 patients with IGE) and 21 matched healthy controls (HCs) were recruited. All subjects underwent a basic neuropsychological battery plus two experimental tasks evaluating emotion recognition from facial expression (Ekman-60-Faces test, Ek-60F) and mental state attribution (Story-based Empathy Task, SET). In particular, the latter is a newly developed task that assesses the ability to infer others' intentions (i.e., intention attribution - IA) and emotions (i.e., emotion attribution - EA) compared with a control condition of physical causality (i.e., causal inferences - CI). Compared with HCs, patients with TLE showed significantly lower performances on both social cognition tasks. In particular, all SET subconditions as well as the recognition of negative emotions were significantly impaired in patients with TLE vs. HCs. On the contrary, patients with IGE showed impairments on anger recognition only without any deficit at the SET task. Emotion recognition deficits occur in patients with epilepsy, possibly because of a global disruption of a pathway involving frontal, temporal, and limbic regions. Impairments of mental state attribution specifically characterize the neuropsychological profile of patients with TLE in the context of the in-depth temporal dysfunction typical of such patients. Impairments of socioemotional processing have to be considered as part of the neuropsychological assessment in both TLE and IGE in view of a correct management and for future therapeutic interventions. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Dispositional Mindfulness and Depressive Symptomatology: Correlations with Limbic and Self-Referential Neural Activity during Rest

PubMed Central

Way, Baldwin M.; Creswell, J. David; Eisenberger, Naomi I.; Lieberman, Matthew D.

2010-01-01

To better understand the relationship between mindfulness and depression, we studied normal young adults (n=27) who completed measures of dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology, which were then correlated with: a) Rest: resting neural activity during passive viewing of a fixation cross, relative to a simple goal-directed task (shape-matching); and b) Reactivity: neural reactivity during viewing of negative emotional faces, relative to the same shape-matching task. Dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting activity in self-referential processing areas, while depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with resting activity in similar areas. In addition, dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting activity in the amygdala, bilaterally, while depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with activity in the right amygdala. Similarly, when viewing emotional faces, amygdala reactivity was positively correlated with depressive symptomatology and negatively correlated with dispositional mindfulness, an effect that was largely attributable to differences in resting activity. These findings indicate that mindfulness is associated with intrinsic neural activity and that changes in resting amygdala activity could be a potential mechanism by which mindfulness-based depression treatments elicit therapeutic improvement. PMID:20141298

Reasoning in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

PubMed

Simpson, Jane; Cove, Jennifer; Fineberg, Naomi; Msetfi, Rachel M; J Ball, Linden

2007-11-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the inductive and deductive reasoning abilities of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Following previous research, it was predicted that people with OCD would show different abilities on inductive reasoning tasks but similar abilities to controls on deductive reasoning tasks. A two-group comparison was used with both groups matched on a range of demographic variables. Where appropriate, unmatched variables were entered into the analyses as covariates. Twenty-three people with OCD and 25 control participants were assessed on two tasks: an inductive reasoning task (the 20-questions task) and a deductive reasoning task (a syllogistic reasoning task with a content-neutral and content-emotional manipulation). While no group differences emerged on several of the parameters of the inductive reasoning task, the OCD group did differ on one, and arguably the most important, parameter by asking fewer correct direct-hypothesis questions. The syllogistic reasoning task results were analysed using both correct response and conclusion acceptance data. While no main effects of group were evident, significant interactions indicated important differences in the way the OCD group reasoned with content neutral and emotional syllogisms. It was argued that the OCD group's patterns of response on both tasks were characterized by the need for more information, states of uncertainty, and doubt and postponement of a final decision.

The effects of gender, age, schooling, and cultural background on the identification of facial emotions: a transcultural study.

PubMed

de Souza, Leonardo Cruz; Bertoux, Maxime; de Faria, Ângelo Ribeiro Vaz; Corgosinho, Laiane Tábata Souza; Prado, Ana Carolina de Almeida; Barbosa, Izabela Guimarães; Caramelli, Paulo; Colosimo, Enrico; Teixeira, Antônio Lúcio

2018-05-25

ABSTRACTBackground:Social cognition tasks, such as identification of emotions, can contribute to the diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders. The wide use of Facial Emotion Recognition Test (FERT) is hampered by the absence of normative dataset and by the limited understanding of how demographic factors such as age, education, gender, and cultural background may influence the performance on the test. We analyzed the influence of these variables in the performance in the FERT from the short version of the Social and Emotional Assessment. This task is composed by 35 pictures with 7 different emotions presented 5 times each. Cognitively healthy Brazilian participants (n = 203; 109 females and 94 males) underwent the FERT. We compared the performance of participants across gender, age, and educational subgroups. We also compared the performance of Brazilians with a group of French subjects (n = 60) matched for gender, age, and educational level. There was no gender difference regarding the performance on total score and in each emotion subscore in the Brazilian sample. We found a significant effect of aging and schooling on the performance on the FERT, with younger and more educated subjects having higher scores. Brazilian and French participants did not differ in the FERT and its subscores. Normative data for employing the FERT in Brazilian population is presented. Data here provided may contribute to the interpretation of the results of FERT in different cultural contexts and highlight the common bias that should be corrected in the future tasks to be developed.

The impact of positive, negative and neutral stimuli in a virtual reality cognitive-motor rehabilitation task: a pilot study with stroke patients.

PubMed

Cameirão, Mónica S; Faria, Ana Lúcia; Paulino, Teresa; Alves, Júlio; Bermúdez I Badia, Sergi

2016-08-09

Virtual Reality (VR) based methods for stroke rehabilitation have mainly focused on motor rehabilitation, but there is increasing interest in integrating motor and cognitive training to increase similarity to real-world settings. Unfortunately, more research is needed for the definition of which type of content should be used in the design of these tools. One possibility is the use of emotional stimuli, which are known to enhance attentional processes. According to the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, as people age, the emotional salience arises for positive and neutral, but not for negative stimuli. For this study we developed a cognitive-motor VR task involving attention and short-term memory, and we investigated the impact of using emotional images of varying valence. The task consisted of finding a target image, shown for only two seconds, among fourteen neutral distractors, and selecting it through arm movements. After performing the VR task, a recall task took place and the patients had to identify the target images among a valence-matched number of distractors. Ten stroke patients participated in a within-subjects experiment with three conditions based on the valence of the images: positive, negative and neutral. Eye movements were recorded during VR task performance with an eye tracking system. Our results show decreased attention for negative stimuli in the VR task performance when compared to neutral stimuli. The recall task shows significantly more wrongly identified images (false memories) for negative stimuli than for neutral. Regression and correlation analyses with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and the Geriatric Depression Scale revealed differential effects of cognitive function and depressive symptomatology in the encoding and recall of positive, negative and neutral images. Further, eye movement data shows reduced search patterns for wrongly selected stimuli containing emotional content. The results of this study suggest that it is feasible to use emotional content in a VR based cognitive-motor task for attention and memory training after stroke. Stroke survivors showed less attention towards negative information, exhibiting reduced visual search patterns and more false memories. We have also shown that the use of emotional stimuli in a VR task can provide additional information regarding patient's mood and cognitive status.

Social cognition in anorexia nervosa: evidence of preserved theory of mind and impaired emotional functioning.

PubMed

Adenzato, Mauro; Todisco, Patrizia; Ardito, Rita B

2012-01-01

The findings of the few studies that have to date investigated the way in which individuals with Anorexia Nervosa (AN) navigate their social environment are somewhat contradictory. We undertook this study to shed new light on the social-cognitive profile of patients with AN, analysing Theory of Mind and emotional functioning. Starting from previous evidence on the role of the amygdala in the neurobiology of AN and in the social cognition, we hypothesise preserved Theory of Mind and impaired emotional functioning in patients with AN. Thirty women diagnosed with AN and thirty-two women matched for education and age were involved in the study. Theory of Mind and emotional functioning were assessed with a set of validated experimental tasks. A measure of perceived social support was also used to test the correlations between this dimension and the social-cognitive profile of AN patients. The performance of patients with AN is significantly worse than that of healthy controls on tasks assessing emotional functioning, whereas patients' performance is comparable to that of healthy controls on the Theory of Mind task. Correlation analyses showed no relationship between scores on any of the social-cognition tasks and either age of onset or duration of illness. A correlation between social support and emotional functioning was found. This latter result seems to suggest a potential role of social support in the treatment and recovery of AN. The pattern of results followed the experimental hypothesis. They may be useful to help us better understand the social-cognitive profile of patients with AN and to contribute to the development of effective interventions based on the ways in which patients with AN actually perceive their social environment.

Prefrontal activation in response to emotional words in patients with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder.

PubMed

Matsubara, Toshio; Matsuo, Koji; Nakashima, Mami; Nakano, Masayuki; Harada, Kenichiro; Watanuki, Toshio; Egashira, Kazuteru; Watanabe, Yoshifumi

2014-01-15

Abnormal emotional processing is involved in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD). However, whether the neural mechanism underlying this deficit is a trait characteristic of BD and MDD is unclear. The aim of this study was to elucidate the similarities and differences in processing of emotional stimuli between patients with BD and MDD in remission, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Thirty-two patients (16 with BD and 16 with MDD) and 20 healthy control subjects matched for age, sex, handedness, and years of education were included. An emotional Stroop task, including happy, sad, and threat words, was used. The relative oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration ([oxy-Hb] and [deoxy-Hb]) changes in the frontal region were measured using 52-channels of NIRS. During the threat task, compared to healthy control subjects, patients with BD showed significantly increased [oxy-Hb] in the left inferior frontal region whereas patients with MDD showed significantly increased [oxy-Hb] in the left middle frontal region. During the happy task, compared to healthy control subjects, patients with BD showed significantly decreased [oxy-Hb] in the middle frontal region in both hemispheres. Moreover, patients with BD exhibited decreased [oxy-Hb] and increased [deoxy-Hb] in the superior frontal and middle frontal regions compared to MDD in response to the happy stimulus. No significant differences in [oxy-Hb] or [deoxy-Hb] were seen between the groups during the sad task. These results suggest that abnormal neural responses to emotional stimuli in patients with mood disorders in remission may be a trait characteristic, that negative emotional stimuli are associated with similar prefrontal responses, and that positive emotional stimuli are associated with different prefrontal responses in patients with BD and MDD. These findings indicate that different neural circuits play a role in emotional processing in BD and MDD; this may aid the elucidation of the pathophysiology of these two disorders. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PubMed Central

Kim, Kwanguk; Rosenthal, M. Zachary; Gwaltney, Mary; Jarrold, William; Hatt, Naomi; McIntyre, Nancy; Swain, Lindsay; Solomon, Marjorie

2017-01-01

A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development (TD) used a joy stick to position themselves closer or further from virtual avatars while attempting to identify six emotions expressed by the avatars, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise that were expressed at different levels of intensity. The results indicated that children with HFASD displayed significantly less approach behavior to the positive happy expression than did children with TD, who displayed increases in approach behavior to higher intensities of happy expressions. Alternatively, all groups tended to withdraw from negative emotions to the same extent and there were no diagnostic group differences in accuracy of recognition of any of the six emotions. This pattern of results is consistent with theory that suggests that some children with HFASD display atypical social-approach motivation, or sensitivity to the positive reward value of positive social–emotional events. Conversely, there was little evidence that a tendency to withdraw from social–emotional stimuli, or a failure to process social emotional stimuli, was a component of social behavior task performance in this sample of children with HFASD. PMID:24435405

A Virtual Joy-Stick Study of Emotional Responses and Social Motivation in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Kim, Kwanguk; Rosenthal, M Zachary; Gwaltney, Mary; Jarrold, William; Hatt, Naomi; McIntyre, Nancy; Swain, Lindsay; Solomon, Marjorie; Mundy, Peter

2015-12-01

A new virtual reality task was employed which uses preference for interpersonal distance to social stimuli to examine social motivation and emotion perception in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Nineteen high function children with higher functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (HFASD) and 23 age, gender, and IQ matched children with typical development (TD) used a joy stick to position themselves closer or further from virtual avatars while attempting to identify six emotions expressed by the avatars, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise that were expressed at different levels of intensity. The results indicated that children with HFASD displayed significantly less approach behavior to the positive happy expression than did children with TD, who displayed increases in approach behavior to higher intensities of happy expressions. Alternatively, all groups tended to withdraw from negative emotions to the same extent and there were no diagnostic group differences in accuracy of recognition of any of the six emotions. This pattern of results is consistent with theory that suggests that some children with HFASD display atypical social-approach motivation, or sensitivity to the positive reward value of positive social-emotional events. Conversely, there was little evidence that a tendency to withdraw from social-emotional stimuli, or a failure to process social emotional stimuli, was a component of social behavior task performance in this sample of children with HFASD.

Emotion modulates eye movement patterns and subsequent memory for the gist and details of movie scenes.

PubMed

Subramanian, Ramanathan; Shankar, Divya; Sebe, Nicu; Melcher, David

2014-03-26

A basic question in vision research regards where people look in complex scenes and how this influences their performance in various tasks. Previous studies with static images have demonstrated a close link between where people look and what they remember. Here, we examined the pattern of eye movements when participants watched neutral and emotional clips from Hollywood-style movies. Participants answered multiple-choice memory questions concerning visual and auditory scene details immediately upon viewing 1-min-long neutral or emotional movie clips. Fixations were more narrowly focused for emotional clips, and immediate memory for object details was worse compared to matched neutral scenes, implying preferential attention to emotional events. Although we found the expected correlation between where people looked and what they remembered for neutral clips, this relationship broke down for emotional clips. When participants were subsequently presented with key frames (static images) extracted from the movie clips such that presentation duration of the target objects (TOs) corresponding to the multiple-choice questions was matched and the earlier questions were repeated, more fixations were observed on the TOs, and memory performance also improved significantly, confirming that emotion modulates the relationship between gaze position and memory performance. Finally, in a long-term memory test, old/new recognition performance was significantly better for emotional scenes as compared to neutral scenes. Overall, these results are consistent with the hypothesis that emotional content draws eye fixations and strengthens memory for the scene gist while weakening encoding of peripheral scene details.

Implicit and explicit processing of emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Wagenbreth, Caroline; Wattenberg, Lena; Heinze, Hans-Jochen; Zaehle, Tino

2016-04-15

Besides motor problems, Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with detrimental emotional and cognitive functioning. Deficient explicit emotional processing has been observed, whilst patients also show impaired Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities. However, it is unclear whether this PD patients' ToM deficit is based on an inability to infer otherś emotional states or whether it is due to explicit emotional processing deficits. We investigated implicit and explicit emotional processing in PD with an affective priming paradigm in which we used pictures of human eyes for emotional primes and a lexical decision task (LDT) with emotional connoted words for target stimuli. Sixteen PD patients and sixteen matched healthy controls performed a LTD combined with an emotional priming paradigm providing emotional information through the facial eye region to assess implicit emotional processing. Second, participants explicitly evaluated the emotional status of eyes and words used in the implicit task. Compared to controls implicit emotional processing abilities were generally preserved in PD with, however, considerable alterations for happiness and disgust processing. Furthermore, we observed a general impairment of patients for explicit evaluation of emotional stimuli, which was augmented for the rating of facial expressions. This is the first study reporting results for affective priming with facial eye expressions in PD patients. Our findings indicate largely preserved implicit emotional processing, with a specific altered processing of disgust and happiness. Explicit emotional processing was considerably impaired for semantic and especially for facial stimulus material. Poor ToM abilities in PD patients might be based on deficient explicit emotional processing, with preserved ability to implicitly infer other people's feelings. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Postural Control in Children with Dyslexia: Effects of Emotional Stimuli in a Dual-Task Environment.

PubMed

Goulème, Nathalie; Gerard, Christophe-Loïc; Bucci, Maria Pia

2017-08-01

The aim of this study was to compare the visual exploration strategies used during a postural control task across participants with and without dyslexia. We simultaneously recorded eye movements and postural control while children were viewing different types of emotional faces. Twenty-two children with dyslexia and twenty-two aged-matched children without dyslexia participated in the study. We analysed the surface area, the length and the mean velocity of the centre of pressure for balance in parallel with visual saccadic latency, the number of saccades and the time spent in regions of interest. Our results showed that postural stability in children with dyslexia was weaker and the surface area of their centre of pressure increased significantly when they viewed an unpleasant face. Moreover, children with dyslexia had different strategies to those used by children without dyslexia during visual exploration, and in particular when they viewed unpleasant emotional faces. We suggest that lower performance in emotional face processing in children with dyslexia could be due to a difference in their visual strategies, linked to their identification of unpleasant emotional faces. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The female advantage: sex as a possible protective factor against emotion recognition impairment following traumatic brain injury.

PubMed

Rigon, Arianna; Turkstra, Lyn; Mutlu, Bilge; Duff, Melissa

2016-10-01

Although moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) leads to facial affect recognition impairments in up to 39% of individuals, protective and risk factors for these deficits are unknown. The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of sex on emotion recognition abilities following TBI. We administered two separate emotion recognition tests (one static and one dynamic) to 53 individuals with moderate to severe TBI (females = 28) and 49 demographically matched comparisons (females = 22). We then investigated the presence of a sex-by-group interaction in emotion recognition accuracy. In the comparison group, there were no sex differences. In the TBI group, however, females significantly outperformed males in the dynamic (but not the static) task. Moreover, males (but not females) with TBI performed significantly worse than comparison participants in the dynamic task. Further analysis revealed that sex differences in emotion recognition abilities within the TBI group could not be explained by lesion location, TBI severity, or other neuropsychological variables. These findings suggest that sex may serve as a protective factor for social impairment following TBI and inform clinicians working with TBI as well as research on the neurophysiological correlates of sex differences in social functioning.

Neural correlates of emotional action control in anger-prone women with borderline personality disorder.

PubMed

Bertsch, Katja; Roelofs, Karin; Roch, Paul Jonathan; Ma, Bo; Hensel, Saskia; Herpertz, Sabine C; Volman, Inge

2018-05-01

Difficulty in controlling emotional impulses is a crucial component of borderline personality disorder (BPD) that often leads to destructive, impulsive behaviours against others. In line with recent findings in aggressive individuals, deficits in prefrontal amygdala coupling during emotional action control may account for these symptoms. To study the neurobiological correlates of altered emotional action control in individuals with BPD, we asked medication-free, anger-prone, female patients with BPD and age- and intelligence-matched healthy women to take part in an approach-avoidance task while lying in an MRI scanner. The task required controlling fast behavioural tendencies to approach happy and avoid angry faces. Additionally, before the task we collected saliva testosterone and self-reported information on tendencies to act out anger and correlated this with behavioural and functional MRI (fMRI) data. We included 30 patients and 28 controls in our analysis. Patients with BPD reported increased tendencies to act out anger and were faster in approaching than avoiding angry faces than with healthy women, suggesting deficits in emotional action control in women with BPD. On a neural level, controlling fast emotional action tendencies was associated with enhanced activation in the antero- and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex across groups. Healthy women showed a negative coupling between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right amygdala, whereas this was absent in patients with BPD. Specificity of results to BPD and sex differences remain unknown owing to the lack of clinical control groups and male participants. The results indicate reduced lateral prefrontal-amygdala communication during emotional action control in anger-prone women with BPD. The findings provide a possible neural mechanism underlying difficulties with controlling emotional impulses in patients with BPD.

Common and disorder-specific neural responses to emotional faces in generalised anxiety, social anxiety and panic disorders

PubMed Central

Fonzo, Gregory A.; Ramsawh, Holly J.; Flagan, Taru M.; Sullivan, Sarah G.; Letamendi, Andrea; Simmons, Alan N.; Paulus, Martin P.; Stein, Murray B.

2015-01-01

Background Although evidence exists for abnormal brain function across various anxiety disorders, direct comparison of neural function across diagnoses is needed to elicit abnormalities common across disorders and those distinct to a particular diagnosis. Aims To delineate common and distinct abnormalities within generalised anxiety (GAD), panic and social anxiety disorder (SAD) during affective processing. Method Fifty-nine adults (15 with GAD, 15 with panic disorder, 14 with SAD, and 15 healthy controls) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while completing a facial emotion matching task with fearful, angry and happy faces. Results Greater differential right amygdala activation to matching fearful v. happy facial expressions related to greater negative affectivity (i.e. trait anxiety) and was heightened across all anxiety disorder groups compared with controls. Collapsing across emotional face types, participants with panic disorder uniquely displayed greater posterior insula activation. Conclusions These preliminary results highlight a common neural basis for clinical anxiety in these diagnoses and also suggest the presence of disorder-specific dysfunction. PMID:25573399

The integration of visual context information in facial emotion recognition in 5- to 15-year-olds.

PubMed

Theurel, Anne; Witt, Arnaud; Malsert, Jennifer; Lejeune, Fleur; Fiorentini, Chiara; Barisnikov, Koviljka; Gentaz, Edouard

2016-10-01

The current study investigated the role of congruent visual context information in the recognition of facial emotional expression in 190 participants from 5 to 15years of age. Children performed a matching task that presented pictures with different facial emotional expressions (anger, disgust, happiness, fear, and sadness) in two conditions: with and without a visual context. The results showed that emotions presented with visual context information were recognized more accurately than those presented in the absence of visual context. The context effect remained steady with age but varied according to the emotion presented and the gender of participants. The findings demonstrated for the first time that children from the age of 5years are able to integrate facial expression and visual context information, and this integration improves facial emotion recognition. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

N450 and LPC Event-Related Potential Correlates of an Emotional Stroop Task with Words Differing in Valence and Emotional Origin

PubMed Central

Imbir, Kamil K.; Spustek, Tomasz; Duda, Joanna; Bernatowicz, Gabriela; Żygierewicz, Jarosław

2017-01-01

Affective meaning of verbal stimuli was found to influence cognitive control as expressed in the Emotional Stroop Task (EST). Behavioral studies have shown that factors such as valence, arousal, and emotional origin of reaction to stimuli associated with words can lead to lengthening of reaction latencies in EST. Moreover, electrophysiological studies have revealed that affective meaning altered amplitude of some components of evoked potentials recorded during EST, and that this alteration correlated with the performance in EST. The emotional origin was defined as processing based on automatic vs. reflective mechanisms, that underlines formation of emotional reactions to words. The aim of the current study was to investigate, within the framework of EST, correlates of processing of words differing in valence and origin levels, but matched in arousal, concreteness, frequency of appearance and length. We found no behavioral differences in response latencies. When controlling for origin, we found no effects of valence. We found the effect of origin on ERP in two time windows: 290–570 and 570–800 ms. The earlier effect can be attributed to cognitive control while the latter is rather the manifestation of explicit processing of words. In each case, reflective originated stimuli evoked more positive amplitudes compared to automatic originated words. PMID:28611717

Face processing in chronic alcoholism: a specific deficit for emotional features.

PubMed

Maurage, P; Campanella, S; Philippot, P; Martin, S; de Timary, P

2008-04-01

It is well established that chronic alcoholism is associated with a deficit in the decoding of emotional facial expression (EFE). Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether this deficit is specifically for emotions or due to a more general impairment in visual or facial processing. This study was designed to clarify this issue using multiple control tasks and the subtraction method. Eighteen patients suffering from chronic alcoholism and 18 matched healthy control subjects were asked to perform several tasks evaluating (1) Basic visuo-spatial and facial identity processing; (2) Simple reaction times; (3) Complex facial features identification (namely age, emotion, gender, and race). Accuracy and reaction times were recorded. Alcoholic patients had a preserved performance for visuo-spatial and facial identity processing, but their performance was impaired for visuo-motor abilities and for the detection of complex facial aspects. More importantly, the subtraction method showed that alcoholism is associated with a specific EFE decoding deficit, still present when visuo-motor slowing down is controlled for. These results offer a post hoc confirmation of earlier data showing an EFE decoding deficit in alcoholism by strongly suggesting a specificity of this deficit for emotions. This may have implications for clinical situations, where emotional impairments are frequently observed among alcoholic subjects.

N450 and LPC Event-Related Potential Correlates of an Emotional Stroop Task with Words Differing in Valence and Emotional Origin.

PubMed

Imbir, Kamil K; Spustek, Tomasz; Duda, Joanna; Bernatowicz, Gabriela; Żygierewicz, Jarosław

2017-01-01

Affective meaning of verbal stimuli was found to influence cognitive control as expressed in the Emotional Stroop Task (EST). Behavioral studies have shown that factors such as valence, arousal, and emotional origin of reaction to stimuli associated with words can lead to lengthening of reaction latencies in EST. Moreover, electrophysiological studies have revealed that affective meaning altered amplitude of some components of evoked potentials recorded during EST, and that this alteration correlated with the performance in EST. The emotional origin was defined as processing based on automatic vs. reflective mechanisms, that underlines formation of emotional reactions to words. The aim of the current study was to investigate, within the framework of EST, correlates of processing of words differing in valence and origin levels, but matched in arousal, concreteness, frequency of appearance and length. We found no behavioral differences in response latencies. When controlling for origin, we found no effects of valence. We found the effect of origin on ERP in two time windows: 290-570 and 570-800 ms. The earlier effect can be attributed to cognitive control while the latter is rather the manifestation of explicit processing of words. In each case, reflective originated stimuli evoked more positive amplitudes compared to automatic originated words.

Basic and complex emotion recognition in children with autism: cross-cultural findings.

PubMed

Fridenson-Hayo, Shimrit; Berggren, Steve; Lassalle, Amandine; Tal, Shahar; Pigat, Delia; Bölte, Sven; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Golan, Ofer

2016-01-01

Children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have emotion recognition deficits when tested in different expression modalities (face, voice, body). However, these findings usually focus on basic emotions, using one or two expression modalities. In addition, cultural similarities and differences in emotion recognition patterns in children with ASC have not been explored before. The current study examined the similarities and differences in the recognition of basic and complex emotions by children with ASC and typically developing (TD) controls across three cultures: Israel, Britain, and Sweden. Fifty-five children with high-functioning ASC, aged 5-9, were compared to 58 TD children. On each site, groups were matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children were tested using four tasks, examining recognition of basic and complex emotions from voice recordings, videos of facial and bodily expressions, and emotional video scenarios including all modalities in context. Compared to their TD peers, children with ASC showed emotion recognition deficits in both basic and complex emotions on all three modalities and their integration in context. Complex emotions were harder to recognize, compared to basic emotions for the entire sample. Cross-cultural agreement was found for all major findings, with minor deviations on the face and body tasks. Our findings highlight the multimodal nature of ER deficits in ASC, which exist for basic as well as complex emotions and are relatively stable cross-culturally. Cross-cultural research has the potential to reveal both autism-specific universal deficits and the role that specific cultures play in the way empathy operates in different countries.

Assessing the Utility of a Virtual Environment for Enhancing Facial Affect Recognition in Adolescents with Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bekele, Esubalew; Crittendon, Julie; Zheng, Zhi; Swanson, Amy; Weitlauf, Amy; Warren, Zachary; Sarkar, Nilanjan

2014-01-01

Teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and age-matched controls participated in a dynamic facial affect recognition task within a virtual reality (VR) environment. Participants identified the emotion of a facial expression displayed at varied levels of intensity by a computer generated avatar. The system assessed performance (i.e.,…

Amygdala Response and Functional Connectivity During Emotion Regulation: A Study of 14 Depressed Adolescents

PubMed Central

Perlman, Greg; Simmons, Alan N.; Wu, Jing; Hahn, Kevin S.; Tapert, Susan F.; Max, Jeffrey E.; Paulus, Martin P.; Brown, Gregory G.; Frank, Guido K.; Campbell-Sills, Laura; Yang, Tony T.

2012-01-01

Background Ineffective emotion regulation and abnormal amygdala activation have each been found in adolescent-onset major depressive disorder. However, amygdala activation during emotion regulation has not been studied in adolescent-onset major depressive disorder. Method Fourteen unmedicated adolescents diagnosed with current depression without comorbid psychiatric disorders and fourteen well-matched controls ages 13 to 17 years underwent an emotional regulation task during functional magnetic resonance imaging. During this task, participants viewed negatively-valence images and were asked to notice how they were feeling without trying to change it and maintain their emotional reaction (“Maintain”) or to interpret the image in such a way as minimize their emotional response (“Reduce”). Results Imaging analyses demonstrated that adolescents with depression showed: (1) greater right amygdala activation during the maintain condition relative to controls, (2) less connectivity during the maintain condition between the amygdala and both the insula and medial prefrontal cortex than controls, and (3) a significant positive correlation between amygdala-seeded connectivity during maintenance of emotion and psychosocial functioning. Limitations The current study is cross-sectional comparison and longitudinal investigations with larger sample sizes are needed to examine the association between amygdala reactivity and emotion regulation over time in adolescent MDD. Conclusions During the maintain condition, adolescents with depression showed a heightened amygdala response and less reciprocal activation in brain regions that may modulate the amygdala. A poorly modulated, overreactive amygdala may contribute to poor emotion regulation. PMID:22401827

The association between PTSD and facial affect recognition.

PubMed

Williams, Christian L; Milanak, Melissa E; Judah, Matt R; Berenbaum, Howard

2018-05-05

The major aims of this study were to examine how, if at all, having higher levels of PTSD would be associated with performance on a facial affect recognition task in which facial expressions of emotion are superimposed on emotionally valenced, non-face images. College students with trauma histories (N = 90) completed a facial affect recognition task as well as measures of exposure to traumatic events, and PTSD symptoms. When the face and context matched, participants with higher levels of PTSD were significantly more accurate. When the face and context were mismatched, participants with lower levels of PTSD were more accurate than were those with higher levels of PTSD. These findings suggest that PTSD is associated with how people process affective information. Furthermore, these results suggest that the enhanced attention of people with higher levels of PTSD to affective information can be either beneficial or detrimental to their ability to accurately identify facial expressions of emotion. Limitations, future directions and clinical implications are discussed. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Negative emotion boosts quality of visual working memory representation.

PubMed

Xie, Weizhen; Zhang, Weiwei

2016-08-01

Negative emotion impacts a variety of cognitive processes, including working memory (WM). The present study investigated whether negative emotion modulated WM capacity (quantity) or resolution (quality), 2 independent limits on WM storage. In Experiment 1, observers tried to remember several colors over 1-s delay and then recalled the color of a randomly picked memory item by clicking a best-matching color on a continuous color wheel. On each trial, before the visual WM task, 1 of 3 emotion conditions (negative, neutral, or positive) was induced by having observers to rate the valence of an International Affective Picture System image. Visual WM under negative emotion showed enhanced resolution compared with neutral and positive conditions, whereas the number of retained representations was comparable across the 3 emotion conditions. These effects were generalized to closed-contour shapes in Experiment 2. To isolate the locus of these effects, Experiment 3 adopted an iconic memory version of the color recall task by eliminating the 1-s retention interval. No significant change in the quantity or quality of iconic memory was observed, suggesting that the resolution effects in the first 2 experiments were critically dependent on the need to retain memory representations over a short period of time. Taken together, these results suggest that negative emotion selectively boosts visual WM quality, supporting the dissociable nature quantitative and qualitative aspects of visual WM representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Dissociable influences of reward motivation and positive emotion on cognitive control.

PubMed

Chiew, Kimberly S; Braver, Todd S

2014-06-01

It is becoming increasingly appreciated that affective and/or motivational influences contribute strongly to goal-oriented cognition and behavior. An unresolved question is whether emotional manipulations (i.e., direct induction of affectively valenced subjective experience) and motivational manipulations (e.g., delivery of performance-contingent rewards and punishments) have similar or distinct effects on cognitive control. Prior work has suggested that reward motivation can reliably enhance a proactive mode of cognitive control, whereas other evidence is suggestive that positive emotion improves cognitive flexibility, but reduces proactive control. However, a limitation of the prior research is that reward motivation and positive emotion have largely been studied independently. Here, we directly compared the effects of positive emotion and reward motivation on cognitive control with a tightly matched, within-subjects design, using the AX-continuous performance task paradigm, which allows for relative measurement of proactive versus reactive cognitive control. High-resolution pupillometry was employed as a secondary measure of cognitive dynamics during task performance. Robust increases in behavioral and pupillometric indices of proactive control were observed with reward motivation. The effects of positive emotion were much weaker, but if anything, also reflected enhancement of proactive control, a pattern that diverges from some prior findings. These results indicate that reward motivation has robust influences on cognitive control, while also highlighting the complexity and heterogeneity of positive-emotion effects. The findings are discussed in terms of potential neurobiological mechanisms.

From neural signatures of emotional modulation to social cognition: individual differences in healthy volunteers and psychiatric participants.

PubMed

Ibáñez, Agustín; Aguado, Jaume; Baez, Sandra; Huepe, David; Lopez, Vladimir; Ortega, Rodrigo; Sigman, Mariano; Mikulan, Ezequiel; Lischinsky, Alicia; Torrente, Fernando; Cetkovich, Marcelo; Torralva, Teresa; Bekinschtein, Tristan; Manes, Facundo

2014-07-01

It is commonly assumed that early emotional signals provide relevant information for social cognition tasks. The goal of this study was to test the association between (a) cortical markers of face emotional processing and (b) social-cognitive measures, and also to build a model which can predict this association (a and b) in healthy volunteers as well as in different groups of psychiatric patients. Thus, we investigated the early cortical processing of emotional stimuli (N170, using a face and word valence task) and their relationship with the social-cognitive profiles (SCPs, indexed by measures of theory of mind, fluid intelligence, speed processing and executive functions). Group comparisons and individual differences were assessed among schizophrenia (SCZ) patients and their relatives, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), individuals with euthymic bipolar disorder (BD) and healthy participants (educational level, handedness, age and gender matched). Our results provide evidence of emotional N170 impairments in the affected groups (SCZ and relatives, ADHD and BD) as well as subtle group differences. Importantly, cortical processing of emotional stimuli predicted the SCP, as evidenced by a structural equation model analysis. This is the first study to report an association model of brain markers of emotional processing and SCP. © The Author (2013). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Attachment and selective attention: disorganization and emotional Stroop reaction time.

PubMed

Atkinson, Leslie; Leung, Eman; Goldberg, Susan; Benoit, Diane; Poulton, Lori; Myhal, Natalie; Blokland, Kirsten; Kerr, Sheila

2009-01-01

Although central to attachment theory, internal working models remain a useful heuristic in need of concretization. We compared the selective attention of organized and disorganized mothers using the emotional Stroop task. Both disorganized attachment and emotional Stroop response involve the coordination of strongly conflicting motivations under conditions of emotional arousal. Furthermore, much is known about the cognitive and neuromodulatory correlates of the Stroop that may inform attempts to substantiate the internal working model construct. We assessed 47 community mothers with the Adult Attachment Interview and the Working Model of the Child Interview in the third trimester of pregnancy. At 6 and 12 months postpartum, we assessed mothers with emotional Stroop tasks involving neutral, attachment, and emotion conditions. At 12 months, we observed their infants in the Strange Situation. Results showed that: disorganized attachment is related to relative Stroop reaction time, that is, unlike organized mothers, disorganized mothers respond to negative attachment/emotion stimuli more slowly than to neutral stimuli; relative speed of response is positively related to number of times the dyad was classified disorganized, and change in relative Stroop response time from 6 to 12 months is related to the match-mismatch status of mother and infant attachment classifications. We discuss implications in terms of automatic and controlled processing and, more specifically, cognitive threat tags, parallel distributed processing, and neuromodulation through norepinephrine and dopamine.

Alcoholism and dampened temporal limbic activation to emotional faces.

PubMed

Marinkovic, Ksenija; Oscar-Berman, Marlene; Urban, Trinity; O'Reilly, Cara E; Howard, Julie A; Sawyer, Kayle; Harris, Gordon J

2009-11-01

Excessive chronic drinking is accompanied by a broad spectrum of emotional changes ranging from apathy and emotional flatness to deficits in comprehending emotional information, but their neural bases are poorly understood. Emotional abnormalities associated with alcoholism were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging in abstinent long-term alcoholic men in comparison to healthy demographically matched controls. Participants were presented with emotionally valenced words and photographs of faces during deep (semantic) and shallow (perceptual) encoding tasks followed by recognition. Overall, faces evoked stronger activation than words, with the expected material-specific laterality (left hemisphere for words, and right for faces) and depth of processing effects. However, whereas control participants showed stronger activation in the amygdala and hippocampus when viewing faces with emotional (relative to neutral) expressions, the alcoholics responded in an undifferentiated manner to all facial expressions. In the alcoholic participants, amygdala activity was inversely correlated with an increase in lateral prefrontal activity as a function of their behavioral deficits. Prefrontal modulation of emotional function as a compensation for the blunted amygdala activity during a socially relevant face appraisal task is in agreement with a distributed network engagement during emotional face processing. Deficient activation of amygdala and hippocampus may underlie impaired processing of emotional faces associated with long-term alcoholism and may be a part of the wide array of behavioral problems including disinhibition, concurring with previously documented interpersonal difficulties in this population. Furthermore, the results suggest that alcoholics may rely on prefrontal rather than temporal limbic areas in order to compensate for reduced limbic responsivity and to maintain behavioral adequacy when faced with emotionally or socially challenging situations.

The role of social cognition and prosocial behaviour in relation to the socio-emotional functioning of primary aged children with specific language impairment.

PubMed

Bakopoulou, Ioanna; Dockrell, Julie E

2016-01-01

Children with language impairments often experience difficulties with their socio-emotional functioning and poorly developed prosocial behaviour. However, the nature of the association between language impairment and difficulties with socio-emotional functioning remains unclear. The social cognition skills of a group of primary-aged children (6-11 years old) with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were examined in relation to their teachers' ratings of socio-emotional functioning. Forty-two children with SLI were individually matched with 42 children for chronological age and non-verbal cognitive ability, and 42 children for receptive language ability. The children all attended mainstream primary schools or one Language Unit. Four aspects of social cognition were directly assessed: emotion identification, emotion labelling, inferring the causes of emotions, and knowledge of conflict resolution strategies. The children's socio-emotional functioning was assessed using the Strengths and Difficulties questionnaire (SDQ), a standardised measure, completed by their teachers. Associations between children's performance on tasks of social cognition and children's socio-emotional functioning were explored. Significant group differences were found for all social cognition tasks. The SLI group was rated to experience significantly more problems with socio-emotional functioning by their teachers than both control groups, indicating problems with all aspects of socio-emotional functioning. Social cognition and prosocial behaviour, but not language ability, predicted teacher-rated behavioural, emotional and social difficulties for the SLI group. The results challenge current understanding of socio-emotional functioning in children with SLI by pointing to the crucial role of social cognition and prosocial behaviour. Factors other than expressive and receptive language play a role in the socio-emotional functioning of children with SLI. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Cognitive and behavioural deficits associated with the orbitomedial prefrontal cortex in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

PubMed

Meier, Sandra L; Charleston, Alison J; Tippett, Lynette J

2010-11-01

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive disease affecting motor neurons, may variably affect cognition and behaviour. We tested the hypothesis that functions associated with orbitomedial prefrontal cortex are affected by evaluating the behavioural and cognitive performance of 18 participants with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis without dementia and 18 healthy, matched controls. We measured Theory of Mind (Faux Pas Task), emotional prosody recognition (Aprosodia Battery), reversal of behaviour in response to changes in reward (Probabilistic Reversal Learning Task), decision making without risk (Holiday Apartment Task) and aberrant behaviour (Neuropsychiatric Inventory). We also assessed dorsolateral prefrontal function, using verbal and written fluency and planning (One-touch Stockings of Cambridge), to determine whether impairments in tasks sensitive to these two prefrontal regions co-occur. The patient group was significantly impaired at identifying social faux pas, recognizing emotions and decision-making, indicating mild, but consistent impairment on most measures sensitive to orbitomedial prefrontal cortex. Significant levels of aberrant behaviour were present in 50% of patients. Patients were also impaired on verbal fluency and planning. Individual subject analyses involved computing classical dissociations between tasks sensitive to different prefrontal regions. These revealed heterogeneous patterns of impaired and spared cognitive abilities: 33% of participants had classical dissociations involving orbitomedial prefrontal tasks, 17% had classical dissociations involving dorsolateral prefrontal tasks, 22% had classical dissociations between tasks of both regions, and 28% had no classical dissociations. These data indicate subtle changes in behaviour, emotional processing, decision-making and altered social awareness, associated with orbitomedial prefrontal cortex, may be present in a significant proportion of individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis without dementia, some with no signs of dysfunction in tasks sensitive to other regions of prefrontal cortex. This demonstration of variability in cognitive integrity supports previous research indicating amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a heterogeneous disease.

Prototype-Incorporated Emotional Neural Network.

PubMed

Oyedotun, Oyebade K; Khashman, Adnan

2017-08-15

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) aim to simulate the biological neural activities. Interestingly, many ''engineering'' prospects in ANN have relied on motivations from cognition and psychology studies. So far, two important learning theories that have been subject of active research are the prototype and adaptive learning theories. The learning rules employed for ANNs can be related to adaptive learning theory, where several examples of the different classes in a task are supplied to the network for adjusting internal parameters. Conversely, the prototype-learning theory uses prototypes (representative examples); usually, one prototype per class of the different classes contained in the task. These prototypes are supplied for systematic matching with new examples so that class association can be achieved. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel neural network algorithm based on modifying the emotional neural network (EmNN) model to unify the prototype- and adaptive-learning theories. We refer to our new model as ``prototype-incorporated EmNN''. Furthermore, we apply the proposed model to two real-life challenging tasks, namely, static hand-gesture recognition and face recognition, and compare the result to those obtained using the popular back-propagation neural network (BPNN), emotional BPNN (EmNN), deep networks, an exemplar classification model, and k-nearest neighbor.

Impaired decision making under ambiguity but not under risk in individuals with pathological buying-behavioral and psychophysiological evidence.

PubMed

Trotzke, Patrick; Starcke, Katrin; Pedersen, Anya; Müller, Astrid; Brand, Matthias

2015-09-30

Pathological buying (PB) is described as dysfunctional buying behavior, associated with harmful consequences. It is discussed whether decision-making deficits are related to PB, because affected individuals often choose the short-term rewarding option of buying despite persistent negative long-term consequences. We investigated 30 patients suffering from PB and 30 matched control participants with two different decision-making tasks: the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) measures decisions under ambiguity and involves emotional feedback processing, whereas the Game of Dice Task (GDT) measures decisions under risk and can be solved strategically. Potential emotional and cognitive correlates of decision making were investigated by assessing skin conductance response (SCR) and executive functioning. In comparison to the control participants, the patients showed more disadvantageous decisions under ambiguity in the IGT. These data were supported by the SCR results: patients failed to generate SCRs that usually occur before disadvantageous decisions. The physiological and behavioral performance on decisions under risk and executive functioning did not differ between groups. Thus, deficits in emotional feedback processing might be one potential factor in etiology and pathogenesis of PB and should be considered in theory and treatment. Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

Underconnectivity of the superior temporal sulcus predicts emotion recognition deficits in autism

PubMed Central

Woolley, Daniel G.; Steyaert, Jean; Di Martino, Adriana; Swinnen, Stephan P.; Wenderoth, Nicole

2014-01-01

Neurodevelopmental disconnections have been assumed to cause behavioral alterations in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here, we combined measurements of intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with task-based fMRI to explore whether altered activity and/or iFC of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) mediates deficits in emotion recognition in ASD. Fifteen adults with ASD and 15 matched-controls underwent resting-state and task-based fMRI, during which participants discriminated emotional states from point light displays (PLDs). Intrinsic FC of the right pSTS was further examined using 584 (278 ASD/306 controls) resting-state data of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE). Participants with ASD were less accurate than controls in recognizing emotional states from PLDs. Analyses revealed pronounced ASD-related reductions both in task-based activity and resting-state iFC of the right pSTS with fronto-parietal areas typically encompassing the action observation network (AON). Notably, pSTS-hypo-activity was related to pSTS-hypo-connectivity, and both measures were predictive of emotion recognition performance with each measure explaining a unique part of the variance. Analyses with the large independent ABIDE dataset replicated reductions in pSTS-iFC to fronto-parietal regions. These findings provide novel evidence that pSTS hypo-activity and hypo-connectivity with the fronto-parietal AON are linked to the social deficits characteristic of ASD. PMID:24078018

State-dependent alterations in inhibitory control and emotional face identification in seasonal affective disorder.

PubMed

Hjordt, Liv V; Stenbæk, Dea S; Madsen, Kathrine Skak; Mc Mahon, Brenda; Jensen, Christian G; Vestergaard, Martin; Hageman, Ida; Meder, David; Hasselbalch, Steen G; Knudsen, Gitte M

2017-04-01

Depressed individuals often exhibit impaired inhibition to negative input and identification of positive stimuli, but it is unclear whether this is a state or trait feature. We here exploited a naturalistic model, namely individuals with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), to study this feature longitudinally. The goal of this study was to examine seasonal changes in inhibitory control and identification of emotional faces in individuals with SAD. Twenty-nine individuals diagnosed with winter-SAD and 30 demographically matched controls with no seasonality symptoms completed an emotional Go/NoGo task, requiring inhibition of prepotent responses to emotional facial expressions and an emotional face identification task twice, in winter and summer. In winter, individuals with SAD showed impaired ability to inhibit responses to angry (p = .0006) and sad faces (p = .011), and decreased identification of happy faces (p = .032) compared with controls. In summer, individuals with SAD and controls performed similarly on these tasks (ps > .24). We provide novel evidence that inhibition of angry and sad faces and identification of happy faces are impaired in SAD in the symptomatic phase, but not in the remitted phase. The affective biases in cognitive processing constitute state-dependent features of SAD. Our data show that reinstatement of a normal affective cognition should be possible and would constitute a major goal in psychiatric treatment to improve the quality of life for these patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Awareness and regulation of emotions in deaf children.

PubMed

Rieffe, Carolien

2012-11-01

In this study, deaf children's understanding of their own emotions was compared with that of hearing peers. Twenty-six deaf children (mean age 11 years) and 26 hearing children, matched for age and gender, were presented with various tasks that tap into their emotion awareness and regulation (coping) regarding the four basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, and fear). The findings suggest that deaf children have no difficulties in identifying their own basic emotions and the elicitors, or multiple emotions of opposite valence (happy and sad). Yet, they did show an impaired capacity to differentiate between their own emotions within the negative spectrum, which suggests a more generic evaluation of the situation. Deaf children's emotion regulation strategies showed a strong preference for approaching the situation at hand, but almost no deaf child reported the use of an avoidant tactic in order to diminish the negative impact of the situation. Overall, deaf children's emotion regulation strategies seemed less effective than those of their hearing peers. The implications for deaf children's emotional development are discussed. ©2011 The British Psychological Society.

Empathy for Positive and Negative Emotions in Social Anxiety Disorder

PubMed Central

Morrison, Amanda S.; Mateen, Maria A.; Brozovich, Faith A.; Zaki, Jamil; Goldin, Philippe R.; Heimberg, Richard G.; Gross, James J.

2016-01-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with elevated negative and diminished positive affective experience. However, little is known about the way in which individuals with SAD perceive and respond emotionally to the naturally-unfolding negative and positive emotions of others, that is, cognitive empathy and affective empathy, respectively. In the present study, participants with generalized SAD (n = 32) and demographically-matched healthy controls (HCs; n = 32) completed a behavioral empathy task. Cognitive empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets’ and participants’ continuous ratings of targets’ emotions, whereas affective empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets’ and participants’ continuous self-ratings of emotion. Individuals with SAD differed from HCs only in positive affective empathy: they were less able to vicariously share others’ positive emotions. Mediation analyses revealed that poor emotional clarity and negative interpersonal perceptions among those with SAD might account for this finding. Future research using experimental methodology is needed to examine whether this finding represents an inability or unwillingness to share positive affect. PMID:27816799

Affective and cognitive decision-making in adolescents.

PubMed

van Duijvenvoorde, Anna C K; Jansen, Brenda R J; Visser, Ingmar; Huizenga, Hilde M

2010-01-01

Adolescents demonstrate impaired decision-making in emotionally arousing situations, yet they appear to exhibit relatively mature decision-making skills in predominantly cognitive, low-arousal situations. In this study we compared adolescents' (13-15 years) performance on matched affective and cognitive decision-making tasks, in order to determine (1) their performance level on each task and (2) whether performance on the cognitive task was associated with performance on the affective task. Both tasks required a comparison of choice dimensions characterized by frequency of loss, amount of loss, and constant gain. Results indicated that in the affective task, adolescents performed sub-optimally by considering only the frequency of loss, whereas in the cognitive task adolescents used relatively mature decision rules by considering two or all three choice dimensions. Performance on the affective task was not related to performance on the cognitive task. These results are discussed in light of neural developmental trajectories observed in adolescence.

Facial Emotion Recognition and Expression in Parkinson's Disease: An Emotional Mirror Mechanism?

PubMed

Ricciardi, Lucia; Visco-Comandini, Federica; Erro, Roberto; Morgante, Francesca; Bologna, Matteo; Fasano, Alfonso; Ricciardi, Diego; Edwards, Mark J; Kilner, James

2017-01-01

Parkinson's disease (PD) patients have impairment of facial expressivity (hypomimia) and difficulties in interpreting the emotional facial expressions produced by others, especially for aversive emotions. We aimed to evaluate the ability to produce facial emotional expressions and to recognize facial emotional expressions produced by others in a group of PD patients and a group of healthy participants in order to explore the relationship between these two abilities and any differences between the two groups of participants. Twenty non-demented, non-depressed PD patients and twenty healthy participants (HC) matched for demographic characteristics were studied. The ability of recognizing emotional facial expressions was assessed with the Ekman 60-faces test (Emotion recognition task). Participants were video-recorded while posing facial expressions of 6 primary emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and anger). The most expressive pictures for each emotion were derived from the videos. Ten healthy raters were asked to look at the pictures displayed on a computer-screen in pseudo-random fashion and to identify the emotional label in a six-forced-choice response format (Emotion expressivity task). Reaction time (RT) and accuracy of responses were recorded. At the end of each trial the participant was asked to rate his/her confidence in his/her perceived accuracy of response. For emotion recognition, PD reported lower score than HC for Ekman total score (p<0.001), and for single emotions sub-scores happiness, fear, anger, sadness (p<0.01) and surprise (p = 0.02). In the facial emotion expressivity task, PD and HC significantly differed in the total score (p = 0.05) and in the sub-scores for happiness, sadness, anger (all p<0.001). RT and the level of confidence showed significant differences between PD and HC for the same emotions. There was a significant positive correlation between the emotion facial recognition and expressivity in both groups; the correlation was even stronger when ranking emotions from the best recognized to the worst (R = 0.75, p = 0.004). PD patients showed difficulties in recognizing emotional facial expressions produced by others and in posing facial emotional expressions compared to healthy subjects. The linear correlation between recognition and expression in both experimental groups suggests that the two mechanisms share a common system, which could be deteriorated in patients with PD. These results open new clinical and rehabilitation perspectives.

Cerebral Correlates of Abnormal Emotion Conflict Processing in Euthymic Bipolar Patients: A Functional MRI Study.

PubMed

Favre, Pauline; Polosan, Mircea; Pichat, Cédric; Bougerol, Thierry; Baciu, Monica

2015-01-01

Patients with bipolar disorder experience cognitive and emotional impairment that may persist even during the euthymic state of the disease. These persistent symptoms in bipolar patients (BP) may be characterized by disturbances of emotion regulation and related fronto-limbic brain circuitry. The present study aims to investigate the modulation of fronto-limbic activity and connectivity in BP by the processing of emotional conflict. Fourteen euthymic BP and 13 matched healthy subjects (HS) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a word-face emotional Stroop task designed to dissociate the monitoring/generation of emotional conflict from its resolution. Functional connectivity was determined by means of psychophysiological interaction (PPI) approach. Relative to HS, BP were slower to process incongruent stimuli, reflecting higher amount of behavioral interference during emotional Stroop. Furthermore, BP showed decreased activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during the monitoring and a lack of bilateral amygdala deactivation during the resolution of the emotional conflict. In addition, during conflict monitoring, BP showed abnormal positive connectivity between the right DLPFC and several regions of the default mode network. Overall, our results highlighted dysfunctional processing of the emotion conflict in euthymic BP that may be subtended by abnormal activity and connectivity of the DLPFC during the conflict monitoring, which, in turn, leads to failure of amygdala deactivation during the resolution of the conflict. Emotional dysregulation in BP may be underpinned by a lack of top-down cognitive control and a difficulty to focus on the task due to persistent self-oriented attention.

Effects of testosterone on attention and memory for emotional stimuli in male rhesus monkeys.

PubMed

King, Hanna M; Kurdziel, Laura B; Meyer, Jerrold S; Lacreuse, Agnès

2012-03-01

Increasing evidence in humans and other animals suggests that testosterone (T) plays an important role in modulating emotion. We previously reported that T treatment in rhesus monkeys undergoing chemically induced hypogonadism results in increased watching time of videos depicting fights between unfamiliar conspecifics (Lacreuse et al., 2010). In the current study, we aimed to further investigate the effect of T manipulations on attention and memory for emotional stimuli in male rhesus monkeys. Six males (7 years old) were administered Depot Lupron to suppress endogenous T levels and treated with either testosterone enanthate (TE, 5 mg/kg) or oil, before crossing over to the alternate treatment. Animals were tested for 16 weeks on two computerized touchscreen tasks with both social and nonsocial emotional and neutral stimuli. The Dot-Probe task was used to measure attention, and the Delayed-Non-Matching-to-Sample task with a 1s delay (DNMS) was used to measure recognition memory for these stimuli. Performance on the two tasks was examined during each of four month-long phases: Baseline, Lupron alone, Lupron+TE and Lupron+oil. It was predicted that T administration would lead to increased attention to negative social stimuli (i.e., negative facial expressions of unfamiliar conspecifics) and would improve memory for such stimuli. We found no evidence to support these predictions. In the Dot-Probe task, an attentional bias towards negative social stimuli was observed at baseline, but T treatment did not enhance this bias. Instead, monkeys had faster response times when treated with T compared to oil, independently of the emotional valence or social relevance of stimuli, perhaps reflecting an enhancing effect of T on reward sensitivity or general arousal. In the DNMS, animals had better memory for nonsocial compared to social stimuli and showed the poorest performance in the recognition of positive facial expressions. However, T did not affect performance on the task. Thus, even though monkeys were sensitive to the social relevance and emotional valence of the stimuli in the two tasks, T manipulations had no effect on attention or memory for these stimuli. Because habituation to the stimuli may have mitigated the effect of treatment in the attentional task, we suggest that T may increase attentional biases to negative social stimuli only during early exposure to the stimuli with acute treatment or when stimuli are highly arousing (i.e., dynamically presented) with chronic treatment. In addition, the data suggest that T does not enhance working memory for emotional stimuli in young male macaques. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Attention to Low- and High-Spatial Frequencies in Categorizing Facial Identities, Emotions and Gender in Children with Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deruelle, Christine; Rondan, Cecilie; Salle-Collemiche, Xavier; Bastard-Rosset, Delphine; Da Fonseca, David

2008-01-01

This study was aimed at investigating face categorization strategies in children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD). Performance of 17 children with ASD was compared to that of 17 control children in a face-matching task, including hybrid faces (composed of two overlapping faces of different spatial bandwidths) and either low- or high-pass…

Aberrant activity and connectivity of the posterior superior temporal sulcus during social cognition in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Mier, Daniela; Eisenacher, Sarah; Rausch, Franziska; Englisch, Susanne; Gerchen, Martin Fungisai; Zamoscik, Vera; Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas; Zink, Mathias; Kirsch, Peter

2017-10-01

Schizophrenia is associated with significant impairments in social cognition. These impairments have been shown to go along with altered activation of the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). However, studies that investigate connectivity of pSTS during social cognition in schizophrenia are sparse. Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 22 matched healthy controls completed a social-cognitive task for functional magnetic resonance imaging that allows the investigation of affective Theory of Mind (ToM), emotion recognition and the processing of neutral facial expressions. Moreover, a resting-state measurement was taken. Patients with schizophrenia performed worse in the social-cognitive task (main effect of group). In addition, a group by social-cognitive processing interaction was revealed for activity, as well as for connectivity during the social-cognitive task, i.e., patients with schizophrenia showed hyperactivity of right pSTS during neutral face processing, but hypoactivity during emotion recognition and affective ToM. In addition, hypoconnectivity between right and left pSTS was revealed for affective ToM, but not for neutral face processing or emotion recognition. No group differences in connectivity from right to left pSTS occurred during resting state. This pattern of aberrant activity and connectivity of the right pSTS during social cognition might form the basis of false-positive perceptions of emotions and intentions and could contribute to the emergence and sustainment of delusions.

Visual short-term memory load modulates the early attention and perception of task-irrelevant emotional faces

PubMed Central

Yang, Ping; Wang, Min; Jin, Zhenlan; Li, Ling

2015-01-01

The ability to focus on task-relevant information, while suppressing distraction, is critical for human cognition and behavior. Using a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) task, we investigated the effects of emotional face distractors (positive, negative, and neutral faces) on early and late phases of visual short-term memory (VSTM) maintenance intervals, using low and high VSTM loads. Behavioral results showed decreased accuracy and delayed reaction times (RTs) for high vs. low VSTM load. Event-related potentials (ERPs) showed enhanced frontal N1 and occipital P1 amplitudes for negative faces vs. neutral or positive faces, implying rapid attentional alerting effects and early perceptual processing of negative distractors. However, high VSTM load appeared to inhibit face processing in general, showing decreased N1 amplitudes and delayed P1 latencies. An inverse correlation between the N1 activation difference (high-load minus low-load) and RT costs (high-load minus low-load) was found at left frontal areas when viewing negative distractors, suggesting that the greater the inhibition the lower the RT cost for negative faces. Emotional interference effect was not found in the late VSTM-related parietal P300, frontal positive slow wave (PSW) and occipital negative slow wave (NSW) components. In general, our findings suggest that the VSTM load modulates the early attention and perception of emotional distractors. PMID:26388763

Implicit processing of heroin and emotional cues in abstinent heroin users: early and late event-related potential effects.

PubMed

Yang, Ling; Zhang, Jianxun; Zhao, Xin

2015-05-01

The abnormal cognitive processing of drug cues is a core characteristic of drug dependence. Previous research has suggested that the late positive potential (LPP) of heroin users is increased by heroin-related stimuli because of the attention-grabbing nature of such stimuli. The present research used a modified emotional Stroop (eStroop) task to examine whether there was an early posterior negativity (EPN) modulation to heroin cues compared with emotional or neutral stimuli in heroin dependent subjects. Fifteen former heroin users and 15 matched controls performed the eStroop task, which was composed of positive, negative, heroin-related, and neutral pictures with superimposed color squares. Participants responded to the color of the square and not to the picture while behavioral data and event-related potentials were recorded. There were no significant differences of EPN amplitudes to emotional and neutral stimuli between heroin users and controls. However, heroin users displayed increased EPN modulation for heroin cues, whereas this modulation was absent in controls. Drug-related cues acquire motivational salience and automatically capture the attention of heroin users at early processing stages, even when engaged in a non-drug-related task. The EPN to heroin cues could represent a novel electrophysiological index with clinical implications for selecting abstinent drug users who are at increased risk of relapse or to evaluate treatment interventions.

Oxytocin improves behavioural and neural deficits in inferring others' social emotions in autism.

PubMed

Aoki, Yuta; Yahata, Noriaki; Watanabe, Takamitsu; Takano, Yosuke; Kawakubo, Yuki; Kuwabara, Hitoshi; Iwashiro, Norichika; Natsubori, Tatsunobu; Inoue, Hideyuki; Suga, Motomu; Takao, Hidemasa; Sasaki, Hiroki; Gonoi, Wataru; Kunimatsu, Akira; Kasai, Kiyoto; Yamasue, Hidenori

2014-11-01

Recent studies have suggested oxytocin's therapeutic effects on deficits in social communication and interaction in autism spectrum disorder through improvement of emotion recognition with direct emotional cues, such as facial expression and voice prosody. Although difficulty in understanding of others' social emotions and beliefs under conditions without direct emotional cues also plays an important role in autism spectrum disorder, no study has examined the potential effect of oxytocin on this difficulty. Here, we sequentially conducted both a case-control study and a clinical trial to investigate the potential effects of oxytocin on this difficulty at behavioural and neural levels measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a psychological task. This task was modified from the Sally-Anne Task, a well-known first-order false belief task. The task was optimized for investigation of the abilities to infer another person's social emotions and beliefs distinctively so as to test the hypothesis that oxytocin improves deficit in inferring others' social emotions rather than beliefs, under conditions without direct emotional cues. In the case-control study, 17 males with autism spectrum disorder showed significant behavioural deficits in inferring others' social emotions (P = 0.018) but not in inferring others' beliefs (P = 0.064) compared with 17 typically developing demographically-matched male participants. They also showed significantly less activity in the right anterior insula and posterior superior temporal sulcus during inferring others' social emotions, and in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during inferring others' beliefs compared with the typically developing participants (P < 0.001 and cluster size > 10 voxels). Then, to investigate potential effects of oxytocin on these behavioural and neural deficits, we conducted a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover within-subject trial for single-dose intranasal administration of 24 IU oxytocin in an independent group of 20 males with autism spectrum disorder. Behaviourally, oxytocin significantly increased the correct rate in inferring others' social emotions (P = 0.043, one-tail). At the neural level, the peptide significantly enhanced the originally-diminished brain activity in the right anterior insula during inferring others' social emotions (P = 0.004), but not in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex during inferring others' beliefs (P = 0.858). The present findings suggest that oxytocin enhances the ability to understand others' social emotions that have also required second-order false belief rather than first-order false beliefs under conditions without direct emotional cues in autism spectrum disorder at both the behaviour and neural levels. © The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Emotion recognition in early Parkinson's disease patients undergoing deep brain stimulation or dopaminergic therapy: a comparison to healthy participants.

PubMed

McIntosh, Lindsey G; Mannava, Sishir; Camalier, Corrie R; Folley, Bradley S; Albritton, Aaron; Konrad, Peter E; Charles, David; Park, Sohee; Neimat, Joseph S

2014-01-01

Parkinson's disease (PD) is traditionally regarded as a neurodegenerative movement disorder, however, nigrostriatal dopaminergic degeneration is also thought to disrupt non-motor loops connecting basal ganglia to areas in frontal cortex involved in cognition and emotion processing. PD patients are impaired on tests of emotion recognition, but it is difficult to disentangle this deficit from the more general cognitive dysfunction that frequently accompanies disease progression. Testing for emotion recognition deficits early in the disease course, prior to cognitive decline, better assesses the sensitivity of these non-motor corticobasal ganglia-thalamocortical loops involved in emotion processing to early degenerative change in basal ganglia circuits. In addition, contrasting this with a group of healthy aging individuals demonstrates changes in emotion processing specific to the degeneration of basal ganglia circuitry in PD. Early PD patients (EPD) were recruited from a randomized clinical trial testing the safety and tolerability of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN-DBS) in early-staged PD. EPD patients were previously randomized to receive optimal drug therapy only (ODT), or drug therapy plus STN-DBS (ODT + DBS). Matched healthy elderly controls (HEC) and young controls (HYC) also participated in this study. Participants completed two control tasks and three emotion recognition tests that varied in stimulus domain. EPD patients were impaired on all emotion recognition tasks compared to HEC. Neither therapy type (ODT or ODT + DBS) nor therapy state (ON/OFF) altered emotion recognition performance in this study. Finally, HEC were impaired on vocal emotion recognition relative to HYC, suggesting a decline related to healthy aging. This study supports the existence of impaired emotion recognition early in the PD course, implicating an early disruption of fronto-striatal loops mediating emotional function.

Neural correlates of emotional response inhibition in obsessive-compulsive disorder: A preliminary study.

PubMed

Berlin, Heather A; Schulz, Kurt P; Zhang, Sam; Turetzky, Rachel; Rosenthal, David; Goodman, Wayne

2015-11-30

Failure to inhibit recurrent anxiety-provoking thoughts is a central symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Neuroimaging studies suggest inhibitory control and disgust processing abnormalities in patients with OCD. However, the emotional modulation of response inhibition deficits in OCD and their neural correlates remain to be elucidated. For this preliminary study we administered an adapted affective response inhibition paradigm, an emotional go/no-go task, during fMRI to characterize the neural systems underlying disgust-related and fear-related inhibition in nine adults with contamination-type OCD compared to ten matched healthy controls. Participants with OCD had significantly greater anterior insula cortex activation when inhibiting responses to both disgusting (bilateral), and fearful (right-sided) images, compared to healthy controls. They also had increased activation in several frontal, temporal, and parietal regions, but there was no evidence of amygdala activation in OCD or healthy participants and no significant between-group differences in performance on the emotion go/no-go task. The anterior insula appears to play a central role in the emotional modulation of response inhibition in contamination-type OCD to both fearful and disgusting images. The insula may serve as a potential treatment target for contamination-type OCD. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Positivity effect in source attributions of arousal-matched emotional and non-emotional words during item-based directed forgetting.

PubMed

Gallant, Sara N; Yang, Lixia

2014-01-01

Consistent with their emphasis on emotional goals, older adults often exhibit a positivity bias in attention and memory relative to their young counterparts (i.e., a positivity effect). The current study sought to determine how this age-related positivity effect would impact intentional forgetting of emotional words, a process critical to efficient operation of memory. Using an item-based directed forgetting task, 36 young and 36 older adults studied a series of arousal-equivalent words that varied in valence (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral). Each word was followed by a cue to either remember or forget the word. A subsequent "tagging" recognition task required classification of items as to-be-remembered (TBR), to-be-forgotten (TBF), or new as a measure of directed forgetting and source attribution in participants' memory. Neither young nor older adults' intentional forgetting was affected by the valence of words. A goal-consistent valence effect did, however, emerge in older adults' source attribution performance. Specifically, older adults assigned more TBR-cues to positive words and more TBF-cues to negative words. Results are discussed in light of existing literature on emotion and directed forgetting as well as the socioemotional selectivity theory underlying the age-related positivity effect.

Positivity effect in source attributions of arousal-matched emotional and non-emotional words during item-based directed forgetting

PubMed Central

Gallant, Sara N.; Yang, Lixia

2014-01-01

Consistent with their emphasis on emotional goals, older adults often exhibit a positivity bias in attention and memory relative to their young counterparts (i.e., a positivity effect). The current study sought to determine how this age-related positivity effect would impact intentional forgetting of emotional words, a process critical to efficient operation of memory. Using an item-based directed forgetting task, 36 young and 36 older adults studied a series of arousal-equivalent words that varied in valence (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral). Each word was followed by a cue to either remember or forget the word. A subsequent “tagging” recognition task required classification of items as to-be-remembered (TBR), to-be-forgotten (TBF), or new as a measure of directed forgetting and source attribution in participants' memory. Neither young nor older adults' intentional forgetting was affected by the valence of words. A goal-consistent valence effect did, however, emerge in older adults' source attribution performance. Specifically, older adults assigned more TBR-cues to positive words and more TBF-cues to negative words. Results are discussed in light of existing literature on emotion and directed forgetting as well as the socioemotional selectivity theory underlying the age-related positivity effect. PMID:25477850

THE FEMALE ADVANTAGE: SEX AS A POSSIBLE PROTECTIVE FACTOR AGAINST EMOTION RECOGNITION IMPAIRMENT FOLLOWING TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY

PubMed Central

Rigon, Arianna; Turkstra, Lyn; Mutlu, Bilge; Duff, Melissa

2018-01-01

Although moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) leads to facial affect recognition impairments in up to 39% of individuals, protective and risk factors for these deficits are unknown. The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of sex on emotion recognition abilities following TBI. We administered two separate emotion recognition tests (one static and one dynamic) to 53 individuals with moderate to severe TBI (Females=28) and 49 demographically matched comparisons (Females=22). We then investigated the presence of a sex-by-group interaction in emotion recognition accuracy. In the comparison group, there were no sex differences. In the TBI group, however, females significantly outperformed males in the dynamic (but not the static) task. Moreover, males (but not females) with TBI performed significantly worse than comparison participants in the dynamic task. Further analysis revealed that sex differences in emotion recognition abilities within the TBI group could not be explained by lesion location, TBI severity, or other neuropsychological variables. These findings suggest that sex may serve as a protective factor for social impairment following TBI and inform clinicians working with TBI as well as research on the neurophysiological correlates of sex differences in social functioning. PMID:27245826

Empathy and aversion: the neural signature of mentalizing in Tourette syndrome.

PubMed

Eddy, C M; Cavanna, A E; Hansen, P C

2017-02-01

Previous studies suggest that adults with Tourette syndrome (TS) can respond unconventionally on tasks involving social cognition. We therefore hypothesized that these patients would exhibit different neural responses to healthy controls in response to emotionally salient expressions of human eyes. Twenty-five adults with TS and 25 matched healthy controls were scanned using fMRI during the standard version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task which requires mental state judgements, and a novel comparison version requiring judgements about age. During prompted mental state recognition, greater activity was apparent in TS within left orbitofrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, right amygdala and right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), while reduced activity was apparent in regions including left inferior parietal cortex. Age judgement elicited greater activity in TS within precuneus, medial prefrontal and temporal regions involved in mentalizing. The interaction between group and task revealed differential activity in areas including right inferior frontal gyrus. Task-related activity in the TPJ covaried with global ratings of the urge to tic. While recognizing mental states, adults with TS exhibit greater activity than controls in brain areas involved in the processing of negative emotion, in addition to reduced activity in regions associated with the attribution of agency. In addition, increased recruitment of areas involved in mental state reasoning is apparent in these patients when mentalizing is not a task requirement. Our findings highlight differential neural reactivity in response to emotive social cues in TS, which may interact with tic expression.

Recognition of face identity and emotion in expressive specific language impairment.

PubMed

Merkenschlager, A; Amorosa, H; Kiefl, H; Martinius, J

2012-01-01

To study face and emotion recognition in children with mostly expressive specific language impairment (SLI-E). A test movie to study perception and recognition of faces and mimic-gestural expression was applied to 24 children diagnosed as suffering from SLI-E and an age-matched control group of normally developing children. Compared to a normal control group, the SLI-E children scored significantly worse in both the face and expression recognition tasks with a preponderant effect on emotion recognition. The performance of the SLI-E group could not be explained by reduced attention during the test session. We conclude that SLI-E is associated with a deficiency in decoding non-verbal emotional facial and gestural information, which might lead to profound and persistent problems in social interaction and development. Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel.

The role of encoding and attention in facial emotion memory: an EEG investigation.

PubMed

Brenner, Colleen A; Rumak, Samuel P; Burns, Amy M N; Kieffaber, Paul D

2014-09-01

Facial expressions are encoded via sensory mechanisms, but meaning extraction and salience of these expressions involve cognitive functions. We investigated the time course of sensory encoding and subsequent maintenance in memory via EEG. Twenty-nine healthy participants completed a facial emotion delayed match-to-sample task. P100, N170 and N250 ERPs were measured in response to the first stimulus, and evoked theta power (4-7Hz) was measured during the delay interval. Negative facial expressions produced larger N170 amplitudes and greater theta power early in the delay. N170 amplitude correlated with theta power, however larger N170 amplitude coupled with greater theta power only predicted behavioural performance for one emotion condition (very happy) out of six tested (see Supplemental Data). These findings indicate that the N170 ERP may be sensitive to emotional facial expressions when task demands require encoding and retention of this information. Furthermore, sustained theta activity may represent continued attentional processing that supports short-term memory, especially of negative facial stimuli. Further study is needed to investigate the potential influence of these measures, and their interaction, on behavioural performance. Crown Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Attentional bias for trauma-related words: exaggerated emotional Stroop effect in Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans with PTSD.

PubMed

Ashley, Victoria; Honzel, Nikki; Larsen, Jary; Justus, Timothy; Swick, Diane

2013-03-14

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) involves debilitating symptoms that can disrupt cognitive functioning. The emotional Stroop has been commonly used to examine the impact of PTSD on attentional control, but no published study has yet used it with Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans, and only one previous study has compared groups on habituation to trauma-related words. We administered the emotional Stroop, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the PTSD Checklist (PCL) to 30 veterans with PTSD, 30 military controls, and 30 civilian controls. Stroop word types included Combat, Matched-neutral, Neutral, Positive and Negative. Compared to controls, veterans with PTSD were disproportionately slower in responding to Combat words. They were also slower and less accurate overall, did not show interference on Negative or Positive words relative to Neutral, and showed a trend for delayed but successful habituation to Combat words. Higher PCL and BDI scores also correlated with larger interference effects. Because of its specificity in detecting attentional biases to trauma-related words, the emotional Stroop task may serve as a useful pre- and post task with intervention studies of PTSD patients.

Attentional bias for trauma-related words: exaggerated emotional Stroop effect in Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans with PTSD

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) involves debilitating symptoms that can disrupt cognitive functioning. The emotional Stroop has been commonly used to examine the impact of PTSD on attentional control, but no published study has yet used it with Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans, and only one previous study has compared groups on habituation to trauma-related words. Methods We administered the emotional Stroop, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the PTSD Checklist (PCL) to 30 veterans with PTSD, 30 military controls, and 30 civilian controls. Stroop word types included Combat, Matched-neutral, Neutral, Positive and Negative. Results Compared to controls, veterans with PTSD were disproportionately slower in responding to Combat words. They were also slower and less accurate overall, did not show interference on Negative or Positive words relative to Neutral, and showed a trend for delayed but successful habituation to Combat words. Higher PCL and BDI scores also correlated with larger interference effects. Conclusions Because of its specificity in detecting attentional biases to trauma-related words, the emotional Stroop task may serve as a useful pre- and post task with intervention studies of PTSD patients. PMID:23496805

Emotional expressiveness and avoidance in narratives of unaccompanied refugee minors

PubMed Central

Huemer, Julia; Nelson, Kristin; Karnik, Niranjan; Völkl-Kernstock, Sabine; Seidel, Stefan; Ebner, Nina; Ryst, Erika; Friedrich, Max; Shaw, Richard J.; Realubit, Cassey; Steiner, Hans; Skala, Katrin

2016-01-01

Objective The aim of this study was to examine a cohort of unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs) by means of psycholinguistic methods in order to obtain a more subtle picture of their degree of traumatization. Methods Twenty-eight participants were included in the Stress-Inducing Speech Task (SIST) consisting of a free association (FA) and a stress (STR) condition. Narratives were examined by means of (1) quantitative parameters (word count); (2) psycholinguistic variables (temporal junctures, TJs), narrative structure, referential activity (RA)—a measure of emotional expressivity; and (3) content analysis ratings. Results Word count was significantly lower than in age-matched norms. In the FA condition, TJs were lower, but in the STR condition, rates were comparable. RA was significantly higher in both conditions. Content analysis ratings showed that the experiences described by these youths were potentially traumatic in nature. Conclusions This pattern of narrative shows a mixture of fulfilling the task demand, while containing an emotionally charged narrative. Narrative structure was absent in the FA condition, but preserved in the STR condition, as URMs struggled with the description of non-normative events. This indicates that these youths have not yet emotionally dealt with and fully integrated their trauma experiences. PMID:26955827

Facial emotion perception by intensity in children and adolescents with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.

PubMed

Leleu, Arnaud; Saucourt, Guillaume; Rigard, Caroline; Chesnoy, Gabrielle; Baudouin, Jean-Yves; Rossi, Massimiliano; Edery, Patrick; Franck, Nicolas; Demily, Caroline

2016-03-01

Difficulties in the recognition of emotions in expressive faces have been reported in people with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS). However, while low-intensity expressive faces are frequent in everyday life, nothing is known about their ability to perceive facial emotions depending on the intensity of expression. Through a visual matching task, children and adolescents with 22q11.2DS as well as gender- and age-matched healthy participants were asked to categorise the emotion of a target face among six possible expressions. Static pictures of morphs between neutrality and expressions were used to parametrically manipulate the intensity of the target face. In comparison to healthy controls, results showed higher perception thresholds (i.e. a more intense expression is needed to perceive the emotion) and lower accuracy for the most expressive faces indicating reduced categorisation abilities in the 22q11.2DS group. The number of intrusions (i.e. each time an emotion is perceived as another one) and a more gradual perception performance indicated smooth boundaries between emotional categories. Correlational analyses with neuropsychological and clinical measures suggested that reduced visual skills may be associated with impaired categorisation of facial emotions. Overall, the present study indicates greater difficulties for children and adolescents with 22q11.2DS to perceive an emotion in low-intensity expressive faces. This disability is subtended by emotional categories that are not sharply organised. It also suggests that these difficulties may be associated with impaired visual cognition, a hallmark of the cognitive deficits observed in the syndrome. These data yield promising tracks for future experimental and clinical investigations.

Attentional biases in body dysmorphic disorder (BDD): Eye-tracking using the emotional Stroop task.

PubMed

Toh, Wei Lin; Castle, David J; Rossell, Susan L

2017-04-01

Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is characterised by repetitive behaviours and/or mental acts occurring in response to preoccupations with perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance. This study aimed to examine attentional biases in BDD via the emotional Stroop task with two modifications: i) incorporating an eye-tracking paradigm, and ii) employing an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) control group. Twenty-one BDD, 19 OCD and 21 HC participants, who were age-, sex-, and IQ-matched, were included. A card version of the emotional Stroop task was employed based on seven 10-word lists: (i) BDD-positive, (ii) BDD-negative, (iii) OCD-checking, (iv) OCD-washing, (v) general positive, (vi) general threat, and (vii) neutral (as baseline). Participants were asked to read aloud words and word colours consecutively, thereby yielding accuracy and latency scores. Eye-tracking parameters were also measured. Participants with BDD exhibited significant Stroop interference for BDD-negative words relative to HC participants, as shown by extended colour-naming latencies. In contrast, the OCD group did not exhibit Stroop interference for OCD-related nor general threat words. Only mild eye-tracking anomalies were uncovered in clinical groups. Inspection of individual scanning styles and fixation heat maps however revealed that viewing strategies adopted by clinical groups were generally disorganised, with avoidance of certain disorder-relevant words and considerable visual attention devoted to non-salient card regions. The operation of attentional biases to negative disorder-specific words was corroborated in BDD. Future replication studies using other paradigms are vital, given potential ambiguities inherent in emotional Stroop task interpretation. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Alcoholism and Dampened Temporal Limbic Activation to Emotional Faces

PubMed Central

Marinkovic, Ksenija; Oscar-Berman, Marlene; Urban, Trinity; O’Reilly, Cara E.; Howard, Julie A.; Sawyer, Kayle; Harris, Gordon J.

2013-01-01

Background Excessive chronic drinking is accompanied by a broad spectrum of emotional changes ranging from apathy and emotional flatness to deficits in comprehending emotional information, but their neural bases are poorly understood. Methods Emotional abnormalities associated with alcoholism were examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging in abstinent long-term alcoholic men in comparison to healthy demographically matched controls. Participants were presented with emotionally valenced words and photographs of faces during deep (semantic) and shallow (perceptual) encoding tasks followed by recognition. Results Overall, faces evoked stronger activation than words, with the expected material-specific laterality (left hemisphere for words, and right for faces) and depth of processing effects. However, whereas control participants showed stronger activation in the amygdala and hippocampus when viewing faces with emotional (relative to neutral) expressions, the alcoholics responded in an undifferentiated manner to all facial expressions. In the alcoholic participants, amygdala activity was inversely correlated with an increase in lateral prefrontal activity as a function of their behavioral deficits. Prefrontal modulation of emotional function as a compensation for the blunted amygdala activity during a socially relevant face appraisal task is in agreement with a distributed network engagement during emotional face processing. Conclusions Deficient activation of amygdala and hippocampus may underlie impaired processing of emotional faces associated with long-term alcoholism and may be a part of the wide array of behavioral problems including disinhibition, concurring with previously documented interpersonal difficulties in this population. Furthermore, the results suggest that alcoholics may rely on prefrontal rather than temporal limbic areas in order to compensate for reduced limbic responsivity and to maintain behavioral adequacy when faced with emotionally or socially challenging situations. PMID:19673745

Neurocognitive correlates of the effects of yoga meditation practice on emotion and cognition: a pilot study

PubMed Central

Froeliger, Brett E.; Garland, Eric L.; Modlin, Leslie A.; McClernon, F. Joseph

2012-01-01

Mindfulness meditation involves attending to emotions without cognitive fixation of emotional experience. Over time, this practice is held to promote alterations in trait affectivity and attentional control with resultant effects on well-being and cognition. However, relatively little is known regarding the neural substrates of meditation effects on emotion and cognition. The present study investigated the neurocognitive correlates of emotion interference on cognition in Yoga practitioners and a matched control group (CG) underwent fMRI while performing an event-related affective Stroop task. The task includes image viewing trials and Stroop trials bracketed by neutral or negative emotional distractors. During image viewing trials, Yoga practitioners exhibited less reactivity in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) to negative as compared to neutral images; whereas the CG had the opposite pattern. A main effect of valence (negative > neutral) was observed in limbic regions (e.g., amygdala), of which the magnitude was inversely related to dlPFC activation. Exploratory analyses revealed that the magnitude of amygdala activation predicted decreased self-reported positive affect in the CG, but not among Yoga practitioners. During Stroop trials, Yoga practitioners had greater activation in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) during Stroop trials when negative, compared to neutral, emotional distractor were presented; the CG exhibited the opposite pattern. Taken together, these data suggest that though Yoga practitioners exhibit limbic reactivity to negative emotional stimuli, such reactivity does not have downstream effects on later mood state. This uncoupling of viewing negative emotional images and affect among Yoga practitioners may be occasioned by their selective implementation of frontal executive-dependent strategies to reduce emotional interference during competing cognitive demands and not during emotional processing per se. PMID:22855674

Face recognition: database acquisition, hybrid algorithms, and human studies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gutta, Srinivas; Huang, Jeffrey R.; Singh, Dig; Wechsler, Harry

1997-02-01

One of the most important technologies absent in traditional and emerging frontiers of computing is the management of visual information. Faces are accessible `windows' into the mechanisms that govern our emotional and social lives. The corresponding face recognition tasks considered herein include: (1) Surveillance, (2) CBIR, and (3) CBIR subject to correct ID (`match') displaying specific facial landmarks such as wearing glasses. We developed robust matching (`classification') and retrieval schemes based on hybrid classifiers and showed their feasibility using the FERET database. The hybrid classifier architecture consist of an ensemble of connectionist networks--radial basis functions-- and decision trees. The specific characteristics of our hybrid architecture include (a) query by consensus as provided by ensembles of networks for coping with the inherent variability of the image formation and data acquisition process, and (b) flexible and adaptive thresholds as opposed to ad hoc and hard thresholds. Experimental results, proving the feasibility of our approach, yield (i) 96% accuracy, using cross validation (CV), for surveillance on a data base consisting of 904 images (ii) 97% accuracy for CBIR tasks, on a database of 1084 images, and (iii) 93% accuracy, using CV, for CBIR subject to correct ID match tasks on a data base of 200 images.

[Emotional response to music by postlingually-deafened adult cochlear implant users].

PubMed

Wang, Shuo; Dong, Ruijuan; Zhou, Yun; Li, Jing; Qi, Beier; Liu, Bo

2012-10-01

To assess the emotional response to music by postlingually-deafened adult cochlear implant users. Munich music questionnaire (MUMU) was used to match the music experience and the motivation of use of music between 12 normal-hearing and 12 cochlear implant subjects. Emotion rating test in Musical Sounds in Cochlear Implants (MuSIC) test battery was used to assess the emotion perception ability for both normal-hearing and cochlear implant subjects. A total of 15 pieces of music phases were used. Responses were given by selecting the rating scales from 1 to 10. "1" represents "very sad" feeling, and "10" represents "very happy feeling. In comparison with normal-hearing subjects, 12 cochlear implant subjects made less active use of music for emotional purpose. The emotion ratings for cochlear implant subjects were similar to normal-hearing subjects, but with large variability. Post-lingually deafened cochlear implant subjects on average performed similarly in emotion rating tasks relative to normal-hearing subjects, but their active use of music for emotional purpose was obviously less than normal-hearing subjects.

Deficits in recognition, identification, and discrimination of facial emotions in patients with bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Benito, Adolfo; Lahera, Guillermo; Herrera, Sara; Muncharaz, Ramón; Benito, Guillermo; Fernández-Liria, Alberto; Montes, José Manuel

2013-01-01

To analyze the recognition, identification, and discrimination of facial emotions in a sample of outpatients with bipolar disorder (BD). Forty-four outpatients with diagnosis of BD and 48 matched control subjects were selected. Both groups were assessed with tests for recognition (Emotion Recognition-40 - ER40), identification (Facial Emotion Identification Test - FEIT), and discrimination (Facial Emotion Discrimination Test - FEDT) of facial emotions, as well as a theory of mind (ToM) verbal test (Hinting Task). Differences between groups were analyzed, controlling the influence of mild depressive and manic symptoms. Patients with BD scored significantly lower than controls on recognition (ER40), identification (FEIT), and discrimination (FEDT) of emotions. Regarding the verbal measure of ToM, a lower score was also observed in patients compared to controls. Patients with mild syndromal depressive symptoms obtained outcomes similar to patients in euthymia. A significant correlation between FEDT scores and global functioning (measured by the Functioning Assessment Short Test, FAST) was found. These results suggest that, even in euthymia, patients with BD experience deficits in recognition, identification, and discrimination of facial emotions, with potential functional implications.

Impaired Perception of Emotional Expression in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

PubMed

Oh, Seong Il; Oh, Ki Wook; Kim, Hee Jin; Park, Jin Seok; Kim, Seung Hyun

2016-07-01

The increasing recognition that deficits in social emotions occur in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is helping to explain the spectrum of neuropsychological dysfunctions, thus supporting the view of ALS as a multisystem disorder involving neuropsychological deficits as well as motor deficits. The aim of this study was to characterize the emotion perception abilities of Korean patients with ALS based on the recognition of facial expressions. Twenty-four patients with ALS and 24 age- and sex-matched healthy controls completed neuropsychological tests and facial emotion recognition tasks [ChaeLee Korean Facial Expressions of Emotions (ChaeLee-E)]. The ChaeLee-E test includes facial expressions for seven emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and neutral. The ability to perceive facial emotions was significantly worse among ALS patients performed than among healthy controls [65.2±18.0% vs. 77.1±6.6% (mean±SD), p=0.009]. Eight of the 24 patients (33%) scored below the 5th percentile score of controls for recognizing facial emotions. Emotion perception deficits occur in Korean ALS patients, particularly regarding facial expressions of emotion. These findings expand the spectrum of cognitive and behavioral dysfunction associated with ALS into emotion processing dysfunction.

Social reasoning skills in adults with Down syndrome: the role of language, executive functions and socio-emotional behaviour.

PubMed

Hippolyte, L; Iglesias, K; Van der Linden, M; Barisnikov, K

2010-08-01

Although the prevalence of mental illness and behaviour problems is lower in adults with Down syndrome (DS) than in other populations with intellectual disabilities, they do present emotional and relational problems, as well as social integration difficulties. However, studies reporting on specific competences known to be central in developing appropriate social relationships (e.g. social reasoning, emotion processing, theory of mind) remain rare in the adult DS population and the mechanisms underlying these people's emotional and relational difficulties are unclear. The present study investigated the ability to understand the appropriateness of others' social behaviour in 34 adults with DS, using the Social Resolution Task (SRT). Their results were compared with those of 34 typically developing (TD) children matched for gender and receptive vocabulary. The relationships among the SRT experimental task, cognitive competences (receptive and productive vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, inhibition, selective attention) and a caregiver-rated measure of socio-emotional behaviour were examined in the DS group. The DS participants' global SRT scores did not differ from those of the controls. However, analyses of the SRT subscores revealed that the DS group identified significantly fewer inappropriate situations than the control group. Nevertheless, when they correctly identified the behaviour as inappropriate, they were as well as the controls to explain the rules underlying their responses. Regression analyses showed that receptive vocabulary and selective attention and a specific dimension of the socio-emotional profile (social relating skills) constituted the best predictors of the DS adults' performance on the SRT. The main findings show that the DS participants demonstrate relatively good social reasoning skills in comparison with TD children matched for verbal age. However, the two groups present distinctions in their response patterns, and the influence of cognitive variables on success on the SRT also appears different. While selective attention skills are found to be significant predictors for both groups, the influence of receptive vocabulary level is much stronger in the DS group. The implications of particular cognitive and socio-emotional factors for success on the SRT in this group are considered in more detail.

More than Just Another Face in the Crowd: Evidence for an "Angry Superiority Effect" in Children with and without Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rosset, Delphine; Santos, Andreia; Da Fonseca, David; Rondan, Cecilie; Poinso, Francois; Deruelle, Christine

2011-01-01

The angry superiority effect refers to more efficient way individuals detect angry relative to happy faces in a crowd. Given their socio-emotional deficits, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may be impervious to this effect. Thirty children with ASD and 30 matched-typically developing children were presented with a visual search task,…

Short-term testosterone manipulations do not affect cognition or motor function but differentially modulate emotions in young and older male rhesus monkeys.

PubMed

Kelly, Brian; Maguire-Herring, Vanessa; Rose, Christian M; Gore, Heather E; Ferrigno, Stephen; Novak, Melinda A; Lacreuse, Agnès

2014-11-01

Human aging is characterized by declines in cognition and fine motor function as well as improved emotional regulation. In men, declining levels of testosterone (T) with age have been implicated in the development of these age-related changes. However, studies examining the effects of T replacement on cognition, emotion and fine motor function in older men have not provided consistent results. Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) are excellent models for human cognitive aging and may provide novel insights on this issue. We tested 10 aged intact male rhesus monkeys (mean age=19, range 15-25) on a battery of cognitive, motor and emotional tasks at baseline and under low or high T experimental conditions. Their performance was compared to that of 6 young males previously tested in the same paradigm (Lacreuse et al., 2009; Lacreuse et al., 2010). Following a 4-week baseline testing period, monkeys were treated with a gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist (Depot Lupron, 200 μg/kg) to suppress endogenous T and were tested on the task battery under a 4-week high T condition (injection of Lupron+T enanthate, 20 mg/kg, n=8) or 4-week low T condition (injection of Lupron+oil vehicle, n=8) before crossing over to the opposite treatment. The cognitive tasks consisted of the Delayed Non-Matching-to-Sample (DNMS), the Delayed Response (DR), and the Delayed Recognition Span Test (spatial-DRST). The emotional tasks included an object Approach-Avoidance task and a task in which monkeys were played videos of unfamiliar conspecifics in different emotional context (Social Playbacks). The fine motor task was the Lifesaver task that required monkeys to remove a Lifesaver candy from rods of different complexity. T manipulations did not significantly affect visual recognition memory, working memory, reference memory or fine motor function at any age. In the Approach-Avoidance task, older monkeys, but not younger monkeys, spent more time in proximity of novel objects in the high T condition relative to the low T condition. In both age groups, high T increased watching time of threatening social stimuli in the Social Playbacks. These results suggest that T affects some aspects of emotional processing but has no effect on fine motor function or cognition in young or older male macaques. It is possible that the duration of T treatment was not long enough to affect cognition or fine motor function or that T levels were too high to improve these outcomes. An alternative explanation for the discrepancies of our findings with some of the cognitive and emotional effects of T reported in rodents and humans may be the use of a chemical castration, which reduced circulating gonadotropins in addition to T. Further studies will investigate whether the luteinizing hormone LH mediates the effects of T on brain function in male primates. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotional Intelligence predicts individual differences in social exchange reasoning.

PubMed

Reis, Deidre L; Brackett, Marc A; Shamosh, Noah A; Kiehl, Kent A; Salovey, Peter; Gray, Jeremy R

2007-04-15

When assessed with performance measures, Emotional Intelligence (EI) correlates positively with the quality of social relationships. However, the bases of such correlations are not understood in terms of cognitive and neural information processing mechanisms. We investigated whether a performance measure of EI is related to reasoning about social situations (specifically social exchange reasoning) using versions of the Wason Card Selection Task. In an fMRI study (N=16), higher EI predicted hemodynamic responses during social reasoning in the left frontal polar and left anterior temporal brain regions, even when controlling for responses on a very closely matched task (precautionary reasoning). In a larger behavioral study (N=48), higher EI predicted faster social exchange reasoning, after controlling for precautionary reasoning. The results are the first to directly suggest that EI is mediated in part by mechanisms supporting social reasoning and validate a new approach to investigating EI in terms of more basic information processing mechanisms.

Prosody recognition and audiovisual emotion matching in schizophrenia: the contribution of cognition and psychopathology.

PubMed

Castagna, Filomena; Montemagni, Cristiana; Maria Milani, Anna; Rocca, Giuseppe; Rocca, Paola; Casacchia, Massimo; Bogetto, Filippo

2013-02-28

This study aimed to evaluate the ability to decode emotion in the auditory and audiovisual modality in a group of patients with schizophrenia, and to explore the role of cognition and psychopathology in affecting these emotion recognition abilities. Ninety-four outpatients in a stable phase and 51 healthy subjects were recruited. Patients were assessed through a psychiatric evaluation and a wide neuropsychological battery. All subjects completed the comprehensive affect testing system (CATS), a group of computerized tests designed to evaluate emotion perception abilities. With respect to the controls, patients were not impaired in the CATS tasks involving discrimination of nonemotional prosody, naming of emotional stimuli expressed by voice and judging the emotional content of a sentence, whereas they showed a specific impairment in decoding emotion in a conflicting auditory condition and in the multichannel modality. Prosody impairment was affected by executive functions, attention and negative symptoms, while deficit in multisensory emotion recognition was affected by executive functions and negative symptoms. These emotion recognition deficits, rather than being associated purely with emotion perception disturbances in schizophrenia, are affected by core symptoms of the illness. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Facial and prosodic emotion recognition in social anxiety disorder.

PubMed

Tseng, Huai-Hsuan; Huang, Yu-Lien; Chen, Jian-Ting; Liang, Kuei-Yu; Lin, Chao-Cheng; Chen, Sue-Huei

2017-07-01

Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have a cognitive preference to negatively evaluate emotional information. In particular, the preferential biases in prosodic emotion recognition in SAD have been much less explored. The present study aims to investigate whether SAD patients retain negative evaluation biases across visual and auditory modalities when given sufficient response time to recognise emotions. Thirty-one SAD patients and 31 age- and gender-matched healthy participants completed a culturally suitable non-verbal emotion recognition task and received clinical assessments for social anxiety and depressive symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine group differences in emotion recognition. Compared to healthy participants, SAD patients were significantly less accurate at recognising facial and prosodic emotions, and spent more time on emotion recognition. The differences were mainly driven by the lower accuracy and longer reaction times for recognising fearful emotions in SAD patients. Within the SAD patients, lower accuracy of sad face recognition was associated with higher severity of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, particularly with avoidance symptoms. These findings may represent a cross-modality pattern of avoidance in the later stage of identifying negative emotions in SAD. This pattern may be linked to clinical symptom severity.

Impaired Theory of Mind and psychosocial functioning among pediatric patients with Type I versus Type II bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Schenkel, Lindsay S; Chamberlain, Todd F; Towne, Terra L

2014-03-30

Deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) have been documented among pediatric patients with Bipolar Disorder (BD). However, fewer studies have directly examined differences between type I and type II patients and whether or not ToM deficits are related to psychosocial difficulties. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare type I versus type II pediatric bipolar patients and matched Healthy Controls (HC) on ToM and interpersonal functioning tasks. All participants completed the Revised Mind in the Eyes Task (MET), the Cognitive and Emotional Perspective Taking Task (CEPTT), and the Index of Peer Relations (IPR). Type I BD patients reported greater peer difficulties on the IPR compared to HC, and also performed more poorly on the MET and the cognitive condition of the CEPTT, but did not differ significantly on the emotional condition. There were no significant group differences between type II BD patients and HC. More impaired ToM performance was associated with poorer interpersonal functioning. Type I BD patients show deficits in the ability to understand another's mental state, irrespective of emotional valence. Deficits in understanding others' mental states could be an important treatment target for type I pediatric patients with BD. © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Negative emotion evoked by viewing snakes has a motivating effect on cognitive processing in human children with or without intellectual disability.

PubMed

Masataka, Nobuo

2017-06-01

It is well known that prioritization of the processing of threatening stimuli generally induces deleterious effects on task performance. However, a study recently reported that emotion (possibly fear) evoked by viewing images of snakes exerts a facilitating effect upon making judgments of the images' color in neurotypical adults and schoolchildren. Here, the author has attempted to confirm the relevance of this notion in children with and without intellectual disability. The author here compared the reaction time required to name the colors of snake and flower images between children with Down syndrome (DS) and mental age matched, typically-developing (TD) children. Snake images were responded to faster than flower images in both the groups, while the children with DS tended to respond more slowly overall. As in TD children, negative emotion can have a motivating effect on cognitive processing in children with DS. Some implications of the findings are pointed out with respect to the lower-level task persistence as a characteristic motivational orientation in children with DS.

The pupil's response to affective pictures: Role of image duration, habituation, and viewing mode

PubMed Central

O'Farrell, Katherine R.; Burley, Daniel; Erichsen, Jonathan T.; Newton, Naomi V.; Gray, Nicola S.

2016-01-01

Abstract The pupil has been shown to be sensitive to the emotional content of stimuli. We examined this phenomenon by comparing fearful and neutral images carefully matched in the domains of luminance, image contrast, image color, and complexity of content. The pupil was more dilated after viewing affective pictures, and this effect was (a) shown to be independent of the presentation time of the images (from 100–3,000 ms), (b) not diminished by repeated presentations of the images, and (c) not affected by actively naming the emotion of the stimuli in comparison to passive viewing. Our results show that the emotional modulation of the pupil is present over a range of variables that typically vary from study to study (image duration, number of trials, free viewing vs. task), and encourages the use of pupillometry as a measure of emotional processing in populations where alternative techniques may not be appropriate. PMID:27172997

Empathy for positive and negative emotions in social anxiety disorder.

PubMed

Morrison, Amanda S; Mateen, Maria A; Brozovich, Faith A; Zaki, Jamil; Goldin, Philippe R; Heimberg, Richard G; Gross, James J

2016-12-01

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with elevated negative and diminished positive affective experience. However, little is known about the way in which individuals with SAD perceive and respond emotionally to the naturally-unfolding negative and positive emotions of others, that is, cognitive empathy and affective empathy, respectively. In the present study, participants with generalized SAD (n = 32) and demographically-matched healthy controls (HCs; n = 32) completed a behavioral empathy task. Cognitive empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets' and participants' continuous ratings of targets' emotions, whereas affective empathy was indexed by the correlation between targets' and participants' continuous self-ratings of emotion. Individuals with SAD differed from HCs only in positive affective empathy: they were less able to vicariously share others' positive emotions. Mediation analyses revealed that poor emotional clarity and negative interpersonal perceptions among those with SAD might account for this finding. Future research using experimental methodology is needed to examine whether this finding represents an inability or unwillingness to share positive affect. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Enhancing creativity: Proper body posture meets proper emotion.

PubMed

Hao, Ning; Xue, Hua; Yuan, Huan; Wang, Qing; Runco, Mark A

2017-02-01

This study tested whether compatibility or incompatibility between body posture and emotion was beneficial for creativity. In Study 1, participants were asked to solve the Alternative Uses Task (AUT) problems when performing open or closed body posture in positive or negative emotional state respectively. The results showed that originality of AUT performance was higher in the compatible conditions (i.e., open-positive and closed-negative) than in the incompatible conditions (i.e., closed-positive and open-negative). In Study 2, the compatibility effect was replicated in both the AUT and the Realistic Presented Problem test (i.e., RPP). Moreover, it was revealed that participants exhibited the highest associative flexibility in the open-positive condition, and the highest persistence in the closed-negative condition. These findings indicate that compatibility between body posture and emotion is beneficial for creativity. This may be because when the implicit emotions elicited by body posture match explicit emotions, the effects of emotions on creativity are enhanced, therefore promoting creativity through the flexibility or the persistence pathway respectively. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Facial Emotion Recognition and Expression in Parkinson’s Disease: An Emotional Mirror Mechanism?

PubMed Central

Ricciardi, Lucia; Visco-Comandini, Federica; Erro, Roberto; Morgante, Francesca; Bologna, Matteo; Fasano, Alfonso; Ricciardi, Diego; Edwards, Mark J.; Kilner, James

2017-01-01

Background and aim Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients have impairment of facial expressivity (hypomimia) and difficulties in interpreting the emotional facial expressions produced by others, especially for aversive emotions. We aimed to evaluate the ability to produce facial emotional expressions and to recognize facial emotional expressions produced by others in a group of PD patients and a group of healthy participants in order to explore the relationship between these two abilities and any differences between the two groups of participants. Methods Twenty non-demented, non-depressed PD patients and twenty healthy participants (HC) matched for demographic characteristics were studied. The ability of recognizing emotional facial expressions was assessed with the Ekman 60-faces test (Emotion recognition task). Participants were video-recorded while posing facial expressions of 6 primary emotions (happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and anger). The most expressive pictures for each emotion were derived from the videos. Ten healthy raters were asked to look at the pictures displayed on a computer-screen in pseudo-random fashion and to identify the emotional label in a six-forced-choice response format (Emotion expressivity task). Reaction time (RT) and accuracy of responses were recorded. At the end of each trial the participant was asked to rate his/her confidence in his/her perceived accuracy of response. Results For emotion recognition, PD reported lower score than HC for Ekman total score (p<0.001), and for single emotions sub-scores happiness, fear, anger, sadness (p<0.01) and surprise (p = 0.02). In the facial emotion expressivity task, PD and HC significantly differed in the total score (p = 0.05) and in the sub-scores for happiness, sadness, anger (all p<0.001). RT and the level of confidence showed significant differences between PD and HC for the same emotions. There was a significant positive correlation between the emotion facial recognition and expressivity in both groups; the correlation was even stronger when ranking emotions from the best recognized to the worst (R = 0.75, p = 0.004). Conclusions PD patients showed difficulties in recognizing emotional facial expressions produced by others and in posing facial emotional expressions compared to healthy subjects. The linear correlation between recognition and expression in both experimental groups suggests that the two mechanisms share a common system, which could be deteriorated in patients with PD. These results open new clinical and rehabilitation perspectives. PMID:28068393

An Attempt at Matching Waking Events Into Dream Reports by Independent Judges

PubMed Central

Wang, Jia Xi; Shen, He Yong

2018-01-01

Correlations between memories and dreaming has typically been studied by linking conscious experiences and dream reports, which has illustrated that dreaming reflects waking life events, thoughts, and emotions. As some research suggests that sleep has a function of memory consolidation, and dreams reflect this, researching this relationship further may uncover more useful insights. However, most related research has been conducted using the self-report method which asks participants to judge the relationship between their own conscious experiences and dreams. This method may cause errors when the research purpose is to make comparisons between different groups, because individual differences cannot be balanced out when the results are compared among groups. Based on a knowledge of metaphors and symbols, we developed two operationalized definitions for independent judges to match conscious experiences and dreams, the descriptive incorporation and the metaphorical incorporation, and tested their reliability for the matching purpose. Two independent judges were asked to complete a linking task for 212 paired event-dreams. Results showed almost half dreams can be matched by independent judges, and the independent-judge method could provide similar proportions for the linking task, when compared with the self-report method. PMID:29681873

Lesions to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex selectively impair reasoning about emotional material.

PubMed

Goel, Vinod; Lam, Elaine; Smith, Kathleen W; Goel, Amit; Raymont, Vanessa; Krueger, Frank; Grafman, Jordan

2017-05-01

While it is widely accepted that lesions to orbital prefrontal cortex lead to emotion related disruptions and poor decision-making, there is very little patient data on this issue involving actual logical reasoning tasks. We tested patients with circumscribed, focal lesions largely confined to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex (BA 10 & 11) (N=17) on logical reasoning tasks involving neutral and emotional content, and compared their performance to that of an age and education-matched normal control group (N=22) and a posterior lesion control group (N=24). Our results revealed a significant group by content interaction driven by a selective impairment in the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex group compared to healthy normal controls and to the parietal patient group, in the emotional content reasoning trials. Subsequent analyses of congruent and incongruent reasoning trials indicated that this impairment was driven by the poor performance of patients with polar/orbital lesions in the incongruent trials. We conclude that the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in filtering emotionally charged content from the material before it is passed on to the reasoning system in lateral/dorsal regions of prefrontal cortex. Where unfiltered content is passed to the reasoning engine, either as a result of pathology (as in the case of our patients) or as a result of individual differences, reasoning performance suffers. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Lesions to Polar/Orbital Prefrontal Cortex Selectively Impair Reasoning about Emotional Material

PubMed Central

Goel, Vinod; Lam, Elaine; Smith, Kathleen W.; Goel, Amit; Raymont, Vanessa; Krueger, Frank; Grafman, Jordan

2017-01-01

While it is widely accepted that lesions to orbital prefrontal cortex lead to emotion related disruptions and poor decision-making, there is very little patient data on this issue involving actual logical reasoning tasks. We tested patients with circumscribed, focal lesions largely confined to polar/orbital prefrontal cortex (BA 10 & 11) (N=17) on logical reasoning tasks involving neutral and emotional content, and compared their performance to that of an age and education-matched normal control group (N=22) and a posterior lesion control group (N=24). Our results revealed a significant group by content interaction driven by a selective impairment in the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex group compared to healthy normal controls and to the parietal patient group, in the emotional content reasoning trials. Subsequent analyses of congruent and incongruent reasoning trials indicated that this impairment was driven by the poor performance of patients with polar/orbital lesions in the incongruent trials. We conclude that the polar/orbital prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in filtering emotionally charged content from the material before it is passed on to the reasoning system in lateral/dorsal regions of prefrontal cortex. Where unfiltered content is passed to the reasoning engine, either as a result of pathology (as in the case of our patients) or as a result of individual differences, reasoning performance suffers. PMID:28263798

Social Behavior and Impairments in Social Cognition Following Traumatic Brain Injury.

PubMed

May, Michelle; Milders, Maarten; Downey, Bruce; Whyte, Maggie; Higgins, Vanessa; Wojcik, Zuzana; Amin, Sophie; O'Rourke, Suzanne

2017-05-01

The negative effect of changes in social behavior following traumatic brain injury (TBI) are known, but much less is known about the neuropsychological impairments that may underlie and predict these changes. The current study investigated possible associations between post-injury behavior and neuropsychological competencies of emotion recognition, understanding intentions, and response selection, that have been proposed as important for social functioning. Forty participants with TBI and 32 matched healthy participants completed a battery of tests assessing the three functions of interest. In addition, self- and proxy reports of pre- and post-injury behavior, mood, and community integration were collected. The TBI group performed significantly poorer than the comparison group on all tasks of emotion recognition, understanding intention, and on one task of response selection. Ratings of current behavior suggested significant changes in the TBI group relative to before the injury and showed significantly poorer community integration and interpersonal behavior than the comparison group. Of the three functions considered, emotion recognition was associated with both post-injury behavior and community integration and this association could not be fully explained by injury severity, time since injury, or education. The current study confirmed earlier findings of associations between emotion recognition and post-TBI behavior, providing partial evidence for models proposing emotion recognition as one of the pre-requisites for adequate social functioning. (JINS, 2017, 23, 400-411).

[Different patterns of brain activation between patients of Alzheimer's disease with and without depression: a functional MRI study during emotion Stroop task].

PubMed

Wang, Hai-tao; Jia, Jian-ping

2007-04-03

To examine whether emotional factor influences the depression onset in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Twenty mild AD patients conforming to the of DSM-IV criteria with a clinical dementia rating score of 1.0 were divided into 2 groups: 11 patients without depression (AD group), and 9 patients with depression confirming to the National Institute of Mental Health-dAD criteria with a Cornell scale for depression in dementia score>12 (dAD group), without significant differences in age, gender, educational level, onset duration, and MMSE scores between these 2 groups. Ten age-and gender ratio-matched healthy elderly subjects were used as controls. Emotion Stroop task was performed to these 3 groups: emotion Stroop task images were presented with colored positive or negative emotion words (such as HAPPY or SUICIDE, etc.) at the left part of the image to induce emotional responses and with pure color at the right part of the image. The subjects were asked to press the right button when the ink color of the emotion word was congruent with the color at the right part, and press the left button when the ink color of the word was not congruent with the color at the right part. Neutral words were used in the test of general word task. The reaction time, false ratio, and missing ratio were recorded. Functional MRI (fMRI) was conducted. The behavioral data were analyzed with SPSS 11.0 software and the fMRI data were analyzed with SPM2 software. The emotion Stroop task showed that the reaction time of the normal control group was 848 ms+/-320 ms, significantly shorter than those of the dAD and AD groups (1528 ms+/-302 ms and 1173 ms+/-237 ms respectively, both P<0.01), and the reaction time of the AD group was significantly shorter than that of the dAD group too (P=0.04). The false ratio of the normal control group was 0.5%, significantly lower than those of the AD and dAD groups (7.6% and 9.7% respectively, both P<0.01), and there was not a significant difference between the latter 2 groups (P=0.22). The missing ratio of the normal control group was 0, significantly lower than those of the AD and dAD groups (3.1% and 2.5% respectively, both P<0.01), and there was not a significant difference between the latter 2 groups (P=0.29). The fMRI results showed that the bilateral amygdala, left parietal lobe, and left prefrontal lobe were activated in the normal control group, bilateral parietal lobe were activated in the AD group; and bilateral prefrontal cortex in dAD group. The subtraction of the results of emotion Stroop task and general word task showed the brain function area activation images as follows simple emotion factors activated the right amygdala, left parietal lobe, and bilateral prefrontal cortices and occipital lobes in the normal control group; bilateral parietal lobes and left dorsal lateral frontal cortex in the AD group; and bilateral prefrontal cortices in the dAD group; With quite different brain activation pattern, the dAD patients are more susceptible to the influence of emotional factors than AD patients. Impaired emotional neurocircus and emotional reaction may play an important role in the depression onset in AD.

Dynamic Changes in Amygdala Activation and Functional Connectivity in Children and Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders

PubMed Central

Swartz, Johnna R.; Phan, K. Luan; Angstadt, Mike; Fitzgerald, Kate D.; Monk, Christopher S.

2015-01-01

Anxiety disorders are associated with abnormalities in amygdala function and prefrontal cortex-amygdala connectivity. The majority of fMRI studies have examined mean group differences in amygdala activation or connectivity in children and adolescents with anxiety disorders relative to controls, but emerging evidence suggests that abnormalities in amygdala function are dependent on the timing of the task and may vary across the course of a scanning session. The goal of the present study was to extend our knowledge of the dynamics of amygdala dysfunction by examining whether changes in amygdala activation and connectivity over scanning differ in pediatric anxiety disorder patients relative to typically developing controls during an emotion processing task. Examining changes in activation over time allows for a comparison of how brain function differs during initial exposure to novel stimuli versus more prolonged exposure. Participants included 34 anxiety disorder patients and 19 controls 7 to 19 years old. Participants performed an emotional face matching task during fMRI scanning and the task was divided into thirds in order to examine change in activation over time. Results demonstrated that patients exhibited an abnormal pattern of amygdala activation characterized by an initially heightened amygdala response relative to controls at the beginning of scanning, followed by significant decreases in activation over time. In addition, controls evidenced greater prefrontal cortex-amygdala connectivity during the beginning of scanning relative to patients. These results indicate that differences in emotion processing between the groups vary from initial exposure to novel stimuli relative to more prolonged exposure. Implications are discussed regarding how this pattern of neural activation may relate to altered early-occurring or anticipatory emotion-regulation strategies and maladaptive later-occurring strategies in children and adolescents with anxiety disorders. PMID:25422963

Fusiform Gyrus Dysfunction is Associated with Perceptual Processing Efficiency to Emotional Faces in Adolescent Depression: A Model-Based Approach.

PubMed

Ho, Tiffany C; Zhang, Shunan; Sacchet, Matthew D; Weng, Helen; Connolly, Colm G; Henje Blom, Eva; Han, Laura K M; Mobayed, Nisreen O; Yang, Tony T

2016-01-01

While the extant literature has focused on major depressive disorder (MDD) as being characterized by abnormalities in processing affective stimuli (e.g., facial expressions), little is known regarding which specific aspects of cognition influence the evaluation of affective stimuli, and what are the underlying neural correlates. To investigate these issues, we assessed 26 adolescents diagnosed with MDD and 37 well-matched healthy controls (HCL) who completed an emotion identification task of dynamically morphing faces during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We analyzed the behavioral data using a sequential sampling model of response time (RT) commonly used to elucidate aspects of cognition in binary perceptual decision making tasks: the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (LBA) model. Using a hierarchical Bayesian estimation method, we obtained group-level and individual-level estimates of LBA parameters on the facial emotion identification task. While the MDD and HCL groups did not differ in mean RT, accuracy, or group-level estimates of perceptual processing efficiency (i.e., drift rate parameter of the LBA), the MDD group showed significantly reduced responses in left fusiform gyrus compared to the HCL group during the facial emotion identification task. Furthermore, within the MDD group, fMRI signal in the left fusiform gyrus during affective face processing was significantly associated with greater individual-level estimates of perceptual processing efficiency. Our results therefore suggest that affective processing biases in adolescents with MDD are characterized by greater perceptual processing efficiency of affective visual information in sensory brain regions responsible for the early processing of visual information. The theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications of our results are discussed.

Fusiform Gyrus Dysfunction is Associated with Perceptual Processing Efficiency to Emotional Faces in Adolescent Depression: A Model-Based Approach

PubMed Central

Ho, Tiffany C.; Zhang, Shunan; Sacchet, Matthew D.; Weng, Helen; Connolly, Colm G.; Henje Blom, Eva; Han, Laura K. M.; Mobayed, Nisreen O.; Yang, Tony T.

2016-01-01

While the extant literature has focused on major depressive disorder (MDD) as being characterized by abnormalities in processing affective stimuli (e.g., facial expressions), little is known regarding which specific aspects of cognition influence the evaluation of affective stimuli, and what are the underlying neural correlates. To investigate these issues, we assessed 26 adolescents diagnosed with MDD and 37 well-matched healthy controls (HCL) who completed an emotion identification task of dynamically morphing faces during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We analyzed the behavioral data using a sequential sampling model of response time (RT) commonly used to elucidate aspects of cognition in binary perceptual decision making tasks: the Linear Ballistic Accumulator (LBA) model. Using a hierarchical Bayesian estimation method, we obtained group-level and individual-level estimates of LBA parameters on the facial emotion identification task. While the MDD and HCL groups did not differ in mean RT, accuracy, or group-level estimates of perceptual processing efficiency (i.e., drift rate parameter of the LBA), the MDD group showed significantly reduced responses in left fusiform gyrus compared to the HCL group during the facial emotion identification task. Furthermore, within the MDD group, fMRI signal in the left fusiform gyrus during affective face processing was significantly associated with greater individual-level estimates of perceptual processing efficiency. Our results therefore suggest that affective processing biases in adolescents with MDD are characterized by greater perceptual processing efficiency of affective visual information in sensory brain regions responsible for the early processing of visual information. The theoretical, methodological, and clinical implications of our results are discussed. PMID:26869950

A new mode of fear expression: perceptual bias in height fear.

PubMed

Teachman, Bethany A; Stefanucci, Jeanine K; Clerkin, Elise M; Cody, Meghan W; Proffitt, Dennis R

2008-04-01

Emotion and psychopathology researchers have described the fear response as consisting of four main components--subjective affect, physiology, cognition, and behavior. The current study provides evidence for an additional component in the domain of height fear (perception) and shows that it is distinct from measures of cognitive processing. Individuals High (N = 35) and Low (N = 36) in acrophobic symptoms looked over a two-story balcony ledge and estimated its vertical extent using a direct height estimation task (visual matching), and an indirect task (size estimation); the latter task seems to exhibit little influence from cognitive factors. In addition, implicit and explicit measures of cognitive processing were obtained. Results indicated that, as expected, the High Fear group showed greater relative, implicit height fear associations and explicit threat cognitions. Of primary interest, the High (compared to Low) Fear group estimated the vertical extent to be higher, and judged target sizes to be greater, even when controlling for the cognitive bias measures. These results suggest that emotional factors such as fear are related to perception. (Copyright) 2008 APA.

Measures of skin conductance and heart rate in alcoholic men and women during memory performance

PubMed Central

Poey, Alan; Ruiz, Susan Mosher; Marinkovic, Ksenija; Oscar-Berman, Marlene

2015-01-01

We examined abnormalities in physiological responses to emotional stimuli associated with long-term chronic alcoholism. Skin conductance responses (SCR) and heart rate (HR) responses were measured in 32 abstinent alcoholic (ALC) and 30 healthy nonalcoholic (NC) men and women undergoing an emotional memory task in an MRI scanner. The task required participants to remember the identity of two emotionally-valenced faces presented at the onset of each trial during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. After viewing the faces, participants saw a distractor image (an alcoholic beverage, nonalcoholic beverage, or scrambled image) followed by a single probe face. The task was to decide whether the probe face matched one of the two encoded faces. Skin conductance measurements (before and after the encoded faces, distractor, and probe) were obtained from electrodes on the index and middle fingers on the left hand. HR measurements (beats per minute before and after the encoded faces, distractor, and probe) were obtained by a pulse oximeter placed on the little finger on the left hand. We expected that, relative to NC participants, the ALC participants would show reduced SCR and HR responses to the face stimuli, and that we would identify greater reactivity to the alcoholic beverage stimuli than to the distractor stimuli unrelated to alcohol. While the beverage type did not differentiate the groups, the ALC group did have reduced skin conductance and HR responses to elements of the task, as compared to the NC group. PMID:26020002

Test-retest reliability and task order effects of emotional cognitive tests in healthy subjects.

PubMed

Adams, Thomas; Pounder, Zoe; Preston, Sally; Hanson, Andy; Gallagher, Peter; Harmer, Catherine J; McAllister-Williams, R Hamish

2016-11-01

Little is known of the retest reliability of emotional cognitive tasks or the impact of using different tasks employing similar emotional stimuli within a battery. We investigated this in healthy subjects. We found improved overall performance in an emotional attentional blink task (EABT) with repeat testing at one hour and one week compared to baseline, but the impact of an emotional stimulus on performance was unchanged. Similarly, performance on a facial expression recognition task (FERT) was better one week after a baseline test, though the relative effect of specific emotions was unaltered. There was no effect of repeat testing on an emotional word categorising, recall and recognition task. We found no difference in performance in the FERT and EABT irrespective of task order. We concluded that it is possible to use emotional cognitive tasks in longitudinal studies and combine tasks using emotional facial stimuli in a single battery.

Intact anger recognition in depression despite aberrant visual facial information usage.

PubMed

Clark, Cameron M; Chiu, Carina G; Diaz, Ruth L; Goghari, Vina M

2014-08-01

Previous literature has indicated abnormalities in facial emotion recognition abilities, as well as deficits in basic visual processes in major depression. However, the literature is unclear on a number of important factors including whether or not these abnormalities represent deficient or enhanced emotion recognition abilities compared to control populations, and the degree to which basic visual deficits might impact this process. The present study investigated emotion recognition abilities for angry versus neutral facial expressions in a sample of undergraduate students with Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) scores indicative of moderate depression (i.e., ≥20), compared to matched low-BDI-II score (i.e., ≤2) controls via the Bubbles Facial Emotion Perception Task. Results indicated unimpaired behavioural performance in discriminating angry from neutral expressions in the high depressive symptoms group relative to the minimal depressive symptoms group, despite evidence of an abnormal pattern of visual facial information usage. The generalizability of the current findings is limited by the highly structured nature of the facial emotion recognition task used, as well as the use of an analog sample undergraduates scoring high in self-rated symptoms of depression rather than a clinical sample. Our findings suggest that basic visual processes are involved in emotion recognition abnormalities in depression, demonstrating consistency with the emotion recognition literature in other psychopathologies (e.g., schizophrenia, autism, social anxiety). Future research should seek to replicate these findings in clinical populations with major depression, and assess the association between aberrant face gaze behaviours and symptom severity and social functioning. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Implicit reward associations impact face processing: Time-resolved evidence from event-related brain potentials and pupil dilations.

PubMed

Hammerschmidt, Wiebke; Kagan, Igor; Kulke, Louisa; Schacht, Annekathrin

2018-06-22

The present study aimed at investigating whether associated motivational salience causes preferential processing of inherently neutral faces similar to emotional expressions by means of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and changes of the pupil size. To this aim, neutral faces were implicitly associated with monetary outcome, while participants (N = 44) performed a masked prime face-matching task that ensured performance around chance level and thus an equal proportion of gain, loss, and zero outcomes. Motivational context strongly impacted the processing of the fixation, prime and mask stimuli prior to the target face, indicated by enhanced amplitudes of subsequent ERP components and increased pupil size. In a separate test session, previously associated faces as well as novel faces with emotional expressions were presented within the same task but without motivational context and performance feedback. Most importantly, previously gain-associated faces amplified the LPC, although the individually contingent face-outcome assignments were not made explicit during the learning session. Emotional expressions impacted the N170 and EPN components. Modulations of the pupil size were absent in both motivationally-associated and emotional conditions. Our findings demonstrate that neural representations of neutral stimuli can acquire increased salience via implicit learning, with an advantage for gain over loss associations. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc.

How specific are emotional deficits? A comparison of empathic abilities in schizophrenia, bipolar and depressed patients

PubMed Central

Derntl, Birgit; Seidel, Eva-Maria; Schneider, Frank; Habel, Ute

2012-01-01

Empathy is a rather elaborated human ability and several recent studies highlight significant impairments in patients suffering from psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or major depression. Therefore, the present study aimed at comparing behavioral empathy performance in schizophrenia, bipolar and depressed patients with healthy controls. All subjects performed three tasks tapping the core components of empathy: emotion recognition, emotional perspective taking and affective responsiveness. Groups were matched for age, gender, and verbal intelligence. Data analysis revealed three main findings: First, schizophrenia patients showed the strongest impairment in empathic performance followed by bipolar patients while depressed patients performed similar to controls in most tasks, except for affective responsiveness. Second, a significant association between clinical characteristics and empathy performance was only apparent in depression, indicating worse affective responsiveness with stronger symptom severity and longer duration of illness. Third, self-report data indicate that particularly bipolar patients describe themselves as less empathic, reporting less empathic concern and less perspective taking. Taken together, this study constitutes the first approach to directly compare specificity of empathic deficits in severe psychiatric disorders. Our results suggest disorder-specific impairments in emotional competencies that enable better characterization of the patient groups investigated and indicate different psychotherapeutic interventions. PMID:23116884

Impairment in the recognition of emotion across different media following traumatic brain injury.

PubMed

Williams, Claire; Wood, Rodger Ll

2010-02-01

The current study examined emotion recognition following traumatic brain injury (TBI) and examined whether performance differed according to the affective valence and type of media presentation of the stimuli. A total of 64 patients with TBI and matched controls completed the Emotion Evaluation Test (EET) and Ekman 60 Faces Test (E-60-FT). Patients with TBI also completed measures of information processing and verbal ability. Results revealed that the TBI group were significantly impaired compared to controls when recognizing emotion on the EET and E-60-FT. A significant main effect of valence was found in both groups, with poor recognition of negative emotions. However, the difference between the recognition of positive and negative emotions was larger in the TBI group. The TBI group were also more accurate recognizing emotion displayed in audiovisual media (EET) than that displayed in still media (E-60-FT). No significant relationship was obtained between emotion recognition tasks and information-processing speed. A significant positive relationship was found between the E-60-FT and one measure of verbal ability. These findings support models of emotion that specify separate neurological pathways for certain emotions and different media and confirm that patients with TBI are vulnerable to experiencing emotion recognition difficulties.

Tryptophan depletion decreases the recognition of fear in female volunteers.

PubMed

Harmer, C J; Rogers, R D; Tunbridge, E; Cowen, P J; Goodwin, G M

2003-06-01

Serotonergic processes have been implicated in the modulation of fear conditioning in humans, postulated to occur at the level of the amygdala. The processing of other fear-relevant cues, such as facial expressions, has also been associated with amygdala function, but an effect of serotonin depletion on these processes has not been assessed. The present study investigated the effects of reducing serotonin function, using acute tryptophan depletion, on the recognition of basic facial expressions of emotions in healthy male and female volunteers. A double-blind between-groups design was used, with volunteers being randomly allocated to receive an amino acid drink specifically lacking tryptophan or a control mixture containing a balanced mixture of these amino acids. Participants were given a facial expression recognition task 5 h after drink administration. This task featured examples of six basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness and happiness) that had been morphed between each full emotion and neutral in 10% steps. As a control, volunteers were given a famous face classification task matched in terms of response selection and difficulty level. Tryptophan depletion significantly impaired the recognition of fearful facial expressions in female, but not male, volunteers. This was specific since recognition of other basic emotions was comparable in the two groups. There was also no effect of tryptophan depletion on the classification of famous faces or on subjective state ratings of mood or anxiety. These results confirm a role for serotonin in the processing of fear related cues, and in line with previous findings also suggest greater effects of tryptophan depletion in female volunteers. Although acute tryptophan depletion does not typically affect mood in healthy subjects, the present results suggest that subtle changes in the processing of emotional material may occur with this manipulation of serotonin function.

Subthalamic nucleus stimulation impairs emotional conflict adaptation in Parkinson's disease.

PubMed

Irmen, Friederike; Huebl, Julius; Schroll, Henning; Brücke, Christof; Schneider, Gerd-Helge; Hamker, Fred H; Kühn, Andrea A

2017-10-01

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) occupies a strategic position in the motor network, slowing down responses in situations with conflicting perceptual input. Recent evidence suggests a role of the STN in emotion processing through strong connections with emotion recognition structures. As deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the STN in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) inhibits monitoring of perceptual and value-based conflict, STN DBS may also interfere with emotional conflict processing. To assess a possible interference of STN DBS with emotional conflict processing, we used an emotional Stroop paradigm. Subjects categorized face stimuli according to their emotional expression while ignoring emotionally congruent or incongruent superimposed word labels. Eleven PD patients ON and OFF STN DBS and eleven age-matched healthy subjects conducted the task. We found conflict-induced response slowing in healthy controls and PD patients OFF DBS, but not ON DBS, suggesting STN DBS to decrease adaptation to within-trial conflict. OFF DBS, patients showed more conflict-induced slowing for negative conflict stimuli, which was diminished by STN DBS. Computational modelling of STN influence on conflict adaptation disclosed DBS to interfere via increased baseline activity. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press.

Age-related emotional bias in processing two emotionally valenced tasks.

PubMed

Allen, Philip A; Lien, Mei-Ching; Jardin, Elliott

2017-01-01

Previous studies suggest that older adults process positive emotions more efficiently than negative emotions, whereas younger adults show the reverse effect. We examined whether this age-related difference in emotional bias still occurs when attention is engaged in two emotional tasks. We used a psychological refractory period paradigm and varied the emotional valence of Task 1 and Task 2. In both experiments, Task 1 was emotional face discrimination (happy vs. angry faces) and Task 2 was sound discrimination (laugh, punch, vs. cork pop in Experiment 1 and laugh vs. scream in Experiment 2). The backward emotional correspondence effect for positively and negatively valenced Task 2 on Task 1 was measured. In both experiments, younger adults showed a backward correspondence effect from a negatively valenced Task 2, suggesting parallel processing of negatively valenced stimuli. Older adults showed similar negativity bias in Experiment 2 with a more salient negative sound ("scream" relative to "punch"). These results are consistent with an arousal-bias competition model [Mather and Sutherland (Perspectives in Psychological Sciences 6:114-133, 2011)], suggesting that emotional arousal modulates top-down attentional control settings (emotional regulation) with age.

Visual search and emotion: how children with autism spectrum disorders scan emotional scenes.

PubMed

Maccari, Lisa; Pasini, Augusto; Caroli, Emanuela; Rosa, Caterina; Marotta, Andrea; Martella, Diana; Fuentes, Luis J; Casagrande, Maria

2014-11-01

This study assessed visual search abilities, tested through the flicker task, in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Twenty-two children diagnosed with ASD and 22 matched typically developing (TD) children were told to detect changes in objects of central interest or objects of marginal interest (MI) embedded in either emotion-laden (positive or negative) or neutral real-world pictures. The results showed that emotion-laden pictures equally interfered with performance of both ASD and TD children, slowing down reaction times compared with neutral pictures. Children with ASD were faster than TD children, particularly in detecting changes in MI objects, the most difficult condition. However, their performance was less accurate than performance of TD children just when the pictures were negative. These findings suggest that children with ASD have better visual search abilities than TD children only when the search is particularly difficult and requires strong serial search strategies. The emotional-social impairment that is usually considered as a typical feature of ASD seems to be limited to processing of negative emotional information.

Setting the Alarm: Word Emotional Attributes Require Consolidation to be Operational.

PubMed

Dumay, Nicolas; Sharma, Dinkar; Kellen, Nora; Abdelrahim, Sarah

2018-01-25

Demonstrations of emotional Stroop in conditioned made-up words are flawed because of the lack of task ensuring similar word encoding across conditions. Here, participants were trained on associations between made-up words (e.g., 'drott') and pictures with an alarming or neutral content (e.g., 'a dead sheep' vs. 'a munching cow') in a situation that required attention to both ends of each association. To test whether word emotional attributes need to consolidate before they can hijack attention, one set of associations was learned seven days before the test, whereas the other set was learned either six hrs or immediately before the test. The novel words' ability to evoke their emotional attributes was assessed by using both Stroop and an auditory analogue called pause detection. Matching words and pictures was harder for alarming associations. However, similar learning rate and forgetting at seven days were observed for both types of associations. Pause detection revealed no emotion effect for same-day (i.e., unconsolidated) associations, but robust interference for seven-day-old (i.e., consolidated) alarming associations. Attention capture was found in the emotional Stroop as well, though only when trial n-1 referred to a same-day association. This task also showed stronger response repetition priming (independently of emotion) when trials n and n-1 both tapped into seven-day-old associations. Word emotional attributes hence take between six hrs and seven days to be operational. Moreover, age interactions between consecutive trials can be used to gauge implicitly the indirect (relational) episodic associations that develop in the meantime between the memories of individual items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search.

PubMed

Dodd, Helen F; Vogt, Julia; Turkileri, Nilgun; Notebaert, Lies

2017-01-01

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

No differences in emotion recognition strategies in children with autism spectrum disorder: evidence from hybrid faces.

PubMed

Evers, Kris; Kerkhof, Inneke; Steyaert, Jean; Noens, Ilse; Wagemans, Johan

2014-01-01

Emotion recognition problems are frequently reported in individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, this research area is characterized by inconsistent findings, with atypical emotion processing strategies possibly contributing to existing contradictions. In addition, an attenuated saliency of the eyes region is often demonstrated in ASD during face identity processing. We wanted to compare reliance on mouth versus eyes information in children with and without ASD, using hybrid facial expressions. A group of six-to-eight-year-old boys with ASD and an age- and intelligence-matched typically developing (TD) group without intellectual disability performed an emotion labelling task with hybrid facial expressions. Five static expressions were used: one neutral expression and four emotional expressions, namely, anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. Hybrid faces were created, consisting of an emotional face half (upper or lower face region) with the other face half showing a neutral expression. Results showed no emotion recognition problem in ASD. Moreover, we provided evidence for the existence of top- and bottom-emotions in children: correct identification of expressions mainly depends on information in the eyes (so-called top-emotions: happiness) or in the mouth region (so-called bottom-emotions: sadness, anger, and fear). No stronger reliance on mouth information was found in children with ASD.

Family environment influences emotion recognition following paediatric traumatic brain injury.

PubMed

Schmidt, Adam T; Orsten, Kimberley D; Hanten, Gerri R; Li, Xiaoqi; Levin, Harvey S

2010-01-01

This study investigated the relationship between family functioning and performance on two tasks of emotion recognition (emotional prosody and face emotion recognition) and a cognitive control procedure (the Flanker task) following paediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) or orthopaedic injury (OI). A total of 142 children (75 TBI, 67 OI) were assessed on three occasions: baseline, 3 months and 1 year post-injury on the two emotion recognition tasks and the Flanker task. Caregivers also completed the Life Stressors and Resources Scale (LISRES) on each occasion. Growth curve analysis was used to analyse the data. Results indicated that family functioning influenced performance on the emotional prosody and Flanker tasks but not on the face emotion recognition task. Findings on both the emotional prosody and Flanker tasks were generally similar across groups. However, financial resources emerged as significantly related to emotional prosody performance in the TBI group only (p = 0.0123). Findings suggest family functioning variables--especially financial resources--can influence performance on an emotional processing task following TBI in children.

Flexible and inflexible task sets: asymmetric interference when switching between emotional expression, sex, and age classification of perceived faces.

PubMed

Schuch, Stefanie; Werheid, Katja; Koch, Iring

2012-01-01

The present study investigated whether the processing characteristics of categorizing emotional facial expressions are different from those of categorizing facial age and sex information. Given that emotions change rapidly, it was hypothesized that processing facial expressions involves a more flexible task set that causes less between-task interference than the task sets involved in processing age or sex of a face. Participants switched between three tasks: categorizing a face as looking happy or angry (emotion task), young or old (age task), and male or female (sex task). Interference between tasks was measured by global interference and response interference. Both measures revealed patterns of asymmetric interference. Global between-task interference was reduced when a task was mixed with the emotion task. Response interference, as measured by congruency effects, was larger for the emotion task than for the nonemotional tasks. The results support the idea that processing emotional facial expression constitutes a more flexible task set that causes less interference (i.e., task-set "inertia") than processing the age or sex of a face.

Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision.

PubMed

Gosselin, Nathalie; Peretz, Isabelle; Noulhiane, Marion; Hasboun, Dominique; Beckett, Christine; Baulac, Michel; Samson, Séverine

2005-03-01

Music constitutes an ideal means to create a sense of suspense in films. However, there has been minimal investigation into the underlying cerebral organization for perceiving danger created by music. In comparison, the amygdala's role in recognition of fear in non-musical contexts has been well established. The present study sought to fill this gap in exploring how patients with amygdala resection recognize emotional expression in music. To this aim, we tested 16 patients with left (LTR; n = 8) or right (RTR; n = 8) medial temporal resection (including amygdala) for the relief of medically intractable seizures and 16 matched controls in an emotion recognition task involving instrumental music. The musical selections were purposely created to induce fear, peacefulness, happiness and sadness. Participants were asked to rate to what extent each musical passage expressed these four emotions on 10-point scales. In order to check for the presence of a perceptual problem, the same musical selections were presented to the participants in an error detection task. None of the patients was found to perform below controls in the perceptual task. In contrast, both LTR and RTR patients were found to be impaired in the recognition of scary music. Recognition of happy and sad music was normal. These findings suggest that the anteromedial temporal lobe (including the amygdala) plays a role in the recognition of danger in a musical context.

Attentional biases and memory for emotional stimuli in men and male rhesus monkeys.

PubMed

Lacreuse, Agnès; Schatz, Kelly; Strazzullo, Sarah; King, Hanna M; Ready, Rebecca

2013-11-01

We examined attentional biases for social and non-social emotional stimuli in young adult men and compared the results to those of male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) previously tested in a similar dot-probe task (King et al. in Psychoneuroendocrinology 37(3):396-409, 2012). Recognition memory for these stimuli was also analyzed in each species, using a recognition memory task in humans and a delayed non-matching-to-sample task in monkeys. We found that both humans and monkeys displayed a similar pattern of attentional biases toward threatening facial expressions of conspecifics. The bias was significant in monkeys and of marginal significance in humans. In addition, humans, but not monkeys, exhibited an attentional bias away from negative non-social images. Attentional biases for social and non-social threat differed significantly, with both species showing a pattern of vigilance toward negative social images and avoidance of negative non-social images. Positive stimuli did not elicit significant attentional biases for either species. In humans, emotional content facilitated the recognition of non-social images, but no effect of emotion was found for the recognition of social images. Recognition accuracy was not affected by emotion in monkeys, but response times were faster for negative relative to positive images. Altogether, these results suggest shared mechanisms of social attention in humans and monkeys, with both species showing a pattern of selective attention toward threatening faces of conspecifics. These data are consistent with the view that selective vigilance to social threat is the result of evolutionary constraints. Yet, selective attention to threat was weaker in humans than in monkeys, suggesting that regulatory mechanisms enable non-anxious humans to reduce sensitivity to social threat in this paradigm, likely through enhanced prefrontal control and reduced amygdala activation. In addition, the findings emphasize important differences in attentional biases to social versus non-social threat in both species. Differences in the impact of emotional stimuli on recognition memory between monkeys and humans will require further study, as methodological differences in the recognition tasks may have affected the results.

Emotional memory and perception in temporal lobectomy patients with amygdala damage.

PubMed

Brierley, B; Medford, N; Shaw, P; David, A S

2004-04-01

The human amygdala is implicated in the formation of emotional memories and the perception of emotional stimuli--particularly fear--across various modalities. To discern the extent to which these functions are related. 28 patients who had anterior temporal lobectomy (13 left and 15 right) for intractable epilepsy were recruited. Structural magnetic resonance imaging showed that three of them had atrophy of their remaining amygdala. All participants were given tests of affect perception from facial and vocal expressions and of emotional memory, using a standard narrative test and a novel test of word recognition. The results were standardised against matched healthy controls. Performance on all emotion tasks in patients with unilateral lobectomy ranged from unimpaired to moderately impaired. Perception of emotions in faces and voices was (with exceptions) significantly positively correlated, indicating multimodal emotional processing. However, there was no correlation between the subjects' performance on tests of emotional memory and perception. Several subjects showed strong emotional memory enhancement but poor fear perception. Patients with bilateral amygdala damage had greater impairment, particularly on the narrative test of emotional memory, one showing superior fear recognition but absent memory enhancement. Bilateral amygdala damage is particularly disruptive of emotional memory processes in comparison with unilateral temporal lobectomy. On a cognitive level, the pattern of results implies that perception of emotional expressions and emotional memory are supported by separate processing systems or streams.

Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect

PubMed Central

Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) is also involved in these processes. According to the hierarchy model, emotions are considered organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy, in which emotion prototypes are organized following affective valence. By controlling different congruencies of emotion relations (i.e., matches or mismatches between valences and prototypes of emotion), the present study showed both an evaluative congruency effect (Experiment 1) and a discrete emotional congruency effect (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that not only affective valences but also discrete emotions can be activated under the present priming lexical decision task. However, the present findings also suggest that discrete emotions might be activated at the later priming stage as compared to valences. The present work provides evidence that information about discrete emotion could be involved in word processing. This might be a result of subjects’ embodied experiences. PMID:27379000

Is Accessing of Words Affected by Affective Valence Only? A Discrete Emotion View on the Emotional Congruency Effect.

PubMed

Chen, Xuqian; Liu, Bo; Lin, Shouwen

2016-01-01

This paper advances the discussion on which emotion information affects word accessing. Emotion information, which is formed as a result of repeated experiences, is primary and necessary in learning and representing word meanings. Previous findings suggested that valence (i.e., positive or negative) denoted by words can be automatically activated and plays a role in many significant cognitive processes. However, there has been a lack of discussion about whether discrete emotion information (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) is also involved in these processes. According to the hierarchy model, emotions are considered organized within an abstract-to-concrete hierarchy, in which emotion prototypes are organized following affective valence. By controlling different congruencies of emotion relations (i.e., matches or mismatches between valences and prototypes of emotion), the present study showed both an evaluative congruency effect (Experiment 1) and a discrete emotional congruency effect (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that not only affective valences but also discrete emotions can be activated under the present priming lexical decision task. However, the present findings also suggest that discrete emotions might be activated at the later priming stage as compared to valences. The present work provides evidence that information about discrete emotion could be involved in word processing. This might be a result of subjects' embodied experiences.

Prolonged hemodynamic response during incidental facial emotion processing in inter-episode bipolar I disorder.

PubMed

Rosenfeld, Ethan S; Pearlson, Godfrey D; Sweeney, John A; Tamminga, Carol A; Keshavan, Matcheri S; Nonterah, Camilla; Stevens, Michael C

2014-03-01

This fMRI study examined whether hemodynamic responses to affectively-salient stimuli were abnormally prolonged in remitted bipolar disorder, possibly representing a novel illness biomarker. A group of 18 DSM-IV bipolar I-diagnosed adults in remission and a demographically-matched control group performed an event-related fMRI gender-discrimination task in which face stimuli had task-irrelevant neutral, happy or angry expressions designed to elicit incidental emotional processing. Participants' brain activation was modeled using a "fully informed" SPM5 basis set. Mixed-model ANOVA tested for diagnostic group differences in BOLD response amplitude and shape within brain regions-of-interest selected from ALE meta-analysis of previous comparable fMRI studies. Bipolar-diagnosed patients had a generally longer duration and/or later-peaking hemodynamic response in amygdala and numerous prefrontal cortex brain regions. Data are consistent with existing models of bipolar limbic hyperactivity, but the prolonged frontolimbic response more precisely details abnormalities recognized in previous studies. Prolonged hemodynamic responses were unrelated to stimulus type, task performance, or degree of residual mood symptoms, suggesting an important novel trait vulnerability brain dysfunction in bipolar disorder. Bipolar patients also failed to engage pregenual cingulate and left orbitofrontal cortex-regions important to models of automatic emotion regulation-while engaging a delayed dorsolateral prefrontal cortex response not seen in controls. These results raise questions about whether there are meaningful relationships between bipolar dysfunction of specific ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions believed to automatically regulate emotional reactions and the prolonged responses in more lateral aspects of prefrontal cortex.

SA54. The Structure of Embodied Emotions in Schizophrenia

PubMed Central

Hong, Seok Jin; Snodgress, Matthew A.; Nichols, Heathman S.; Nummenmaa, Lauri; Glerean, Enrico; Park, Sohee

2017-01-01

Abstract Background: Past research suggests a disconnection between experienced emotions and bodily sensations in individuals with schizophrenia (SZ), but mechanisms underlying abnormal embodiment of emotions in SZ are unknown. There might be an overall reduction in emotion-related bodily sensations, but it is also possible that the spatial distribution of bodily sensations associated with emotions may be altered in SZ. We hypothesized the presence of a more coherent underlying structure giving rise to embodied emotions in healthy controls (HC) compared to SZ. Methods: Fifteen SZ and 15 demographically matched HC (bootstrapped from a possible 300 HC) were asked to complete the emBODY task (Nummenmaa et al., 2014). In the emBODY task, participants were asked to shade in where they felt sensations (activation and deactivation) on the outline of a human body when presented with an emotion word. Fourteen emotion words were presented sequentially. From activation and deactivation data, body maps of emotions were generated and 2 separate principal components analyses (PCA) were conducted, one for each group to determine the multivariate structure of embodied emotions. Results: The pattern of principal components for HC differed significantly from that of the SZ group. SZ showed more diffuse components with lesser magnitude than the HC. Moreover, the variance that accounts for these dimensions was significantly reduced for SZ. This suggests anomalous embodied emotion in SZ. In this PCA framework, a particular set of innate constructs is thought to yield the activation and deactivation maps of emotions on the body. Our results imply that the complexity of this set in SZ is highly deviant from that of the HC. Conclusion: Quantitative modeling of the underlying structure of self-reported embodied emotion provided novel insight into altered emotional experience in SZ. Our findings illustrate radically different bodily maps of emotions in SZ compared to HC. Bodily sensations are not only different in intensity but also in where they are felt in SZ. While an important first step, our analysis was exploratory and limited by the small sample size. Future direction includes probing the specific contents of the underlying dimensions that give rise to embodied emotions.

Quantifying deficits in the perception of fear and anger in morphed facial expressions after bilateral amygdala damage.

PubMed

Graham, Reiko; Devinsky, Orrin; Labar, Kevin S

2007-01-07

Amygdala damage has been associated with impairments in perceiving facial expressions of fear. However, deficits in perceiving other emotions, such as anger, and deficits in perceiving emotion blends have not been definitively established. One possibility is that methods used to index expression perception are susceptible to heuristic use, which may obscure impairments. To examine this, we adapted a task used to examine categorical perception of morphed facial expressions [Etcoff, N. L., & Magee, J. J. (1992). Categorical perception of facial expressions. Cognition, 44(3), 227-240]. In one version of the task, expressions were categorized with unlimited time constraints. In the other, expressions were presented with limited exposure durations to tap more automatic aspects of processing. Three morph progressions were employed: neutral to anger, neutral to fear, and fear to anger. Both tasks were administered to a participant with bilateral amygdala damage (S.P.), age- and education-matched controls, and young controls. The second task was also administered to unilateral temporal lobectomy patients. In the first version, S.P. showed impairments relative to normal controls on the neutral-to-anger and fear-to-anger morphs, but not on the neutral-to-fear morph. However, reaction times suggested that speed-accuracy tradeoffs could account for results. In the second version, S.P. showed impairments on all morph types relative to all other subject groups. A third experiment showed that this deficit did not extend to the perception of morphed identities. These results imply that when heuristics use is discouraged on tasks utilizing subtle emotion transitions, deficits in the perception of anger and anger/fear blends, as well as fear, are evident with bilateral amygdala damage.

Emotion-motion interactions in conversion disorder: an FMRI study.

PubMed

Aybek, Selma; Nicholson, Timothy R; O'Daly, Owen; Zelaya, Fernando; Kanaan, Richard A; David, Anthony S

2015-01-01

To evaluate the neural correlates of implicit processing of negative emotions in motor conversion disorder (CD) patients. An event related fMRI task was completed by 12 motor CD patients and 14 matched healthy controls using standardised stimuli of faces with fearful and sad emotional expressions in comparison to faces with neutral expressions. Temporal changes in the sensitivity to stimuli were also modelled and tested in the two groups. We found increased amygdala activation to negative emotions in CD compared to healthy controls in region of interest analyses, which persisted over time consistent with previous findings using emotional paradigms. Furthermore during whole brain analyses we found significantly increased activation in CD patients in areas involved in the 'freeze response' to fear (periaqueductal grey matter), and areas involved in self-awareness and motor control (cingulate gyrus and supplementary motor area). In contrast to healthy controls, CD patients exhibited increased response amplitude to fearful stimuli over time, suggesting abnormal emotional regulation (failure of habituation / sensitization). Patients with CD also activated midbrain and frontal structures that could reflect an abnormal behavioral-motor response to negative including threatening stimuli. This suggests a mechanism linking emotions to motor dysfunction in CD.

Theory of Mind and Emotional Functioning in Fibromyalgia Syndrome: An Investigation of the Relationship between Social Cognition and Executive Function

PubMed Central

Di Tella, Marialaura; Castelli, Lorys; Colonna, Fabrizio; Fusaro, Enrico; Torta, Riccardo; Ardito, Rita B.; Adenzato, Mauro

2015-01-01

Background Fibromyalgia (FM) is a syndrome primarily characterised by chronic, widespread musculoskeletal pain. In the aetiology of this syndrome a crucial role is played by complex interactions among biological, genetic, psychological, and socio-cultural factors. Recently, researchers have started to explore emotional functioning in FM, with their attention focused on alexithymia, a personality construct that affects the regulation of a person’s own emotions. On the other hand, the detection and experience of emotional signals from other people have only been sparsely investigated in FM syndrome and no studies have investigated the ability to represent other people’s mental states (i.e. Theory of Mind, ToM) in these patients. Here we present the first study investigating a large set of social-cognitive abilities, and the possible relationships between these abilities and the performance on executive-function tasks, in a homogenous sample of patients with FM. Methodology Forty women with FM and forty-one healthy women matched for education and age were involved in the study. Social cognition was assessed with a set of validated experimental tasks. Measures of executive function were used to test the correlations between this dimension and the social-cognitive profile of patients with FM. Relationships between social-cognitive abilities and demographic, clinical and psychological variables were also investigated. Principal Findings Patients with FM have impairments both in the regulation of their own affect and in the recognition of other’s emotions, as well as in representing other people’s mental states. No significant correlations were found between social cognition tasks and the subcomponents of the executive function that were analysed. Conclusions The results show the presence of several impairments in social cognition skills in patients with FM, which are largely independent of both executive function deficits and symptoms of psychological distress. The impairments reported highlight the importance of adequately assessing ToM and emotional functioning in clinical practice. PMID:25594169

Theory of mind and emotional functioning in fibromyalgia syndrome: an investigation of the relationship between social cognition and executive function.

PubMed

Di Tella, Marialaura; Castelli, Lorys; Colonna, Fabrizio; Fusaro, Enrico; Torta, Riccardo; Ardito, Rita B; Adenzato, Mauro

2015-01-01

Fibromyalgia (FM) is a syndrome primarily characterised by chronic, widespread musculoskeletal pain. In the aetiology of this syndrome a crucial role is played by complex interactions among biological, genetic, psychological, and socio-cultural factors. Recently, researchers have started to explore emotional functioning in FM, with their attention focused on alexithymia, a personality construct that affects the regulation of a person's own emotions. On the other hand, the detection and experience of emotional signals from other people have only been sparsely investigated in FM syndrome and no studies have investigated the ability to represent other people's mental states (i.e. Theory of Mind, ToM) in these patients. Here we present the first study investigating a large set of social-cognitive abilities, and the possible relationships between these abilities and the performance on executive-function tasks, in a homogenous sample of patients with FM. Forty women with FM and forty-one healthy women matched for education and age were involved in the study. Social cognition was assessed with a set of validated experimental tasks. Measures of executive function were used to test the correlations between this dimension and the social-cognitive profile of patients with FM. Relationships between social-cognitive abilities and demographic, clinical and psychological variables were also investigated. Patients with FM have impairments both in the regulation of their own affect and in the recognition of other's emotions, as well as in representing other people's mental states. No significant correlations were found between social cognition tasks and the subcomponents of the executive function that were analysed. The results show the presence of several impairments in social cognition skills in patients with FM, which are largely independent of both executive function deficits and symptoms of psychological distress. The impairments reported highlight the importance of adequately assessing ToM and emotional functioning in clinical practice.

Specific Patterns of Emotion Recognition from Faces in Children with ASD: Results of a Cross-Modal Matching Paradigm

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Golan, Ofer; Gordon, Ilanit; Fichman, Keren; Keinan, Giora

2018-01-01

Children with ASD show emotion recognition difficulties, as part of their social communication deficits. We examined facial emotion recognition (FER) in intellectually disabled children with ASD and in younger typically developing (TD) controls, matched on mental age. Our emotion-matching paradigm employed three different modalities: facial, vocal…

Emotion Recognition and Perspective Taking: A Comparison between Typical and Incarcerated Male Adolescents

PubMed Central

Morosan, Larisa; Badoud, Deborah; Zaharia, Alexandra; Brosch, Tobias; Eliez, Stephan; Bateman, Anthony; Heller, Patrick; Debbané, Martin

2017-01-01

Background Previous research suggests that antisocial individuals present impairment in social cognitive processing, more specifically in emotion recognition (ER) and perspective taking (PT). The first aim of the present study was to investigate the recognition of a wide range of emotional expressions and visual PT capacities in a group of incarcerated male adolescents in comparison to a matched group of community adolescents. Secondly, we sought to explore the relationship between these two mechanisms in relation to psychopathic traits. Methods Forty-five male adolescents (22 incarcerated adolescents (Mage = 16.52, SD = 0.96) and 23 community adolescents (Mage = 16.43, SD = 1.41)) participated in the study. ER abilities were measured using a dynamic and multimodal task that requires the participants to watch short videos in which trained actors express 14 emotions. PT capacities were examined using a task recognized and proven to be sensitive to adolescent development, where participants had to follow the directions of another person whilst taking into consideration his perspective. Results We found a main effect of group on emotion recognition scores. In comparison to the community adolescents, the incarcerated adolescents presented lower recognition of three emotions: interest, anxiety and amusement. Analyses also revealed significant impairments in PT capacities in incarcerated adolescents. In addition, incarcerated adolescents’ PT scores were uniquely correlated to their scores on recognition of interest. Conclusions The results corroborate previously reported impairments in ER and PT capacities, in the incarcerated adolescents. The study also indicates an association between impairments in the recognition of interest and impairments in PT. PMID:28122048

Family environment influences emotion recognition following paediatric traumatic brain injury

PubMed Central

SCHMIDT, ADAM T.; ORSTEN, KIMBERLEY D.; HANTEN, GERRI R.; LI, XIAOQI; LEVIN, HARVEY S.

2011-01-01

Objective This study investigated the relationship between family functioning and performance on two tasks of emotion recognition (emotional prosody and face emotion recognition) and a cognitive control procedure (the Flanker task) following paediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) or orthopaedic injury (OI). Methods A total of 142 children (75 TBI, 67 OI) were assessed on three occasions: baseline, 3 months and 1 year post-injury on the two emotion recognition tasks and the Flanker task. Caregivers also completed the Life Stressors and Resources Scale (LISRES) on each occasion. Growth curve analysis was used to analyse the data. Results Results indicated that family functioning influenced performance on the emotional prosody and Flanker tasks but not on the face emotion recognition task. Findings on both the emotional prosody and Flanker tasks were generally similar across groups. However, financial resources emerged as significantly related to emotional prosody performance in the TBI group only (p = 0.0123). Conclusions Findings suggest family functioning variables—especially financial resources—can influence performance on an emotional processing task following TBI in children. PMID:21058900

Mentalization of complex emotions in borderline personality disorder: The impact of parenting and exposure to trauma on the performance in a novel cartoon-based task.

PubMed

Brüne, Martin; Walden, Sarah; Edel, Marc-Andreas; Dimaggio, Giancarlo

2016-01-01

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by a range of interpersonal difficulties, which are, in part, related to adverse experiences during childhood. Unresponsive parenting and traumatization may cause functional impairment of mentalization, i.e. the ability to reflect upon own and others' mental states. However, the relationship of poor parenting, trauma and mentalization in BPD has not exhaustively been studied. Thirty patients diagnosed with BPD and 30 matched control subjects were asked to sequence a novel cartoon-based mentalization task involving complex emotions such as jealousy, shame, guilt etc. In addition, they were required to reason about cognitive and affective mental states of the cartoon characters. The quality of parental care was assessed using a self-report measure for recalled parental rearing style, and childhood trauma was measured in retrospect using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. Patients with BPD performed more poorly in all aspects of the cartoon task. Mentalizing skills, particularly relating to affective mental states, were uniquely associated with the quality of recalled parental care and childhood trauma. Together, the quality of parental care and the experience of childhood trauma negatively impact on mentalization in BPD, even in an experimental "offline" task. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Individual differences in emotion processing: how similar are diffusion model parameters across tasks?

PubMed

Mueller, Christina J; White, Corey N; Kuchinke, Lars

2017-11-27

The goal of this study was to replicate findings of diffusion model parameters capturing emotion effects in a lexical decision task and investigating whether these findings extend to other tasks of implicit emotion processing. Additionally, we were interested in the stability of diffusion model parameters across emotional stimuli and tasks for individual subjects. Responses to words in a lexical decision task were compared with responses to faces in a gender categorization task for stimuli of the emotion categories: happy, neutral and fear. Main effects of emotion as well as stability of emerging response style patterns as evident in diffusion model parameters across these tasks were analyzed. Based on earlier findings, drift rates were assumed to be more similar in response to stimuli of the same emotion category compared to stimuli of a different emotion category. Results showed that emotion effects of the tasks differed with a processing advantage for happy followed by neutral and fear-related words in the lexical decision task and a processing advantage for neutral followed by happy and fearful faces in the gender categorization task. Both emotion effects were captured in estimated drift rate parameters-and in case of the lexical decision task also in the non-decision time parameters. A principal component analysis showed that contrary to our hypothesis drift rates were more similar within a specific task context than within a specific emotion category. Individual response patterns of subjects across tasks were evident in significant correlations regarding diffusion model parameters including response styles, non-decision times and information accumulation.

Independence of Hot and Cold Executive Function Deficits in High-Functioning Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

PubMed

Zimmerman, David L; Ownsworth, Tamara; O'Donovan, Analise; Roberts, Jacqueline; Gullo, Matthew J

2016-01-01

Individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) display diverse deficits in social, cognitive and behavioral functioning. To date, there has been mixed findings on the profile of executive function deficits for high-functioning adults (IQ > 70) with ASD. A conceptual distinction is commonly made between "cold" and "hot" executive functions. Cold executive functions refer to mechanistic higher-order cognitive operations (e.g., working memory), whereas hot executive functions entail cognitive abilities supported by emotional awareness and social perception (e.g., social cognition). This study aimed to determine the independence of deficits in hot and cold executive functions for high-functioning adults with ASD. Forty-two adults with ASD (64% male, aged 18-66 years) and 40 age and gender matched controls were administered The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT; emotion recognition and social inference), Letter Number Sequencing (working memory) and Hayling Sentence Completion Test (response initiation and suppression). Between-group analyses identified that the ASD group performed significantly worse than matched controls on all measures of cold and hot executive functions (d = 0.54 - 1.5). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that the ASD sample performed more poorly on emotion recognition and social inference tasks than matched controls after controlling for cold executive functions and employment status. The findings also indicated that the ability to recognize emotions and make social inferences was supported by working memory and response initiation and suppression processes. Overall, this study supports the distinction between hot and cold executive function impairments for adults with ASD. Moreover, it advances understanding of higher-order impairments underlying social interaction difficulties for this population which, in turn, may assist with diagnosis and inform intervention programs.

Independence of Hot and Cold Executive Function Deficits in High-Functioning Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PubMed Central

Zimmerman, David L.; Ownsworth, Tamara; O'Donovan, Analise; Roberts, Jacqueline; Gullo, Matthew J.

2016-01-01

Individuals with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) display diverse deficits in social, cognitive and behavioral functioning. To date, there has been mixed findings on the profile of executive function deficits for high-functioning adults (IQ > 70) with ASD. A conceptual distinction is commonly made between “cold” and “hot” executive functions. Cold executive functions refer to mechanistic higher-order cognitive operations (e.g., working memory), whereas hot executive functions entail cognitive abilities supported by emotional awareness and social perception (e.g., social cognition). This study aimed to determine the independence of deficits in hot and cold executive functions for high-functioning adults with ASD. Forty-two adults with ASD (64% male, aged 18–66 years) and 40 age and gender matched controls were administered The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT; emotion recognition and social inference), Letter Number Sequencing (working memory) and Hayling Sentence Completion Test (response initiation and suppression). Between-group analyses identified that the ASD group performed significantly worse than matched controls on all measures of cold and hot executive functions (d = 0.54 − 1.5). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that the ASD sample performed more poorly on emotion recognition and social inference tasks than matched controls after controlling for cold executive functions and employment status. The findings also indicated that the ability to recognize emotions and make social inferences was supported by working memory and response initiation and suppression processes. Overall, this study supports the distinction between hot and cold executive function impairments for adults with ASD. Moreover, it advances understanding of higher-order impairments underlying social interaction difficulties for this population which, in turn, may assist with diagnosis and inform intervention programs. PMID:26903836

Accuracy of emotion labeling in children of parents diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Hanford, Lindsay C; Sassi, Roberto B; Hall, Geoffrey B

2016-04-01

Emotion labeling deficits have been posited as an endophenotype for bipolar disorder (BD) as they have been observed in both patients and their first-degree relatives. It remains unclear whether these deficits exist secondary to the development of psychiatric symptoms or whether they can be attributed to risk for psychopathology. To explore this, we investigated emotion processing in symptomatic and asymptomatic high-risk bipolar offspring (HRO) and healthy children of healthy parents (HCO). Symptomatic (n:18, age: 13.8 ± 2.6 years, 44% female) and asymptomatic (n:12, age: 12.8 ± 3.0 years, 42% female) HRO and age- and sex-matched HCO (n:20, age: 13.3 ± 2.5 years, 45% female) performed an emotion-labeling task. Total number of errors, emotion category and intensity of emotion error scores were compared. Correlations between total error scores and symptom severity were also investigated. Compared to HCO, both HRO groups made more errors on the adult face task (pcor=0.014). The HRO group were 2.3 times [90%CI:0.9-6.3] more likely and 4.3 times [90%CI:1.3-14.3] more likely to make errors on sad and angry faces, respectively. With the exception of sad face type errors, we observed no significant differences in error patterns between symptomatic and asymptomatic HRO, and no correlations between symptom severity and total number of errors. This study was cross-sectional in design, limiting our ability to infer trajectories or heritability of these deficits. This study provides further support for emotion labeling deficits as a candidate endophenotype for BD. Our study also suggests these deficits are not attributable to the presence of psychiatric symptoms. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Cortical deficits of emotional face processing in adults with ADHD: its relation to social cognition and executive function.

PubMed

Ibáñez, Agustin; Petroni, Agustin; Urquina, Hugo; Torrente, Fernando; Torralva, Teresa; Hurtado, Esteban; Guex, Raphael; Blenkmann, Alejandro; Beltrachini, Leandro; Muravchik, Carlos; Baez, Sandra; Cetkovich, Marcelo; Sigman, Mariano; Lischinsky, Alicia; Manes, Facundo

2011-01-01

Although it has been shown that adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have impaired social cognition, no previous study has reported the brain correlates of face valence processing. This study looked for behavioral, neuropsychological, and electrophysiological markers of emotion processing for faces (N170) in adult ADHD compared to controls matched by age, gender, educational level, and handedness. We designed an event-related potential (ERP) study based on a dual valence task (DVT), in which faces and words were presented to test the effects of stimulus type (faces, words, or face-word stimuli) and valence (positive versus negative). Individual signatures of cognitive functioning in participants with ADHD and controls were assessed with a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation, including executive functioning (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). Compared to controls, the adult ADHD group showed deficits in N170 emotion modulation for facial stimuli. These N170 impairments were observed in the absence of any deficit in facial structural processing, suggesting a specific ADHD impairment in early facial emotion modulation. The cortical current density mapping of N170 yielded a main neural source of N170 at posterior section of fusiform gyrus (maximum at left hemisphere for words and right hemisphere for faces and simultaneous stimuli). Neural generators of N170 (fusiform gyrus) were reduced in ADHD. In those patients, N170 emotion processing was associated with performance on an emotional inference ToM task, and N170 from simultaneous stimuli was associated with EF, especially working memory. This is the first report to reveal an adult ADHD-specific impairment in the cortical modulation of emotion for faces and an association between N170 cortical measures and ToM and EF.

Pretreatment Differences in BOLD Response to Emotional Faces Correlate with Antidepressant Response to Scopolamine.

PubMed

Furey, Maura L; Drevets, Wayne C; Szczepanik, Joanna; Khanna, Ashish; Nugent, Allison; Zarate, Carlos A

2015-03-28

Faster acting antidepressants and biomarkers that predict treatment response are needed to facilitate the development of more effective treatments for patients with major depressive disorders. Here, we evaluate implicitly and explicitly processed emotional faces using neuroimaging to identify potential biomarkers of treatment response to the antimuscarinic, scopolamine. Healthy participants (n=15) and unmedicated-depressed major depressive disorder patients (n=16) participated in a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover infusion study using scopolamine (4 μg/kg). Before and following scopolamine, blood oxygen-level dependent signal was measured using functional MRI during a selective attention task. Two stimuli comprised of superimposed pictures of faces and houses were presented. Participants attended to one stimulus component and performed a matching task. Face emotion was modulated (happy/sad) creating implicit (attend-houses) and explicit (attend-faces) emotion processing conditions. The pretreatment difference in blood oxygen-level dependent response to happy and sad faces under implicit and explicit conditions (emotion processing biases) within a-priori regions of interest was correlated with subsequent treatment response in major depressive disorder. Correlations were observed exclusively during implicit emotion processing in the regions of interest, which included the subgenual anterior cingulate (P<.02) and middle occipital cortices (P<.02). The magnitude and direction of differential blood oxygen-level- dependent response to implicitly processed emotional faces prior to treatment reflect the potential to respond to scopolamine. These findings replicate earlier results, highlighting the potential for pretreatment neural activity in the middle occipital cortices and subgenual anterior cingulate to inform us about the potential to respond clinically to scopolamine. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of CINP 2015. This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.

Neural Reactivity to Angry Faces Predicts Treatment Response in Pediatric Anxiety.

PubMed

Bunford, Nora; Kujawa, Autumn; Fitzgerald, Kate D; Swain, James E; Hanna, Gregory L; Koschmann, Elizabeth; Simpson, David; Connolly, Sucheta; Monk, Christopher S; Phan, K Luan

2017-02-01

Although cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy are evidence-based treatments for pediatric anxiety, many youth with anxiety disorders fail to respond to these treatments. Given limitations of clinical measures in predicting treatment response, identifying neural predictors is timely. In this study, 35 anxious youth (ages 7-19 years) completed an emotional face-matching task during which the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes sustained attention towards emotional stimuli, was measured. Following the ERP measurement, youth received CBT or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment, and the LPP was examined as a predictor of treatment response. Findings indicated that, accounting for pre-treatment anxiety severity, neural reactivity to emotional faces predicted anxiety severity post- CBT and SSRI treatment such that enhanced electrocortical response to angry faces was associated with better treatment response. An enhanced LPP to angry faces may predict treatment response insofar as it may reflect greater emotion dysregulation or less avoidance and/or enhanced engagement with environmental stimuli in general, including with treatment.

Automatic affective processing impairments in patients with deficit syndrome schizophrenia.

PubMed

Strauss, Gregory P; Allen, Daniel N; Duke, Lisa A; Ross, Sylvia A; Schwartz, Jason

2008-07-01

Affective impairments were examined in patients with and without deficit syndrome schizophrenia. Two Emotional Stroop tasks designed to measure automatic processing of emotional information were administered to deficit (n=15) and non-deficit syndrome (n=26) schizophrenia patients classified according to the Schedule for the Deficit Syndrome, and matched non-patient control subjects (n=22). In comparison to non-deficit patients and controls, deficit syndrome patients demonstrated a lack of attention bias for positive information, and an elevated attentional lingering effect for negative information. These findings suggest that positive information fails to automatically capture attention of deficit syndrome patients, and that when negative information captures attention, it produces difficulty in disengagement Attentional abnormalities were significantly correlated with negative symptoms, such that more severe symptoms were associated with less attention bias for positive emotion and a greater lingering effect for negative information. Results are generally consistent with a mood-congruent processing abnormality and suggest that impaired automatic processing may be core to diminished emotional experience symptoms exhibited in deficit syndrome patients.

Emotional face processing deficit in schizophrenia: A replication study in a South African Xhosa population.

PubMed

Leppänen, J M; Niehaus, D J H; Koen, L; Du Toit, E; Schoeman, R; Emsley, R

2006-06-01

Schizophrenia is associated with a deficit in the recognition of negative emotions from facial expressions. The present study examined the universality of this finding by studying facial expression recognition in African Xhosa population. Forty-four Xhosa patients with schizophrenia and forty healthy controls were tested with a computerized task requiring rapid perceptual discrimination of matched positive (i.e. happy), negative (i.e. angry), and neutral faces. Patients were equally accurate as controls in recognizing happy faces but showed a marked impairment in recognition of angry faces. The impairment was particularly pronounced for high-intensity (open-mouth) angry faces. Patients also exhibited more false happy and angry responses to neutral faces than controls. No correlation between level of education or illness duration and emotion recognition was found but the deficit in the recognition of negative emotions was more pronounced in familial compared to non-familial cases of schizophrenia. These findings suggest that the deficit in the recognition of negative facial expressions may constitute a universal neurocognitive marker of schizophrenia.

Event-related potentials reveal preserved attention allocation but impaired emotion regulation in patients with epilepsy and comorbid negative affect.

PubMed

De Taeye, Leen; Pourtois, Gilles; Meurs, Alfred; Boon, Paul; Vonck, Kristl; Carrette, Evelien; Raedt, Robrecht

2015-01-01

Patients with epilepsy have a high prevalence of comorbid mood disorders. This study aims to evaluate whether negative affect in epilepsy is associated with dysfunction of emotion regulation. Event-related potentials (ERPs) are used in order to unravel the exact electrophysiological time course and investigate whether a possible dysfunction arises during early (attention) and/or late (regulation) stages of emotion control. Fifty epileptic patients with (n = 25) versus without (n = 25) comorbid negative affect plus twenty-five matched controls were recruited. ERPs were recorded while subjects performed a face- or house-matching task in which fearful, sad or neutral faces were presented either at attended or unattended spatial locations. Two ERP components were analyzed: the early vertex positive potential (VPP) which is normally enhanced for faces, and the late positive potential (LPP) that is typically larger for emotional stimuli. All participants had larger amplitude of the early face-sensitive VPP for attended faces compared to houses, regardless of their emotional content. By contrast, in patients with negative affect only, the amplitude of the LPP was significantly increased for unattended negative emotional expressions. These VPP results indicate that epilepsy with or without negative affect does not interfere with the early structural encoding and attention selection of faces. However, the LPP results suggest abnormal regulation processes during the processing of unattended emotional faces in patients with epilepsy and comorbid negative affect. In conclusion, this ERP study reveals that early object-based attention processes are not compromised by epilepsy, but instead, when combined with negative affect, this neurological disease is associated with dysfunction during the later stages of emotion regulation. As such, these new neurophysiological findings shed light on the complex interplay of epilepsy with negative affect during the processing of emotional visual stimuli and in turn might help to better understand the etiology and maintenance of mood disorders in epilepsy.

Selective preservation of the beat in apperceptive music agnosia: a case study.

PubMed

Baird, Amee D; Walker, David G; Biggs, Vivien; Robinson, Gail A

2014-04-01

Music perception involves processing of melodic, temporal and emotional dimensions that have been found to dissociate in healthy individuals and after brain injury. Two components of the temporal dimension have been distinguished, namely rhythm and metre. We describe an 18 year old male musician 'JM' who showed apperceptive music agnosia with selectively preserved metre perception, and impaired recognition of sad and peaceful music relative to age and music experience matched controls after resection of a right temporoparietal tumour. Two months post-surgery JM underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation including assessment of his music perception abilities using the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA, Peretz, Champod, & Hyde, 2003). He also completed several experimental tasks to explore his ability to recognise famous songs and melodies, emotions portrayed by music and a broader range of environmental sounds. Five age-, gender-, education- and musical experienced-matched controls were administered the same experimental tasks. JM showed selective preservation of metre perception, with impaired performances compared to controls and scoring below the 5% cut-off on all MBEA subtests, except for the metric condition. He could identify his favourite songs and environmental sounds. He showed impaired recognition of sad and peaceful emotions portrayed in music relative to controls but intact ability to identify happy and scary music. This case study contributes to the scarce literature documenting a dissociation between rhythmic and metric processing, and the rare observation of selectively preserved metric interpretation in the context of apperceptive music agnosia. It supports the notion that the anterior portion of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) plays a role in metric processing and provides the novel observation that selectively preserved metre is sufficient to identify happy and scary, but not sad or peaceful emotions portrayed in music. Crown Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Aberrant interference of auditory negative words on attention in patients with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Iwashiro, Norichika; Yahata, Noriaki; Kawamuro, Yu; Kasai, Kiyoto; Yamasue, Hidenori

2013-01-01

Previous research suggests that deficits in attention-emotion interaction are implicated in schizophrenia symptoms. Although disruption in auditory processing is crucial in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, deficits in interaction between emotional processing of auditorily presented language stimuli and auditory attention have not yet been clarified. To address this issue, the current study used a dichotic listening task to examine 22 patients with schizophrenia and 24 age-, sex-, parental socioeconomic background-, handedness-, dexterous ear-, and intelligence quotient-matched healthy controls. The participants completed a word recognition task on the attended side in which a word with emotionally valenced content (negative/positive/neutral) was presented to one ear and a different neutral word was presented to the other ear. Participants selectively attended to either ear. In the control subjects, presentation of negative but not positive word stimuli provoked a significantly prolonged reaction time compared with presentation of neutral word stimuli. This interference effect for negative words existed whether or not subjects directed attention to the negative words. This interference effect was significantly smaller in the patients with schizophrenia than in the healthy controls. Furthermore, the smaller interference effect was significantly correlated with severe positive symptoms and delusional behavior in the patients with schizophrenia. The present findings suggest that aberrant interaction between semantic processing of negative emotional content and auditory attention plays a role in production of positive symptoms in schizophrenia. (224 words).

Spanish parents' emotion talk and their children's understanding of emotion

PubMed Central

Aznar, Ana; Tenenbaum, Harriet R.

2013-01-01

Relations between parent-child emotion talk and children's emotion understanding were examined in 63 Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.35 months, SD = 3.86) and 6-year-old (M = 76.62 months, SD = 3.91) children. Parent-child emotion talk was analyzed during two storytelling tasks: a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Children's emotion understanding was assessed twice through a standardized test of emotion comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004), once before one of the two parent-child storytelling sessions and again 6 months later. Mothers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task predicted children's emotion understanding after controlling for children's previous emotion understanding. Whereas fathers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task was correlated with children's emotion understanding, it did not predict children's emotion understanding after controlling for previous emotion understanding. Implications of these findings for future research on children's socioemotional development are discussed. PMID:24069016

Spanish parents' emotion talk and their children's understanding of emotion.

PubMed

Aznar, Ana; Tenenbaum, Harriet R

2013-01-01

Relations between parent-child emotion talk and children's emotion understanding were examined in 63 Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.35 months, SD = 3.86) and 6-year-old (M = 76.62 months, SD = 3.91) children. Parent-child emotion talk was analyzed during two storytelling tasks: a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Children's emotion understanding was assessed twice through a standardized test of emotion comprehension (TEC; Pons et al., 2004), once before one of the two parent-child storytelling sessions and again 6 months later. Mothers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task predicted children's emotion understanding after controlling for children's previous emotion understanding. Whereas fathers' use of emotion labels during the play-related storytelling task was correlated with children's emotion understanding, it did not predict children's emotion understanding after controlling for previous emotion understanding. Implications of these findings for future research on children's socioemotional development are discussed.

Sex differences in memory of emotional images: a behavioral and electrophysiological investigation.

PubMed

Glaser, Emma; Mendrek, Adrianna; Germain, Martine; Lakis, Nadia; Lavoie, Marc E

2012-07-01

Current research suggests that emotional responses differ between men and women. Sex differences regarding emotional effects on memory have been recently studied through brain imaging techniques. However, the majority of investigations have often neglected to balance the variable of emotional intensity (arousal) across pleasant and unpleasant pictures. Additionally, men and women were often mixed or studied separately. The current study aims at comparing men and women's electrophysiological responses related to emotional memory of photographic material. These responses were measured using Event Related brain Potentials (ERP) in response to a task of episodic memory of emotional images. The frontal N200, the parietal P300 and the central LPC were compared in 17 men and 17 women matched for age, social economic status, education and intelligence. Behavioral results showed that, in men, reaction times were modulated by valence, whereas for women, reaction times were mainly modulated by arousal. Accuracy was affected by both emotional valence and arousal, but only in women. ERP analyses revealed that emotional valence influenced earlier time components (frontal N200 and parietal P300), whereas arousal influenced memory in the later time component (central LPC). Moreover, sex differences, mediated by valence and arousal, were found in ERP responses at different times in the processing stream. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Empathetic perspective-taking is impaired in schizophrenia: evidence from a study of emotion attribution and theory of mind.

PubMed

Langdon, Robyn; Coltheart, Max; Ward, Philip B

2006-03-01

Schizophrenia and autism are clinically distinct yet both disorders are characterised by theory of mind (ToM) deficits. Autistic individuals fail to appreciate false beliefs, yet understand the causal connections between behavioural events and simple emotions. Findings of this type have promoted the view that ToM deficits in autism reflect a domain-specific difficulty with appreciating the representational nature of epistemic mental states (i.e., beliefs and intentions and not emotions). This study examines whether the same holds true for schizophrenia. A picture-sequencing task assessed capacity to infer false beliefs in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. To assess emotion attribution, participants were shown cartoon strips of events likely to elicit strong emotional reactions in story characters. Characters' faces were blanked out. Participants were instructed to think about how the characters would be feeling in order to match up the cards depicting facial affect appropriately. Participants later named emotions depicted in facial affect cards. Patients were as capable as controls of identifying cartoon facial expressions, yet had greater difficulties with: (a) attributing emotions based on circumstances; and (b) inferring false beliefs. Schizophrenia patients, unlike autistic individuals, suffer a domain-general difficulty with empathetic perspective-taking that affects equally their appreciation of other people's beliefs, percepts, and emotions.

Symptom-specific amygdala hyperactivity modulates motor control network in conversion disorder.

PubMed

Hassa, Thomas; Sebastian, Alexandra; Liepert, Joachim; Weiller, Cornelius; Schmidt, Roger; Tüscher, Oliver

2017-01-01

Initial historical accounts as well as recent data suggest that emotion processing is dysfunctional in conversion disorder patients and that this alteration may be the pathomechanistic neurocognitive basis for symptoms in conversion disorder. However, to date evidence of direct interaction of altered negative emotion processing with motor control networks in conversion disorder is still lacking. To specifically study the neural correlates of emotion processing interacting with motor networks we used a task combining emotional and sensorimotor stimuli both separately as well as simultaneously during functional magnetic resonance imaging in a well characterized group of 13 conversion disorder patients with functional hemiparesis and 19 demographically matched healthy controls. We performed voxelwise statistical parametrical mapping for a priori regions of interest within emotion processing and motor control networks. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) was used to test altered functional connectivity of emotion and motor control networks. Only during simultaneous emotional stimulation and passive movement of the affected hand patients displayed left amygdala hyperactivity. PPI revealed increased functional connectivity in patients between the left amygdala and the (pre-)supplemental motor area and the subthalamic nucleus, key regions within the motor control network. These findings suggest a novel mechanistic direct link between dysregulated emotion processing and motor control circuitry in conversion disorder.

When Early Experiences Build a Wall to Others’ Emotions: An Electrophysiological and Autonomic Study

PubMed Central

Ardizzi, Martina; Martini, Francesca; Umiltà, Maria Alessandra; Sestito, Mariateresa; Ravera, Roberto; Gallese, Vittorio

2013-01-01

Facial expression of emotions is a powerful vehicle for communicating information about others’ emotional states and it normally induces facial mimicry in the observers. The aim of this study was to investigate if early aversive experiences could interfere with emotion recognition, facial mimicry, and with the autonomic regulation of social behaviors. We conducted a facial emotion recognition task in a group of “street-boys” and in an age-matched control group. We recorded facial electromyography (EMG), a marker of facial mimicry, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of the recruitment of autonomic system promoting social behaviors and predisposition, in response to the observation of facial expressions of emotions. Results showed an over-attribution of anger, and reduced EMG responses during the observation of both positive and negative expressions only among street-boys. Street-boys also showed lower RSA after observation of facial expressions and ineffective RSA suppression during presentation of non-threatening expressions. Our findings suggest that early aversive experiences alter not only emotion recognition but also facial mimicry of emotions. These deficits affect the autonomic regulation of social behaviors inducing lower social predisposition after the visualization of facial expressions and an ineffective recruitment of defensive behavior in response to non-threatening expressions. PMID:23593374

Impairment in judgement of the moral emotion guilt following orbitofrontal cortex damage.

PubMed

Funayama, Michitaka; Koreki, Akihiro; Muramatsu, Taro; Mimura, Masaru; Kato, Motoichiro; Abe, Takayuki

2018-04-19

Although neuroimaging studies have provided evidence for an association between moral emotions and the orbitofrontal cortex, studies on patients with focal lesions using experimental probes of moral emotions are scarce. Here, we addressed this topic by presenting a moral emotion judgement task to patients with focal brain damage. Four judgement tasks in a simple pairwise choice paradigm were given to 72 patients with cerebrovascular disease. These tasks consisted of a perceptual line judgement task as a control task; the objects' preference task as a basic preference judgement task; and two types of moral emotion judgement task, an anger task and a guilt task. A multiple linear regression analysis was performed on each set of task performance scores to take into account potential confounders. Performance on the guilt emotion judgement task negatively correlated with the orbitofrontal cortex damage, but not with the other variables. Results for the other judgement tasks did not reach statistical significance. The close association between orbitofrontal cortex damage and a decrease in guilt emotion judgement consistency might suggest that the orbitofrontal cortex plays a key role in the sense of guilt, a hallmark of morality. © 2018 The British Psychological Society.

Implicit learning and emotional responses in nine-month-old infants.

PubMed

Angulo-Barroso, Rosa M; Peciña, Susana; Lin, Xu; Li, Mingyan; Sturza, Julia; Shao, Jie; Lozoff, Betsy

2017-08-01

To study the interplay between motor learning and emotional responses of young infants, we developed a contingent learning paradigm that included two related, difficult, operant tasks. We also coded facial expression to characterise emotional response to learning. In a sample of nine-month-old healthy Chinese infants, 44.7% achieved learning threshold during this challenging arm-conditioning test. Some evidence of learning was observed at the beginning of the second task. The lowest period of negative emotions coincided with the period of maximum movement responses after the initiation of the second task, and movement responses negatively correlated with the frequency of negative emotions. Positive emotions, while generally low throughout the task, increased during peak performance especially for learners. Peak frequency of movement responses was positively correlated with the frequency of positive emotions. Despite the weak evidence of learning this difficult task, our results from the learners would suggest that increasing positive emotions, and perhaps down-regulating negative emotional responses, may be important for improving performance and learning a complex operant task in infancy. Further studies are necessary to determine the role of emotions in learning difficult tasks in infancy.

Gender and age differences in parent-child emotion talk.

PubMed

Aznar, Ana; Tenenbaum, Harriet R

2015-03-01

This study examined gender differences in emotion word use during mother-child and father-child conversations. Sixty-five Spanish mothers and fathers and their 4- (M = 53.50, SD = 3.54) and 6-year-old (M = 77.07, SD = 3.94) children participated in this study. Emotion talk was examined during a play-related storytelling task and a reminiscence task (conversation about past experiences). Mothers mentioned a higher proportion of emotion words than did fathers. During the play-related storytelling task, mothers of 4-year-old daughters mentioned a higher proportion of emotion words than did mothers of 4-year-old sons, whereas fathers of 4-year-old daughters directed a higher proportion of emotion words than did fathers of 4-year-old sons during the reminiscence task. No gender differences were found with parents of 6-year-old children. During the reminiscence task daughters mentioned more emotion words with their fathers than with their mothers. Finally, mothers' use of emotion talk was related to whether children used emotion talk in both tasks. Fathers' use of emotion talk was only related to children's emotion talk during the reminiscence task. © 2014 The British Psychological Society.

The Effects of a Distracting N-Back Task on Recognition Memory Are Reduced by Negative Emotional Intensity

PubMed Central

Buratto, Luciano G.; Pottage, Claire L.; Brown, Charity; Morrison, Catriona M.; Schaefer, Alexandre

2014-01-01

Memory performance is usually impaired when participants have to encode information while performing a concurrent task. Recent studies using recall tasks have found that emotional items are more resistant to such cognitive depletion effects than non-emotional items. However, when recognition tasks are used, the same effect is more elusive as recent recognition studies have obtained contradictory results. In two experiments, we provide evidence that negative emotional content can reliably reduce the effects of cognitive depletion on recognition memory only if stimuli with high levels of emotional intensity are used. In particular, we found that recognition performance for realistic pictures was impaired by a secondary 3-back working memory task during encoding if stimuli were emotionally neutral or had moderate levels of negative emotionality. In contrast, when negative pictures with high levels of emotional intensity were used, the detrimental effects of the secondary task were significantly attenuated. PMID:25330251

The effects of a distracting N-back task on recognition memory are reduced by negative emotional intensity.

PubMed

Buratto, Luciano G; Pottage, Claire L; Brown, Charity; Morrison, Catriona M; Schaefer, Alexandre

2014-01-01

Memory performance is usually impaired when participants have to encode information while performing a concurrent task. Recent studies using recall tasks have found that emotional items are more resistant to such cognitive depletion effects than non-emotional items. However, when recognition tasks are used, the same effect is more elusive as recent recognition studies have obtained contradictory results. In two experiments, we provide evidence that negative emotional content can reliably reduce the effects of cognitive depletion on recognition memory only if stimuli with high levels of emotional intensity are used. In particular, we found that recognition performance for realistic pictures was impaired by a secondary 3-back working memory task during encoding if stimuli were emotionally neutral or had moderate levels of negative emotionality. In contrast, when negative pictures with high levels of emotional intensity were used, the detrimental effects of the secondary task were significantly attenuated.

Emotional job demands and the role of matching job resources: a cross-sectional survey study among health care workers.

PubMed

de Jonge, Jan; Le Blanc, Pascale M; Peeters, Maria C W; Noordam, Hanneke

2008-10-01

Research on emotional labour in health care work has not yet revealed under what conditions emotional job demands have an impact on employee health and well-being. There is a need for more theory to unveil the black box of emotional labour processes. To test the moderating role of matching (i.e. emotional) and non-matching (i.e. cognitive) job resources in the relation between emotional job demands and employee health/well-being (i.e. emotional exhaustion, employee creativity, and work motivation). A cross-sectional survey with anonymous questionnaires was conducted. A large organization for residential elderly care with eight locations in an urban area in the Netherlands. Questionnaires were distributed to 1259 health care workers, of which 826 people returned the questionnaire (66% response rate). In addition to descriptive statistics, multivariate multiple regression analysis (LISREL 8.54) with cross-validation was conducted. Findings showed that emotional job resources moderated the relation between emotional job demands and health/well-being outcomes. Firstly, emotional job resources were able to moderate the relation between emotional job demands and emotional exhaustion. Secondly, both emotional job resources and, to a lesser extent, cognitive job resources were able to moderate the relation between emotional job demands and positive well-being outcomes (i.e. employee creativity and work motivation). Finally, cross-validation showed that parameter estimates did not vary across subsamples. Job resources could compensate for resources lost through meeting the requirements of emotional job demands, thereby reducing stress-reactions and increasing well-being. Providing health care workers with more, preferably matching, job resources could make emotional job demands less stressful, and even stimulating and challenging. Future longitudinal studies should investigate the interplay of emotional job demands and (matching) job resources more profoundly.

Neural circuitry of emotional and cognitive conflict revealed through facial expressions.

PubMed

Chiew, Kimberly S; Braver, Todd S

2011-03-09

Neural systems underlying conflict processing have been well studied in the cognitive realm, but the extent to which these overlap with those underlying emotional conflict processing remains unclear. A novel adaptation of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a stimulus-response incompatibility paradigm, was examined that permits close comparison of emotional and cognitive conflict conditions, through the use of affectively-valenced facial expressions as the response modality. Brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of the emotional AX-CPT. Emotional conflict was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis, by requiring contextually pre-cued facial expressions to emotional probe stimuli (IAPS images) that were either affectively compatible (low-conflict) or incompatible (high-conflict). The emotion condition was contrasted against a matched cognitive condition that was identical in all respects, except that probe stimuli were emotionally neutral. Components of the brain cognitive control network, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), showed conflict-related activation increases in both conditions, but with higher activity during emotion conditions. In contrast, emotion conflict effects were not found in regions associated with affective processing, such as rostral ACC. These activation patterns provide evidence for a domain-general neural system that is active for both emotional and cognitive conflict processing. In line with previous behavioural evidence, greatest activity in these brain regions occurred when both emotional and cognitive influences additively combined to produce increased interference.

Neural Circuitry of Emotional and Cognitive Conflict Revealed through Facial Expressions

PubMed Central

Chiew, Kimberly S.; Braver, Todd S.

2011-01-01

Background Neural systems underlying conflict processing have been well studied in the cognitive realm, but the extent to which these overlap with those underlying emotional conflict processing remains unclear. A novel adaptation of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT), a stimulus-response incompatibility paradigm, was examined that permits close comparison of emotional and cognitive conflict conditions, through the use of affectively-valenced facial expressions as the response modality. Methodology/Principal Findings Brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance of the emotional AX-CPT. Emotional conflict was manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis, by requiring contextually pre-cued facial expressions to emotional probe stimuli (IAPS images) that were either affectively compatible (low-conflict) or incompatible (high-conflict). The emotion condition was contrasted against a matched cognitive condition that was identical in all respects, except that probe stimuli were emotionally neutral. Components of the brain cognitive control network, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), showed conflict-related activation increases in both conditions, but with higher activity during emotion conditions. In contrast, emotion conflict effects were not found in regions associated with affective processing, such as rostral ACC. Conclusions/Significance These activation patterns provide evidence for a domain-general neural system that is active for both emotional and cognitive conflict processing. In line with previous behavioural evidence, greatest activity in these brain regions occurred when both emotional and cognitive influences additively combined to produce increased interference. PMID:21408006

Contextual interference processing during fast categorisations of facial expressions.

PubMed

Frühholz, Sascha; Trautmann-Lengsfeld, Sina A; Herrmann, Manfred

2011-09-01

We examined interference effects of emotionally associated background colours during fast valence categorisations of negative, neutral and positive expressions. According to implicitly learned colour-emotion associations, facial expressions were presented with colours that either matched the valence of these expressions or not. Experiment 1 included infrequent non-matching trials and Experiment 2 a balanced ratio of matching and non-matching trials. Besides general modulatory effects of contextual features on the processing of facial expressions, we found differential effects depending on the valance of target facial expressions. Whereas performance accuracy was mainly affected for neutral expressions, performance speed was specifically modulated by emotional expressions indicating some susceptibility of emotional expressions to contextual features. Experiment 3 used two further colour-emotion combinations, but revealed only marginal interference effects most likely due to missing colour-emotion associations. The results are discussed with respect to inherent processing demands of emotional and neutral expressions and their susceptibility to contextual interference.

Physiological and brain activity after a combined cognitive behavioral treatment plus video game therapy for emotional regulation in bulimia nervosa: a case report.

PubMed

Fagundo, Ana Beatriz; Via, Esther; Sánchez, Isabel; Jiménez-Murcia, Susana; Forcano, Laura; Soriano-Mas, Carles; Giner-Bartolomé, Cristina; Santamaría, Juan J; Ben-Moussa, Maher; Konstantas, Dimitri; Lam, Tony; Lucas, Mikkel; Nielsen, Jeppe; Lems, Peter; Cardoner, Narcís; Menchón, Jose M; de la Torre, Rafael; Fernandez-Aranda, Fernando

2014-08-12

PlayMancer is a video game designed to increase emotional regulation and reduce general impulsive behaviors, by training to decrease arousal and improve decision-making and planning. We have previously demonstrated the usefulness of PlayMancer in reducing impulsivity and improving emotional regulation in bulimia nervosa (BN) patients. However, whether these improvements are actually translated into brain changes remains unclear. The aim of this case study was to report on a 28-year-old Spanish woman with BN, and to examine changes in physiological variables and brain activity after a combined treatment of video game therapy (VGT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Ten VGT sessions were carried out on a weekly basis. Anxiety, physiological, and impulsivity measurements were recorded. The patient was scanned in a 1.5-T magnetic resonance scanner, prior to and after the 10-week VGT/CBT combined treatment, using two paradigms: (1) an emotional face-matching task, and (2) a multi-source interference task (MSIT). Upon completing the treatment, a decrease in average heart rate was observed. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results indicated a post-treatment reduction in reaction time along with high accuracy. The patient engaged areas typically active in healthy controls, although the cluster extension of the active areas decreased after the combined treatment. These results suggest a global improvement in emotional regulation and impulsivity control after the VGT therapy in BN, demonstrated by both physiological and neural changes. These promising results suggest that a combined treatment of CBT and VGT might lead to functional cerebral changes that ultimately translate into better cognitive and emotional performances.

Physiological and Brain Activity After a Combined Cognitive Behavioral Treatment Plus Video Game Therapy for Emotional Regulation in Bulimia Nervosa: A Case Report

PubMed Central

Fagundo, Ana Beatriz; Via, Esther; Sánchez, Isabel; Jiménez-Murcia, Susana; Forcano, Laura; Soriano-Mas, Carles; Giner-Bartolomé, Cristina; Santamaría, Juan J; Ben-Moussa, Maher; Konstantas, Dimitri; Lam, Tony; Lucas, Mikkel; Nielsen, Jeppe; Lems, Peter; Cardoner, Narcís; Menchón, Jose M; de la Torre, Rafael

2014-01-01

Background PlayMancer is a video game designed to increase emotional regulation and reduce general impulsive behaviors, by training to decrease arousal and improve decision-making and planning. We have previously demonstrated the usefulness of PlayMancer in reducing impulsivity and improving emotional regulation in bulimia nervosa (BN) patients. However, whether these improvements are actually translated into brain changes remains unclear. Objective The aim of this case study was to report on a 28-year-old Spanish woman with BN, and to examine changes in physiological variables and brain activity after a combined treatment of video game therapy (VGT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Methods Ten VGT sessions were carried out on a weekly basis. Anxiety, physiological, and impulsivity measurements were recorded. The patient was scanned in a 1.5-T magnetic resonance scanner, prior to and after the 10-week VGT/CBT combined treatment, using two paradigms: (1) an emotional face-matching task, and (2) a multi-source interference task (MSIT). Results Upon completing the treatment, a decrease in average heart rate was observed. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results indicated a post-treatment reduction in reaction time along with high accuracy. The patient engaged areas typically active in healthy controls, although the cluster extension of the active areas decreased after the combined treatment. Conclusions These results suggest a global improvement in emotional regulation and impulsivity control after the VGT therapy in BN, demonstrated by both physiological and neural changes. These promising results suggest that a combined treatment of CBT and VGT might lead to functional cerebral changes that ultimately translate into better cognitive and emotional performances. PMID:25116416

Prior cognitive activity implicitly modulates subsequent emotional responses to subliminally presented emotional stimuli.

PubMed

Iida, Saea; Nakao, Takashi; Ohira, Hideki

2012-06-01

It has been reported that engagement in several kinds of cognitive activity can successfully inhibit unpleasant emotions. In this study, we tried to replicate the previous finding that cognitive activity can modulate subsequent psychological and physiological emotional processes and to investigate whether prior cognitive activity can attenuate implicit emotional processes triggered by subliminal emotional stimuli. Sixty students were randomly divided into three groups (cognitive task group, noncognitive task group, control group). The cognitive task group was asked to engage in an n-back task, while the control group was asked to stay calm. The noncognitive task group was asked to do a handgrip-squeezing task. All participants then engaged in a version of a subliminal affective priming task where they were unconsciously exposed to affectively negative pictures. The cognitive task group showed lower negative experiences after the subliminal affective priming task and a substantial reduction in their heart rate responses, as compared with the other groups. These results provide evidence that engagement in cognitive activity can attenuate emotional processes in an automatic and unconscious manner.

Neuroticism influences pupillary responses during an emotional interference task.

PubMed

Prehn, Kristin; Heekeren, Hauke R; Blasek, Katharina; Lapschies, Katharina; Mews, Isabella; van der Meer, Elke

2008-10-01

We used behavioral and pupillary measures during an analogical reasoning task to investigate the processing of conceptual and emotional relations as well as their interaction. In particular, we examined how mental resource consumption is modulated by individual differences in neuroticism in healthy participants during conditions with emotional interference. Two word pairs were presented simultaneously, each with a conceptual and an emotional relation. In one experimental block, participants had to decide whether conceptual relations between the two word pairs were corresponding (conceptual task). In the other block, participants had to decide whether emotional relations were corresponding (emotional task). When participants had to focus on the correspondence of emotional relations, they were faster, more accurate, and showed greater pupillary responses than during the conceptual task. Moreover, participants with comparably higher neuroticism scores showed increased pupillary responses during conditions with emotional interference (i.e., during the conceptual task when they had to ignore incongruent information on the correspondence provided by the task-irrelevant emotional relations). These results demonstrate that affective aspects of stimuli (here: emotional relations) are preferentially selected for information processing. Moreover, increased mental resource consumption due to emotional interference in participants with comparably higher neuroticism scores might reflect a possible mechanism making these individuals more vulnerable to mood or anxiety disorders.

Emotion recognition ability in mothers at high and low risk for child physical abuse.

PubMed

Balge, K A; Milner, J S

2000-10-01

The study sought to determine if high-risk, compared to low-risk, mothers make more emotion recognition errors when they attempt to recognize emotions in children and adults. Thirty-two demographically matched high-risk (n = 16) and low-risk (n = 16) mothers were asked to identify different emotions expressed by children and adults. Sets of high- and low-intensity, visual and auditory emotions were presented. Mothers also completed measures of stress, depression, and ego-strength. High-risk, compared to low-risk, mothers showed a tendency to make more errors on the visual and auditory emotion recognition tasks, with a trend toward more errors on the low-intensity, visual stimuli. However, the observed trends were not significant. Only a post-hoc test of error rates across all stimuli indicated that high-risk, compared to low-risk, mothers made significantly more emotion recognition errors. Although situational stress differences were not found, high-risk mothers reported significantly higher levels of general parenting stress and depression and lower levels of ego-strength. Since only trends and a significant post hoc finding of more overall emotion recognition errors in high-risk mothers were observed, additional research is needed to determine if high-risk mothers have emotion recognition deficits that may impact parent-child interactions. As in prior research, the study found that high-risk mothers reported more parenting stress and depression and less ego-strength.

Rapid Presentation of Emotional Expressions Reveals New Emotional Impairments in Tourette’s Syndrome

PubMed Central

Mermillod, Martial; Devaux, Damien; Derost, Philippe; Rieu, Isabelle; Chambres, Patrick; Auxiette, Catherine; Legrand, Guillaume; Galland, Fabienne; Dalens, Hélène; Coulangeon, Louise Marie; Broussolle, Emmanuel; Durif, Franck; Jalenques, Isabelle

2013-01-01

Objective: Based on a variety of empirical evidence obtained within the theoretical framework of embodiment theory, we considered it likely that motor disorders in Tourette’s syndrome (TS) would have emotional consequences for TS patients. However, previous research using emotional facial categorization tasks suggests that these consequences are limited to TS patients with obsessive-compulsive behaviors (OCB). Method: These studies used long stimulus presentations which allowed the participants to categorize the different emotional facial expressions (EFEs) on the basis of a perceptual analysis that might potentially hide a lack of emotional feeling for certain emotions. In order to reduce this perceptual bias, we used a rapid visual presentation procedure. Results: Using this new experimental method, we revealed different and surprising impairments on several EFEs in TS patients compared to matched healthy control participants. Moreover, a spatial frequency analysis of the visual signal processed by the patients suggests that these impairments may be located at a cortical level. Conclusion: The current study indicates that the rapid visual presentation paradigm makes it possible to identify various potential emotional disorders that were not revealed by the standard visual presentation procedures previously reported in the literature. Moreover, the spatial frequency analysis performed in our study suggests that emotional deficit in TS might lie at the level of temporal cortical areas dedicated to the processing of HSF visual information. PMID:23630481

Effects of short-term quetiapine treatment on emotional processing, sleep and circadian rhythms.

PubMed

Rock, Philippa L; Goodwin, Guy M; Wulff, Katharina; McTavish, Sarah F B; Harmer, Catherine J

2016-03-01

Quetiapine is an atypical antipsychotic that can stabilise mood from any index episode of bipolar disorder. This study investigated the effects of seven-day quetiapine administration on sleep, circadian rhythms and emotional processing in healthy volunteers. Twenty healthy volunteers received 150 mg quetiapine XL for seven nights and 20 matched controls received placebo. Sleep-wake actigraphy was completed for one week both pre-dose and during drug treatment. On Day 8, participants completed emotional processing tasks. Actigraphy revealed that quetiapine treatment increased sleep duration and efficiency, delayed final wake time and had a tendency to reduce within-day variability. There were no effects of quetiapine on subjective ratings of mood or energy. Quetiapine-treated participants showed diminished bias towards positive words and away from negative words during recognition memory. Quetiapine did not significantly affect facial expression recognition, emotional word categorisation, emotion-potentiated startle or emotional word/faces dot-probe vigilance reaction times. These changes in sleep timing and circadian rhythmicity in healthy volunteers may be relevant to quetiapine's therapeutic actions. Effects on emotional processing did not emulate the effects of antidepressants. The effects of quetiapine on sleep and circadian rhythms in patients with bipolar disorder merit further investigation to elucidate its mechanisms of action. © The Author(s) 2016.

Children's Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions Through Photographs and Drawings.

PubMed

Brechet, Claire

2017-01-01

The author's purpose was to examine children's recognition of emotional facial expressions, by comparing two types of stimulus: photographs and drawings. The author aimed to investigate whether drawings could be considered as a more evocative material than photographs, as a function of age and emotion. Five- and 7-year-old children were presented with photographs and drawings displaying facial expressions of 4 basic emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and were asked to perform a matching task by pointing to the face corresponding to the target emotion labeled by the experimenter. The photographs we used were selected from the Radboud Faces Database and the drawings were designed on the basis of both the facial components involved in the expression of these emotions and the graphic cues children tend to use when asked to depict these emotions in their own drawings. Our results show that drawings are better recognized than photographs, for sadness, anger, and fear (with no difference for happiness, due to a ceiling effect). And that the difference between the 2 types of stimuli tends to be more important for 5-year-olds compared to 7-year-olds. These results are discussed in view of their implications, both for future research and for practical application.

Adaptive memory: Is the animacy effect on memory due to emotional arousal?

PubMed

Meinhardt, Martin J; Bell, Raoul; Buchner, Axel; Röer, Jan P

2018-05-07

Animate entities are often better remembered than inanimate ones. The proximal mechanisms underlying this animacy effect on recall are unclear. In two experiments, we tested whether the animacy effect is due to emotional arousal. Experiment 1 revealed that translations of the animate words used in the pioneering study of Nairne et al. (Psychological science, 24, 2099-2105, 2013) were perceived as being more arousing than translations of the inanimate words, suggesting that animacy might have been confounded with arousal in previous studies. In Experiment 2, new word lists were created in which the animate and inanimate words were matched on arousal (amongst several other dimensions), and participants were required to reproduce the animate and inanimate words in a free recall task. There was a tendency towards better memory for arousing items, but robust animacy effects were obtained even though animate and inanimate words were matched on arousal. Thus, while arousal may contribute to the animacy effect when it is not carefully controlled for, it cannot explain the memory advantage of animate items.

The role of the right hemisphere in semantic control: A case-series comparison of right and left hemisphere stroke

PubMed Central

Thompson, Hannah E.; Henshall, Lauren; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2016-01-01

Semantic control processes guide conceptual retrieval so that we are able to focus on non-dominant associations and features when these are required for the task or context, yet the neural basis of semantic control is not fully understood. Neuroimaging studies have emphasised the role of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in controlled retrieval, while neuropsychological investigations of semantic control deficits have almost exclusively focussed on patients with left-sided damage (e.g., patients with semantic aphasia, SA). Nevertheless, activation in fMRI during demanding semantic tasks typically extends to right IFG. To investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in semantic control, we compared nine RH stroke patients with 21 left-hemisphere SA patients, 11 mild SA cases and 12 healthy, aged-matched controls on semantic and executive tasks, plus experimental tasks that manipulated semantic control in paradigms particularly sensitive to RH damage. RH patients had executive deficits to parallel SA patients but they performed well on standard semantic tests. Nevertheless, multimodal semantic control deficits were found in experimental tasks involving facial emotions and the ‘summation’ of meaning across multiple items. On these tasks, RH patients showed effects similar to those in SA cases – multimodal deficits that were sensitive to distractor strength and cues and miscues, plus increasingly poor performance in cyclical matching tasks which repeatedly probed the same set of concepts. Thus, despite striking differences in single-item comprehension, evidence presented here suggests semantic control is bilateral, and disruption of this component of semantic cognition can be seen following damage to either hemisphere. PMID:26945505

Increases in Emotional Intelligence After an Online Training Program Are Associated With Better Decision-Making on the Iowa Gambling Task.

PubMed

Alkozei, Anna; Smith, Ryan; Demers, Lauren A; Weber, Mareen; Berryhill, Sarah M; Killgore, William D S

2018-01-01

Higher levels of emotional intelligence have been associated with better inter and intrapersonal functioning. In the present study, 59 healthy men and women were randomized into either a three-week online training program targeted to improve emotional intelligence ( n = 29), or a placebo control training program targeted to improve awareness of nonemotional aspects of the environment ( n = 30). Compared to placebo, participants in the emotional intelligence training group showed increased performance on the total emotional intelligence score of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test, a performance measure of emotional intelligence, as well as subscales of perceiving emotions and facilitating thought. Moreover, after emotional intelligence training, but not after placebo training, individuals displayed the ability to arrive at optimal performance faster (i.e., they showed a faster learning rate) during an emotion-guided decision-making task (i.e., the Iowa Gambling Task). More specifically, although both groups showed similar performance at the start of the Iowa Gambling Task from pre- to posttraining, the participants in the emotional intelligence training group learned to choose more advantageous than disadvantageous decks than those in the placebo training group by the time they reached the "hunch" period of the task (i.e., the point in the task when implicit task learning is thought to have occurred). Greater total improvements in performance on the Iowa Gambling Task from pre- to posttraining in the emotional intelligence training group were also positively correlated with pre- to posttraining changes in Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test scores, in particular with changes in the ability to perceive emotions. The present study provides preliminary evidence that emotional intelligence can be trained with the help of an online training program targeted at adults; it also suggests that changes in emotional intelligence, as a result of such a program, can lead to improved emotion-guided decision-making.

Advanced Parkinson disease patients have impairment in prosody processing.

PubMed

Albuquerque, Luisa; Martins, Maurício; Coelho, Miguel; Guedes, Leonor; Ferreira, Joaquim J; Rosa, Mário; Martins, Isabel Pavão

2016-01-01

The ability to recognize and interpret emotions in others is a crucial prerequisite of adequate social behavior. Impairments in emotion processing have been reported from the early stages of Parkinson's disease (PD). This study aims to characterize emotion recognition in advanced Parkinson's disease (APD) candidates for deep-brain stimulation and to compare emotion recognition abilities in visual and auditory domains. APD patients, defined as those with levodopa-induced motor complications (N = 42), and healthy controls (N = 43) matched by gender, age, and educational level, undertook the Comprehensive Affect Testing System (CATS), a battery that evaluates recognition of seven basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and neutral) on facial expressions and four emotions on prosody (happiness, sadness, anger, and fear). APD patients were assessed during the "ON" state. Group performance was compared with independent-samples t tests. Compared to controls, APD had significantly lower scores on the discrimination and naming of emotions in prosody, and visual discrimination of neutral faces, but no significant differences in visual emotional tasks. The contrasting performance in emotional processing between visual and auditory stimuli suggests that APD candidates for surgery have either a selective difficulty in recognizing emotions in prosody or a general defect in prosody processing. Studies investigating early-stage PD, and the effect of subcortical lesions in prosody processing, favor the latter interpretation. Further research is needed to understand these deficits in emotional prosody recognition and their possible contribution to later behavioral or neuropsychiatric manifestations of PD.

Cognition-emotion interactions are modulated by working memory capacity in individuals with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Strauss, Gregory P; Lee, Bern G; Waltz, James A; Robinson, Benjamin M; Brown, Jaime K; Gold, James M

2012-11-01

Prior research provides evidence for aberrant cognition-emotion interactions in schizophrenia. In the current study, we aimed to extend these findings by administering the "distractor devaluation" task to 40 individuals with schizophrenia and 32 demographically matched healthy controls. The task consisted of a simple visual search task for neutral faces, followed by an evaluative response made for one of the search items (or a novel item) to determine whether prior attentional selection results in a devaluation of a previously unattended stimulus. We also manipulated working memory demands by preceding the search array with a memory array that required subjects to hold 0, 1, or 2 items in working memory while performing the search array and devaluation task, to determine whether the normative process by which attentional states influence evaluative response is limited by working memory capacity. Results indicated that individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated the typical distractor devaluation effect at working memory load 0, suggesting intact evaluative response. However, the devaluation effect was absent at working memory loads of 1 and 2, suggesting that normal evaluative responses can be abolished in people with schizophrenia when working memory capacity is exceeded. Thus, findings provide further evidence for normal evaluative response in schizophrenia, but clarify that these normal experiences may not hold when working memory demands are too high. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

COGNITION-EMOTION INTERACTIONS ARE MODULATED BY WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY IN INDIVIDUALS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

PubMed Central

Strauss, Gregory P.; Lee, Bern G.; Waltz, James A.; Robinson, Benjamin M.; Brown, Jaime K.; Gold, James M.

2012-01-01

Prior research provides evidence for aberrant cognition-emotion interactions in schizophrenia. In the current study, we aimed to extend these findings by administering the “distractor devaluation” task to 40 individuals with schizophrenia and 32 demographically matched healthy controls. The task consisted of a simple visual search task for neutral faces, followed by an evaluative response made for one of the search items (or a novel item) to determine whether prior attentional selection results in a devaluation of a previously unattended stimulus. We also manipulated working memory demands by preceding the search array with a memory array that required subjects to hold 0, 1, or 2 items in working memory while performing the search array and devaluation task, to determine whether the normative process by which attentional states influence evaluative response is limited by working memory capacity. Results indicated that individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated the typical distractor devaluation effect at working memory load 0, suggesting intact evaluative response. However, the devaluation effect was absent at working memory loads of 1 and 2, suggesting that normal evaluative responses can be abolished in people with schizophrenia when working memory capacity is exceeded. Thus, findings provide further evidence for normal evaluative response in schizophrenia, but clarify that these normal experiences may not hold when working memory demands are too high. PMID:22968207

Distinct and Overlapping Brain Areas Engaged during Value-Based, Mathematical, and Emotional Decision Processing

PubMed Central

Hsu, Chun-Wei; Goh, Joshua O. S.

2016-01-01

When comparing between the values of different choices, human beings can rely on either more cognitive processes, such as using mathematical computation, or more affective processes, such as using emotion. However, the neural correlates of how these two types of processes operate during value-based decision-making remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the extent to which neural regions engaged during value-based decision-making overlap with those engaged during mathematical and emotional processing in a within-subject manner. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, participants viewed stimuli that always consisted of numbers and emotional faces that depicted two choices. Across tasks, participants decided between the two choices based on the expected value of the numbers, a mathematical result of the numbers, or the emotional face stimuli. We found that all three tasks commonly involved various cortical areas including frontal, parietal, motor, somatosensory, and visual regions. Critically, the mathematical task shared common areas with the value but not emotion task in bilateral striatum. Although the emotion task overlapped with the value task in parietal, motor, and sensory areas, the mathematical task also evoked responses in other areas within these same cortical structures. Minimal areas were uniquely engaged for the value task apart from the other two tasks. The emotion task elicited a more expansive area of neural activity whereas value and mathematical task responses were in more focal regions. Whole-brain spatial correlation analysis showed that valuative processing engaged functional brain responses more similarly to mathematical processing than emotional processing. While decisions on expected value entail both mathematical and emotional processing regions, mathematical processes have a more prominent contribution particularly in subcortical processes. PMID:27375466

Distinct and Overlapping Brain Areas Engaged during Value-Based, Mathematical, and Emotional Decision Processing.

PubMed

Hsu, Chun-Wei; Goh, Joshua O S

2016-01-01

When comparing between the values of different choices, human beings can rely on either more cognitive processes, such as using mathematical computation, or more affective processes, such as using emotion. However, the neural correlates of how these two types of processes operate during value-based decision-making remain unclear. In this study, we investigated the extent to which neural regions engaged during value-based decision-making overlap with those engaged during mathematical and emotional processing in a within-subject manner. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, participants viewed stimuli that always consisted of numbers and emotional faces that depicted two choices. Across tasks, participants decided between the two choices based on the expected value of the numbers, a mathematical result of the numbers, or the emotional face stimuli. We found that all three tasks commonly involved various cortical areas including frontal, parietal, motor, somatosensory, and visual regions. Critically, the mathematical task shared common areas with the value but not emotion task in bilateral striatum. Although the emotion task overlapped with the value task in parietal, motor, and sensory areas, the mathematical task also evoked responses in other areas within these same cortical structures. Minimal areas were uniquely engaged for the value task apart from the other two tasks. The emotion task elicited a more expansive area of neural activity whereas value and mathematical task responses were in more focal regions. Whole-brain spatial correlation analysis showed that valuative processing engaged functional brain responses more similarly to mathematical processing than emotional processing. While decisions on expected value entail both mathematical and emotional processing regions, mathematical processes have a more prominent contribution particularly in subcortical processes.

Can conflict be energizing? a study of task conflict, positive emotions, and job satisfaction.

PubMed

Todorova, Gergana; Bear, Julia B; Weingart, Laurie R

2014-05-01

Scholars have assumed that the presence of negative emotions during task conflict implies the absence of positive emotions. However, emotions researchers have shown that positive and negative emotions are not 2 ends of a bipolar continuum; rather, they represent 2 separate, orthogonal dimensions. Drawing on affective events theory, we develop and test hypotheses about the effects of task conflict on positive emotions and job satisfaction. To this end, we distinguish among the frequency, intensity, and information gained from task conflict. Using field data from 232 employees in a long-term health care organization, we find that more frequent mild task conflict expression engenders more information acquisition, but more frequent intense task conflict expression hinders it. Because of the information gains from mild task conflict expression, employees feel more active, energized, interested, and excited, and these positive active emotions increase job satisfaction. The information gained during task conflict, however, is not always energizing: It depends on the extent to which the behavioral context involves active learning and whether the conflict is cross-functional. We discuss theoretical implications for conflict, emotions, and job satisfaction in organizations. (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Biased emotional attention in post-traumatic stress disorder: a help as well as a hindrance?

PubMed

Vythilingam, M; Blair, K S; McCaffrey, D; Scaramozza, M; Jones, M; Nakic, M; Mondillo, K; Hadd, K; Bonne, O; Mitchell, D G V; Pine, D S; Charney, D S; Blair, R J R

2007-10-01

From a cognitive neuroscience perspective, the emotional attentional bias in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be conceptualized either as emotional hyper-responsiveness or as reduced priming of task-relevant representations due to dysfunction in 'top-down' regulatory systems. We investigated these possibilities both with respect to threatening and positive stimuli among traumatized individuals with and without PTSD. Twenty-two patients with PTSD, 21 trauma controls and 20 non-traumatized healthy participants were evaluated on two tasks. For one of these tasks, the affective Stroop task (aST), the emotional stimuli act as distracters and interfere with task performance. For the other, the emotional lexical decision task (eLDT), emotional information facilitates task performance. Compared to trauma controls and healthy participants, patients with PTSD showed increased interference for negative but not positive distracters on the aST and increased emotional facilitation for negative words on the eLDT. These findings document that hyper-responsiveness to threat but not to positive stimuli is specific for patients with PTSD.

Inferior Frontal Gyrus Activation Underlies the Perception of Emotions, While Precuneus Activation Underlies the Feeling of Emotions during Music Listening.

PubMed

Tabei, Ken-ichi

2015-01-01

While music triggers many physiological and psychological reactions, the underlying neural basis of perceived and experienced emotions during music listening remains poorly understood. Therefore, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), I conducted a comparative study of the different brain areas involved in perceiving and feeling emotions during music listening. I measured fMRI signals while participants assessed the emotional expression of music (perceived emotion) and their emotional responses to music (felt emotion). I found that cortical areas including the prefrontal, auditory, cingulate, and posterior parietal cortices were consistently activated by the perceived and felt emotional tasks. Moreover, activity in the inferior frontal gyrus increased more during the perceived emotion task than during a passive listening task. In addition, the precuneus showed greater activity during the felt emotion task than during a passive listening task. The findings reveal that the bilateral inferior frontal gyri and the precuneus are important areas for the perception of the emotional content of music as well as for the emotional response evoked in the listener. Furthermore, I propose that the precuneus, a brain region associated with self-representation, might be involved in assessing emotional responses.

Facial emotion recognition deficits following moderate-severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI): re-examining the valence effect and the role of emotion intensity.

PubMed

Rosenberg, Hannah; McDonald, Skye; Dethier, Marie; Kessels, Roy P C; Westbrook, R Frederick

2014-11-01

Many individuals who sustain moderate-severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are poor at recognizing emotional expressions, with a greater impairment in recognizing negative (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness, and anger) than positive emotions (e.g., happiness and surprise). It has been questioned whether this "valence effect" might be an artifact of the wide use of static facial emotion stimuli (usually full-blown expressions) which differ in difficulty rather than a real consequence of brain impairment. This study aimed to investigate the valence effect in TBI, while examining emotion recognition across different intensities (low, medium, and high). Twenty-seven individuals with TBI and 28 matched control participants were tested on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). The TBI group was more impaired in overall emotion recognition, and less accurate recognizing negative emotions. However, examining the performance across the different intensities indicated that this difference was driven by some emotions (e.g., happiness) being much easier to recognize than others (e.g., fear and surprise). Our findings indicate that individuals with TBI have an overall deficit in facial emotion recognition, and that both people with TBI and control participants found some emotions more difficult than others. These results suggest that conventional measures of facial affect recognition that do not examine variance in the difficulty of emotions may produce erroneous conclusions about differential impairment. They also cast doubt on the notion that dissociable neural pathways underlie the recognition of positive and negative emotions, which are differentially affected by TBI and potentially other neurological or psychiatric disorders.

Cerebral Correlates of Emotional and Action Appraisals During Visual Processing of Emotional Scenes Depending on Spatial Frequency: A Pilot Study.

PubMed

Campagne, Aurélie; Fradcourt, Benoit; Pichat, Cédric; Baciu, Monica; Kauffmann, Louise; Peyrin, Carole

2016-01-01

Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the type of cognitive appraisal involved. The present fMRI pilot study aimed to investigate the cerebral correlates involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes in two tasks, one emotional, based on the appraisal of personal emotional experience, and the other motivational, based on the appraisal of the tendency to action. Given that the use of spatial frequency information is relatively flexible during the visual processing of emotional stimuli depending on the task's demands, we also explored the effect of the type of spatial frequency in visual stimuli in each task by using emotional scenes filtered in low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequencies (HSF). Activation was observed in the visual areas of the fusiform gyrus for all emotional scenes in both tasks, and in the amygdala for unpleasant scenes only. The motivational task induced additional activation in frontal motor-related areas (e.g. premotor cortex, SMA) and parietal regions (e.g. superior and inferior parietal lobules). Parietal regions were recruited particularly during the motivational appraisal of approach in response to pleasant scenes. These frontal and parietal activations, respectively, suggest that motor and navigation processes play a specific role in the identification of the tendency to action in the motivational task. Furthermore, activity observed in the motivational task, in response to both pleasant and unpleasant scenes, was significantly greater for HSF than for LSF scenes, suggesting that the tendency to action is driven mainly by the detailed information contained in scenes. Results for the emotional task suggest that spatial frequencies play only a small role in the evaluation of unpleasant and pleasant emotions. Our preliminary study revealed a partial distinction between visual processing of emotional scenes during identification of the tendency to action, and during identification of personal emotional experiences. It also illustrates flexible use of the spatial frequencies contained in scenes depending on their emotional valence and on task demands.

Impaired modulation of attention and emotion in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Dichter, Gabriel S; Bellion, Carolyn; Casp, Michael; Belger, Aysenil

2010-05-01

Fronto-limbic interactions facilitate the generation of task-relevant responses while inhibiting interference from emotionally distracting information. Schizophrenia is associated with deficits in both executive attention and affective regulation. This study aims to elucidate the neural correlates of emotion-attention regulation and shifting in schizophrenia. We employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to probe the fronto-limbic regions in 16 adults with schizophrenia and 13 matched adults with no history of psychiatric illness. Subjects performed a forced-choice visual oddball task where they detected infrequent target circles embedded in a series of infrequent nontarget aversive and neutral pictures and frequent squares. In control participants, target events activated a dorsal frontoparietal network, whereas these regions were deactivated by aversive stimuli. Conversely, ventral frontolimbic brain regions were activated by aversive stimuli and deactivated by target events. In the patient group, regional hemodynamic timecourses revealed not only reduced activation to target and aversive events in dorsal executive and ventral limbic regions, respectively, but also reduced deactivation to target and aversive stimuli in ventral and dorsal regions, respectively, relative to the control group. Patients further showed reduced spatial extent of activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus during the target and aversive conditions. Activation of the anterior cingulate to aversive images was inversely related to severity of avolition and anhedonia symptoms in the schizophrenia group. These results suggest both frontal and limbic dysfunction in schizophrenia as well as aberrant reciprocal inhibitions between these regions during attention-emotion modulation in this disorder.

Emotion brain alterations in anorexia nervosa: a candidate biological marker and implications for treatment

PubMed Central

Hatch, Ainslie; Madden, Sloane; Kohn, Michael R.; Clarke, Simon; Touyz, Stephen; Gordon, Evian; Williams, Leanne M.

2010-01-01

Background Identification of the biological markers of anorexia nervosa (AN) is crucial for the development of new treatments. We aimed to determine whether AN is associated with disturbances in the nonconscious neural processing of innate signals of emotion and whether these disturbances persist after weight gain. Methods In a retest design, 28 adolescent females with AN were tested at first admission to hospital and again after they had gained weight. Matched healthy control participants were tested at the same times. We assessed emotion-elicited event-related potentials (ERPs) during overt and covert presentation of emotion expressions, scores on an emotion-identification behavioural task, and symptom measures. We performed between and within group analyses. Results Individuals with AN had a marked alteration in ERPs relative to healthy controls. Irrespective of the form of stimulus, early and late ERP components were significantly reduced in AN patients at baseline (when underweight) and on retest (after weight gain), especially in the temporo-occipital regions, suggesting a persistent disruption of the early automatic appraisal of salient emotional signals. Limitations This study could have been improved with a longer standardized retest interval. Conclusion There is likely a core, generic disturbance in AN in the early “automatic” neural processing of emotion irrespective of weight or nutritional status. New innovative emotion-based psychologic or pharmacologic treatments targeting these nonconscious processes may prove beneficial. PMID:20598239

Emotion brain alterations in anorexia nervosa: a candidate biological marker and implications for treatment.

PubMed

Hatch, Ainslie; Madden, Sloane; Kohn, Michael R; Clarke, Simon; Touyz, Stephen; Gordon, Evian; Williams, Leanne M

2010-07-01

Identification of the biological markers of anorexia nervosa (AN) is crucial for the development of new treatments. We aimed to determine whether AN is associated with disturbances in the nonconscious neural processing of innate signals of emotion and whether these disturbances persist after weight gain. In a retest design, 28 adolescent females with AN were tested at first ad not mission to hospital and again after they had gained weight. Matched healthy control participants were tested at the same times. We assessed emotion-elicited event-related potentials (ERPs) during overt and covert presentation of emotion expressions, scores on an emotion-identification behavioural task, and symptom measures. We performed between and within group analyses. Individuals with AN had a marked alteration in ERPs relative to healthy controls. Irrespective of the form of stimulus, early and late ERP componotnents were significantly reduced in AN patients at baseline (when underweight) and on retest (after weight gain), especially in the temporo-occipital regions, suggesting a persistent disruption of the early automatic appraisal of salient emotional signals. This study could have been improved with a longer standardized retest interval. There is likely a core, generic disturbance in AN in the early "automatic" neural processing of emotion irrespective of weight or nutritional status. New innovative emotion-based psychologic or pharmacologic treatments targeting these nonconscious processes may prove beneficial.

Inhibiting reactions to emotional versus non-emotional response cues in schizophrenia: Insights from a motor-process paradigm.

PubMed

Patrick, Regan E; Christensen, Bruce K; Smolewska, Kathy

2016-03-01

Recent models of schizophrenia suggest deficient use of contextual response cues when confronted with countermanding emotional cues. It is important to clinically validate these models by testing patients diagnosed with schizophrenia on tasks with competing emotional and contextual response determinants. Control and schizophrenia groups completed a novel task that elicited motor responses consistent with, or in opposition to, pre-potent emotional actions (i.e., approach vs. avoidance). An analogous non-emotional task was also used to examine cue-conflict impairment more generally. The groups demonstrated statistically equivalent performance decrements on incongruent versus congruent trials on both tasks. However, within the schizophrenia group, the incongruency effect was significantly greater in the emotional versus non-emotional task. These data suggest that, while patients with schizophrenia were able to employ contextual response cues to override competing emotional responses, they were slower to resolve emotional versus non-emotional response conflict. When patients were subdivided according to the presence or absence of disorganized symptoms, this effect was confined to patients with disorganized symptoms. © 2014 The British Psychological Society.

Emotional verbal fluency: a new task on emotion and executive function interaction.

PubMed

Sass, Katharina; Fetz, Karolina; Oetken, Sarah; Habel, Ute; Heim, Stefan

2013-09-01

The present study introduces "Emotional Verbal Fluency" as a novel (partially computerized) task, which is aimed to investigate the interaction between emotionally loaded words and executive functions. Verbal fluency tasks are thought to measure executive functions but the interaction with emotional aspects is hardly investigated. In the current study, a group of healthy subjects (n = 21, mean age 25 years, 76% females) were asked to generate items that are either part of a semantic category (e.g., plants, toys, vehicles; standard semantic verbal fluency) or can trigger the emotions joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The results of the task revealed no differences between performance on semantic and emotional categories, suggesting a comparable task difficulty for healthy subjects. Hence, these first results on the comparison between semantic and emotional verbal fluency seem to highlight that both might be suitable for examining executive functioning. However, an interaction was found between the category type and repetition (first vs. second sequence of the same category) with larger performance decrease for semantic in comparison to emotional categories. Best performance overall was found for the emotional category "joy" suggesting a positivity bias in healthy subjects. To conclude, emotional verbal fluency is a promising approach to investigate emotional components in an executive task, which may stimulate further research, especially in psychiatric patients who suffer from emotional as well as cognitive deficits.

Emotional Verbal Fluency: A New Task on Emotion and Executive Function Interaction

PubMed Central

Sass, Katharina; Fetz, Karolina; Oetken, Sarah; Habel, Ute; Heim, Stefan

2013-01-01

The present study introduces “Emotional Verbal Fluency” as a novel (partially computerized) task, which is aimed to investigate the interaction between emotionally loaded words and executive functions. Verbal fluency tasks are thought to measure executive functions but the interaction with emotional aspects is hardly investigated. In the current study, a group of healthy subjects (n = 21, mean age 25 years, 76% females) were asked to generate items that are either part of a semantic category (e.g., plants, toys, vehicles; standard semantic verbal fluency) or can trigger the emotions joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The results of the task revealed no differences between performance on semantic and emotional categories, suggesting a comparable task difficulty for healthy subjects. Hence, these first results on the comparison between semantic and emotional verbal fluency seem to highlight that both might be suitable for examining executive functioning. However, an interaction was found between the category type and repetition (first vs. second sequence of the same category) with larger performance decrease for semantic in comparison to emotional categories. Best performance overall was found for the emotional category “joy” suggesting a positivity bias in healthy subjects. To conclude, emotional verbal fluency is a promising approach to investigate emotional components in an executive task, which may stimulate further research, especially in psychiatric patients who suffer from emotional as well as cognitive deficits. PMID:25379243

The music of your emotions: neural substrates involved in detection of emotional correspondence between auditory and visual music actions.

PubMed

Petrini, Karin; Crabbe, Frances; Sheridan, Carol; Pollick, Frank E

2011-04-29

In humans, emotions from music serve important communicative roles. Despite a growing interest in the neural basis of music perception, action and emotion, the majority of previous studies in this area have focused on the auditory aspects of music performances. Here we investigate how the brain processes the emotions elicited by audiovisual music performances. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, and in Experiment 1 we defined the areas responding to audiovisual (musician's movements with music), visual (musician's movements only), and auditory emotional (music only) displays. Subsequently a region of interest analysis was performed to examine if any of the areas detected in Experiment 1 showed greater activation for emotionally mismatching performances (combining the musician's movements with mismatching emotional sound) than for emotionally matching music performances (combining the musician's movements with matching emotional sound) as presented in Experiment 2 to the same participants. The insula and the left thalamus were found to respond consistently to visual, auditory and audiovisual emotional information and to have increased activation for emotionally mismatching displays in comparison with emotionally matching displays. In contrast, the right thalamus was found to respond to audiovisual emotional displays and to have similar activation for emotionally matching and mismatching displays. These results suggest that the insula and left thalamus have an active role in detecting emotional correspondence between auditory and visual information during music performances, whereas the right thalamus has a different role.

Math anxiety and developmental dyscalculia: A study on working memory processes.

PubMed

Mammarella, Irene C; Hill, Francesca; Devine, Amy; Caviola, Sara; Szűcs, Dénes

2015-01-01

Although many children encounter difficulties in arithmetic, the underlying cognitive and emotive factors are still not fully understood. This study examined verbal and visuospatial short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) performance in children with developmental dyscalculia (DD) and high mathematics anxiety (MA) compared with typically developing (TD) children. Groups were matched on reading comprehension performance and IQ as well as on general anxiety. We aimed to test whether children with DD and MA were differently impaired in verbal and visuospatial STM and WM. Children were individually tested with four computerized tasks: two STM tasks (forward verbal and visuospatial recall) and two WM tasks (backward verbal and visuospatial recall). Relative to children with TD, those with DD did not show impairments on the forward or backward verbal tasks, but showed specific impairments in the visuospatial WM task. In contrast, children with MA were particularly impaired in the verbal WM task. Knowing the underlying cognitive processes that differentiate why children with DD and MA fail in math could have both educational and clinical implications.

Affective experience and motivated behavior in schizophrenia spectrum disorders: Evidence from clinical and nonclinical samples.

PubMed

Lui, Simon S Y; Shi, Yan-Fang; Au, Angie C W; Li, Zhi; Tsui, Chi F; Chan, Constance K Y; Leung, Meranda M W; Wong, Peony T Y; Wang, Yi; Yan, Chao; Heerey, Erin A; Cheung, Eric F C; Chan, Raymond C K

2016-09-01

Individuals with schizophrenia have been found to exhibit emotion-behavior decoupling, particularly with respect to anticipated, rather than experienced events. However, previous research has focused on how emotion valence translates into motivated behavior, ignoring the fact that emotion arousal should also modulate emotion-behavior coupling. Few studies have examined emotion-behavior coupling in prepsychotic conditions. This investigation aimed to examine the nature and extent of emotion valence- and arousal-behavior coupling across the schizophrenia spectrum. We examine how emotional valence and arousal couple with behavior in 3 groups of individuals (25 individuals with chronic schizophrenia; 27 individuals early in the disease course, and 31 individuals reporting negative schizotypal symptoms). Participants completed a task using slides to elicit emotion and evoke motivated behavior. We compared participants with their respective matched control groups to determine differences in the correspondence between self-reported emotion valence/arousal and motivated behavior. Both groups with schizophrenia reported similar affective experiences as their controls, whereas individuals reporting negative schizotypal symptoms showed "in-the-moment" anhedonia but not emotion-behavior decoupling. In addition, the schizophrenia groups' affective experiences corresponded less well to their behavior relative to controls. Our findings suggest emotion-behavior decoupling along both valence and arousal dimensions in schizophrenia but not in participants with high levels of schizotypal symptoms. Findings appear to support the idea that emotion-behavior decoupling differs in nature and extent across the schizophrenia spectrum. Interventions to recouple emotion and behavior may be particularly helpful in allowing people with schizophrenia to gain functional independence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Explicit attention interferes with selective emotion processing in human extrastriate cortex.

PubMed

Schupp, Harald T; Stockburger, Jessica; Bublatzky, Florian; Junghöfer, Markus; Weike, Almut I; Hamm, Alfons O

2007-02-22

Brain imaging and event-related potential studies provide strong evidence that emotional stimuli guide selective attention in visual processing. A reflection of the emotional attention capture is the increased Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) for pleasant and unpleasant compared to neutral images (approximately 150-300 ms poststimulus). The present study explored whether this early emotion discrimination reflects an automatic phenomenon or is subject to interference by competing processing demands. Thus, emotional processing was assessed while participants performed a concurrent feature-based attention task varying in processing demands. Participants successfully performed the primary visual attention task as revealed by behavioral performance and selected event-related potential components (Selection Negativity and P3b). Replicating previous results, emotional modulation of the EPN was observed in a task condition with low processing demands. In contrast, pleasant and unpleasant pictures failed to elicit increased EPN amplitudes compared to neutral images in more difficult explicit attention task conditions. Further analyses determined that even the processing of pleasant and unpleasant pictures high in emotional arousal is subject to interference in experimental conditions with high task demand. Taken together, performing demanding feature-based counting tasks interfered with differential emotion processing indexed by the EPN. The present findings demonstrate that taxing processing resources by a competing primary visual attention task markedly attenuated the early discrimination of emotional from neutral picture contents. Thus, these results provide further empirical support for an interference account of the emotion-attention interaction under conditions of competition. Previous studies revealed the interference of selective emotion processing when attentional resources were directed to locations of explicitly task-relevant stimuli. The present data suggest that interference of emotion processing by competing task demands is a more general phenomenon extending to the domain of feature-based attention. Furthermore, the results are inconsistent with the notion of effortlessness, i.e., early emotion discrimination despite concurrent task demands. These findings implicate to assess the presumed automatic nature of emotion processing at the level of specific aspects rather than considering automaticity as an all-or-none phenomenon.

Explicit attention interferes with selective emotion processing in human extrastriate cortex

PubMed Central

Schupp, Harald T; Stockburger, Jessica; Bublatzky, Florian; Junghöfer, Markus; Weike, Almut I; Hamm, Alfons O

2007-01-01

Background Brain imaging and event-related potential studies provide strong evidence that emotional stimuli guide selective attention in visual processing. A reflection of the emotional attention capture is the increased Early Posterior Negativity (EPN) for pleasant and unpleasant compared to neutral images (~150–300 ms poststimulus). The present study explored whether this early emotion discrimination reflects an automatic phenomenon or is subject to interference by competing processing demands. Thus, emotional processing was assessed while participants performed a concurrent feature-based attention task varying in processing demands. Results Participants successfully performed the primary visual attention task as revealed by behavioral performance and selected event-related potential components (Selection Negativity and P3b). Replicating previous results, emotional modulation of the EPN was observed in a task condition with low processing demands. In contrast, pleasant and unpleasant pictures failed to elicit increased EPN amplitudes compared to neutral images in more difficult explicit attention task conditions. Further analyses determined that even the processing of pleasant and unpleasant pictures high in emotional arousal is subject to interference in experimental conditions with high task demand. Taken together, performing demanding feature-based counting tasks interfered with differential emotion processing indexed by the EPN. Conclusion The present findings demonstrate that taxing processing resources by a competing primary visual attention task markedly attenuated the early discrimination of emotional from neutral picture contents. Thus, these results provide further empirical support for an interference account of the emotion-attention interaction under conditions of competition. Previous studies revealed the interference of selective emotion processing when attentional resources were directed to locations of explicitly task-relevant stimuli. The present data suggest that interference of emotion processing by competing task demands is a more general phenomenon extending to the domain of feature-based attention. Furthermore, the results are inconsistent with the notion of effortlessness, i.e., early emotion discrimination despite concurrent task demands. These findings implicate to assess the presumed automatic nature of emotion processing at the level of specific aspects rather than considering automaticity as an all-or-none phenomenon. PMID:17316444

Neural Reactivity to Angry Faces Predicts Treatment Response in Pediatric Anxiety

PubMed Central

Kujawa, Autumn; Fitzgerald, Kate D.; Swain, James E.; Hanna, Gregory L.; Koschmann, Elizabeth; Simpson, David; Connolly, Sucheta; Monk, Christopher S.; Phan, K. Luan

2018-01-01

Although cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy are evidence-based treatments for pediatric anxiety, many youth with anxiety disorders fail to respond to these treatments. Given limitations of clinical measures in predicting treatment response, identifying neural predictors is timely. In this study, 35 anxious youth (ages 7–19 years) completed an emotional face-matching task during which the late positive potential (LPP), an event-related potential (ERP) component that indexes sustained attention towards emotional stimuli, was measured. Following the ERP measurement, youth received CBT or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) treatment, and the LPP was examined as a predictor of treatment response. Findings indicated that, accounting for pre-treatment anxiety severity, neural reactivity to emotional faces predicted anxiety severity post-CBT and SSRI treatment such that enhanced electrocortical response to angry faces was associated with better treatment response. An enhanced LPP to angry faces may predict treatment response insofar as it may reflect greater emotion dysregulation or less avoidance and/or enhanced engagement with environmental stimuli in general, including with treatment. PMID:27255517

Unaltered emotional experience in Parkinson's disease: Pupillometry and behavioral evidence.

PubMed

Schwartz, Rachel; Rothermich, Kathrin; Kotz, Sonja A; Pell, Marc D

2018-04-01

Recognizing emotions in others is a pivotal part of socioemotional functioning and plays a central role in social interactions. It has been shown that individuals suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) are less accurate at identifying basic emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness; however, previous studies have predominantly assessed emotion processing using unimodal stimuli (e.g., pictures) that do not reflect the complexity of real-world processing demands. Dynamic, naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) have been shown to elicit stronger subjective emotional experiences than unimodal stimuli and can facilitate emotion recognition. In this experiment, pupil measurements of PD patients and matched healthy controls (HC) were recorded while they watched short film clips. Participants' task was to identify the emotion elicited by each clip and rate the intensity of their emotional response. We explored (a) how PD affects subjective emotional experience in response to dynamic, ecologically valid film stimuli, and (b) whether there are PD-related changes in pupillary response, which may contribute to the differences in emotion processing reported in the literature. Behavioral results showed that identification of the felt emotion as well as perceived intensity varies by emotion, but no significant group effect was found. Pupil measurements revealed differences in dilation depending on the emotion evoked by the film clips (happy, tender, sadness, fear, and neutral) for both groups. Our results suggest that differences in emotional response may be negligible when PD patients and healthy controls are presented with dynamic, ecologically valid emotional stimuli. Given the limited data available on pupil response in PD, this study provides new evidence to suggest that the PD-related deficits in emotion processing reported in the literature may not translate to real-world differences in physiological or subjective emotion processing in early-stage PD patients.

Testosterone Modulates Altered Prefrontal Control of Emotional Actions in Psychopathic Offenders(1,2,3).

PubMed

Volman, Inge; von Borries, Anna Katinka Louise; Bulten, Berend Hendrik; Verkes, Robbert Jan; Toni, Ivan; Roelofs, Karin

2016-01-01

Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their controlled goal-directed aggressive behavior. Yet, during social challenges, they often show uncontrolled emotional behavior. Healthy individuals can control their social emotional behavior through anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) downregulation of neural activity in the amygdala, with testosterone modulating aPFC-amygdala coupling. This study tests whether individual differences in this neuroendocrine system relate to the paradoxical lack of emotional control observed in human psychopathic offenders. Emotional control was operationalized with an fMRI-adapted approach-avoidance task requiring rule-driven control over rapid emotional responses. Fifteen psychopathic offenders and 19 matched healthy control subjects made approaching and avoiding movements in response to emotional faces. Control of social emotional behavior was required during affect-incongruent trials, when participants had to override affect-congruent, automatic action tendencies and select the opposite response. Psychopathic offenders showed less control-related aPFC activity and aPFC-amygdala coupling during trials requiring control of emotional actions, when compared with healthy control subjects. This pattern was particularly pronounced in psychopathic individuals with high endogenous testosterone levels. These findings suggest that reduced prefrontal coordination underlies reduced behavioral control in psychopathic offenders during emotionally provoking situations. Even though the modest sample size warrants replication, the modulatory role of endogenous testosterone on the aPFC-amygdala circuit suggests a neurobiological substrate of individual differences that is relevant for the advancement of treatment and the reduction of recidivism.

Temporal profile of brain response to alprazolam in patients with generalized anxiety disorder.

PubMed

Brown, Gregory G; Ostrowitzki, Susanne; Stein, Murray B; von Kienlin, Markus; Liu, Thomas T; Simmons, Alan; Wierenga, Christina; Stein, Orah Y; Bruns, Andreas; Bischoff-Grethe, Amanda; Paulus, Martin

2015-09-30

This study investigated the temporal pattern of brain response to emotional stimuli during 28 days of alprazolam treatment among patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) randomized 2:1 to drug or placebo in a double-blind design. Functional magnetic resonance imaging scans obtained during an emotion face matching task (EFMT) and an affective stimulus expectancy task (STIMEX) were performed at baseline, one hour after initial drug administration and 28 days later. Alprazolam significantly reduced scores on the Hamilton Anxiety Scale and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire after one week and 28 days of treatment. Brain activation in the amygdala during the EFMT and in the insula during the STIMEX was reduced one hour after alprazolam administration but returned to baseline levels at Day 28. Exploratory analyses revealed significant treatment differences in brain activity during the STIMEX on Day 28 in frontal lobe, caudate nucleus, middle temporal gyrus, secondary visual cortex, and supramarginal gyrus. These results are consistent with the notion that the neural mechanisms supporting sustained treatment effects of benzodiazepines in GAD differ from those underlying their acute effects. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd.

When sex hurts, anxiety and fear orient attention towards pain.

PubMed

Payne, Kimberley A; Binik, Yitzchak M; Amsel, Rhonda; Khalifé, Samir

2005-08-01

Hypervigilance for pain-relevant stimuli has been associated with anxiety, fear of pain and anxiety sensitivity. This attentional bias has been primarily investigated in heterogeneous pain groups or pain-free controls, but has not been examined in pain conditions where anxiety and fear are likely to play a central role. Due to the intimate and interpersonal nature of genital pain experienced during sexual intercourse, Vulvar Vestibulitis Syndrome (VVS) constitutes an ideal sample in which to investigate the role of cognitive and affective factors in pain perception and maintenance. Seventeen women suffering from VVS and an equal number of age and education matched control women completed an emotional Stroop and memory recall task in addition to a series of questionnaires assessing pain-hypervigilance, state and trait anxiety, fear of pain, and anxiety sensitivity. VVS sufferers reported hypervigilance for coital pain and also exhibited a selective attentional bias towards pain stimuli on the emotional Stroop task as compared with controls. This effect was predicted by state and trait anxiety and fear of pain. According to these data, treament strategies for VVS should target anxiety and fear in addition to sensory systems.

Neuropsychological correlates of cognitive, emotional-affective and auto-activation apathy in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Perri, Roberta; Turchetta, Chiara Stella; Caruso, Giulia; Fadda, Lucia; Caltagirone, Carlo; Carlesimo, Augusto Giovanni

2018-01-31

Apathy symptoms include different dimensions: cognitive (C), emotional-affective (E-Aff) and auto-activation; they have been related to dysfunctions of the dorsolateral, orbito-basal prefrontal cortex and the subcortical frontal connections to the basal ganglia, respectively. In Alzheimer's disease (AD), an association has been found between apathy severity and both executive deficits and atrophy of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex; however, it is not clear whether these associations concern only the cognitive aspects of apathy. Furthermore, whether there is an association in AD between E-aff apathy and theory of mind (ToM),the cognitive functions subsumed by the orbito-basal prefrontal cortex, has not been investigated. Aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between C, E-Aff and auto-activation apathy and performance on tasks investigating executive and ToM cognitive functions in AD. For this purpose, 20 AD patients with apathy and 20 matched controls were submitted to an executive and ToM neuropsychological assessment. Apathy was assessed with a weekly diary (ApD) created specifically to assist caregivers in quantifying the C, E-Aff and auto-activation symptomatology of apathy. Correlational analyses showed that AD patients' scores on the Modified Card Sorting Test (MCST) and Emotion Attribution tasks were correlated with most ApD scores. However, regression analyses showed that C diary scores were predicted by MCST performance, E-Aff diary scores by performance on the E-Attribution task and ApD scores measuring auto-activation apathy were predicted by both the MCST and the Emotion Attribution scores. These results confirm the co-occurrence of apathy and executive-function deficits in AD and suggest a specific association between AD patients' executive deficits and the cognitive component of apathy. Furthermore, they document, for the first time, an association between poor performance on tests assessing ToM abilities and the emotional-affective component of apathy in AD patients. Finally, these results are in line with the view that auto-activation apathy reflects the sum of emotional and cognitive processing deficits. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Short-term testosterone manipulations modulate visual recognition memory and some aspects of emotional reactivity in male rhesus monkeys.

PubMed

Lacreuse, Agnès; Gore, Heather E; Chang, Jeemin; Kaplan, Emily R

2012-05-15

The role of testosterone (T) in modulating cognitive function and emotion in men remains unclear. The paucity of animal studies has likely contributed to the slow progress in this area. In particular, studies in nonhuman primates have been lacking. Our laboratory has begun to address this issue by pharmacologically manipulating T levels in intact male rhesus monkeys, using blind, placebo-controlled, crossover designs. We previously found that T-suppressed monkeys receiving supraphysiological T for 4 weeks had lower visual recognition memory for long delays and enhanced attention to videos of negative social stimuli (Lacreuse et al., 2009, 2010) compared to when treated with oil. To further delineate the conditions under which T affects cognition and emotion, the present study focused on the short-term effects of physiological T. Six intact males were treated with the gonadotropin-releasing hormone antagonist degarelix (3 mg/kg) for 7 days and received one injection of T enanthate (5 mg/kg) followed by one injection of oil vehicle 7 days later (n=3), or the reverse treatment (n=3). Performance on two computerized tasks, the Delayed-non-matching-to-sample (DNMS) with random delays and the object-Delayed Recognition Span test (object-DRST) and one task of emotional reactivity, an approach/avoidance task of negative, familiar and novel objects, was examined at baseline and 3-5 days after treatment. DNMS performance was significantly better when monkeys were treated with T compared to oil, independently of the delay duration or the nature (emotional or neutral) of the stimuli. Performance on the object-DRST was unaffected. Interestingly, subtle changes in emotional reactivity were also observed: T administration was associated with fewer object contacts, especially on negative objects, without overt changes in anxious behaviors. These results may reflect increased vigilance and alertness with high T. Altogether, the data suggest that changes in general arousal may underlie the beneficial effects of T on DNMS performance. This hypothesis will require further study with objective measures of physiological arousal. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Selecting fillers on emotional appearance improves lineup identification accuracy.

PubMed

Flowe, Heather D; Klatt, Thimna; Colloff, Melissa F

2014-12-01

Mock witnesses sometimes report using criminal stereotypes to identify a face from a lineup, a tendency known as criminal face bias. Faces are perceived as criminal-looking if they appear angry. We tested whether matching the emotional appearance of the fillers to an angry suspect can reduce criminal face bias. In Study 1, mock witnesses (n = 226) viewed lineups in which the suspect had an angry, happy, or neutral expression, and we varied whether the fillers matched the expression. An additional group of participants (n = 59) rated the faces on criminal and emotional appearance. As predicted, mock witnesses tended to identify suspects who appeared angrier and more criminal-looking than the fillers. This tendency was reduced when the lineup fillers matched the emotional appearance of the suspect. Study 2 extended the results, testing whether the emotional appearance of the suspect and fillers affects recognition memory. Participants (n = 1,983) studied faces and took a lineup test in which the emotional appearance of the target and fillers was varied between subjects. Discrimination accuracy was enhanced when the fillers matched an angry target's emotional appearance. We conclude that lineup member emotional appearance plays a critical role in the psychology of lineup identification. The fillers should match an angry suspect's emotional appearance to improve lineup identification accuracy. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Positive emotion impedes emotional but not cognitive conflict processing.

PubMed

Zinchenko, Artyom; Obermeier, Christian; Kanske, Philipp; Schröger, Erich; Kotz, Sonja A

2017-06-01

Cognitive control enables successful goal-directed behavior by resolving a conflict between opposing action tendencies, while emotional control arises as a consequence of emotional conflict processing such as in irony. While negative emotion facilitates both cognitive and emotional conflict processing, it is unclear how emotional conflict processing is affected by positive emotion (e.g., humor). In 2 EEG experiments, we investigated the role of positive audiovisual target stimuli in cognitive and emotional conflict processing. Participants categorized either spoken vowels (cognitive task) or their emotional valence (emotional task) and ignored the visual stimulus dimension. Behaviorally, a positive target showed no influence on cognitive conflict processing, but impeded emotional conflict processing. In the emotional task, response time conflict costs were higher for positive than for neutral targets. In the EEG, we observed an interaction of emotion by congruence in the P200 and N200 ERP components in emotional but not in cognitive conflict processing. In the emotional conflict task, the P200 and N200 conflict effect was larger for emotional than neutral targets. Thus, our results show that emotion affects conflict processing differently as a function of conflict type and emotional valence. This suggests that there are conflict- and valence-specific mechanisms modulating executive control.

The course of visual searching to a target in a fixed location: electrophysiological evidence from an emotional flanker task.

PubMed

Dong, Guangheng; Yang, Lizhu; Shen, Yue

2009-08-21

The present study investigated the course of visual searching to a target in a fixed location, using an emotional flanker task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed the task. Emotional facial expressions were used as emotion-eliciting triggers. The course of visual searching was analyzed through the emotional effects arising from these emotion-eliciting stimuli. The flanker stimuli showed effects at about 150-250 ms following the stimulus onset, while the effect of target stimuli showed effects at about 300-400 ms. The visual search sequence in an emotional flanker task moved from a whole overview to a specific target, even if the target always appeared at a known location. The processing sequence was "parallel" in this task. The results supported the feature integration theory of visual search.

Task relevance regulates the interaction between reward expectation and emotion.

PubMed

Wei, Ping; Kang, Guanlan

2014-06-01

In the present study, we investigated the impact of reward expectation on the processing of emotional facial expression using a cue-target paradigm. A cue indicating the reward condition of each trial (incentive vs. non-incentive) was followed by the presentation of a picture of an emotional face, the target. Participants were asked to discriminate the emotional expression of the target face in Experiment 1, to discriminate the gender of the target face in Experiment 2, and to judge a number superimposed on the center of the target face as even or odd in Experiment 3, rendering the emotional expression of the target face as task relevant in Experiment 1 but task irrelevant in Experiments 2 and 3. Faster reaction times (RTs) were observed in the monetary incentive condition than in the non-incentive condition, demonstrating the effect of reward on facilitating task concentration. Moreover, the reward effect (i.e., RTs in non-incentive conditions versus incentive conditions) was larger for emotional faces than for neutral faces when emotional expression was task relevant but not when it was task irrelevant. The findings suggest that top-down incentive motivation biased attentional processing toward task-relevant stimuli, and that task relevance played an important role in regulating the influence of reward expectation on the processing of emotional stimuli.

The influence of emotional interference on cognitive control: A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies using the emotional Stroop task.

PubMed

Song, Sensen; Zilverstand, Anna; Song, Hongwen; d'Oleire Uquillas, Federico; Wang, Yongming; Xie, Chao; Cheng, Li; Zou, Zhiling

2017-05-18

The neural correlates underlying the influence of emotional interference on cognitive control remain a topic of discussion. Here, we assessed 16 neuroimaging studies that used an emotional Stroop task and that reported a significant interaction effect between emotion (stimulus type) and cognitive conflict. There were a total of 330 participants, equaling 132 foci for an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis. Results revealed consistent brain activation patterns related to emotionally-salient stimuli (as compared to emotionally-neutral trials) during cognitive conflict trials [incongruent trials (with task-irrelevant information interfering), versus congruent/baseline trials (less disturbance from task-irrelevant information)], that span the lateral prefrontal cortex (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus), the medial prefrontal cortex, and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Comparing mild emotional interference trials (without semantic conflict) versus intense emotional interference trials (with semantic conflict), revealed that while concurrent activation in similar brain regions as mentioned above was found for intense emotional interference trials, activation for mild emotional interference trials was only found in the precentral/postcentral gyrus. These data provide evidence for the potential neural mechanisms underlying emotional interference on cognitive control, and further elucidate an important distinction in brain activation patterns for different levels of emotional conflict across emotional Stroop tasks.

Neural correlates of impaired emotion processing in manifest Huntington's disease.

PubMed

Dogan, Imis; Saß, Christian; Mirzazade, Shahram; Kleiman, Alexandra; Werner, Cornelius J; Pohl, Anna; Schiefer, Johannes; Binkofski, Ferdinand; Schulz, Jörg B; Shah, N Jon; Reetz, Kathrin

2014-05-01

The complex phenotype of Huntington's disease (HD) encompasses motor, psychiatric and cognitive dysfunctions, including early impairments in emotion recognition. In this first functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated emotion-processing deficits in 14 manifest HD patients and matched controls. An emotion recognition task comprised short video clips displaying one of six basic facial expressions (sadness, happiness, disgust, fear, anger and neutral). Structural changes between patients and controls were assessed by means of voxel-based morphometry. Along with deficient recognition of negative emotions, patients exhibited predominantly lower neural response to stimuli of negative valences in the amygdala, hippocampus, striatum, insula, cingulate and prefrontal cortices, as well as in sensorimotor, temporal and visual areas. Most of the observed reduced activity patterns could not be explained merely by regional volume loss. Reduced activity in the thalamus during fear correlated with lower thalamic volumes. During the processing of sadness, patients exhibited enhanced amygdala and hippocampal activity along with reduced recruitment of the medial prefrontal cortex. Higher amygdala activity was related to more pronounced amygdala atrophy and disease burden. Overall, the observed emotion-related dysfunctions in the context of structural neurodegeneration suggest both disruptions of striatal-thalamo-cortical loops and potential compensation mechanism with greater disease severity in manifest HD.

Preschool negative emotionality predicts activity and connectivity of the fusiform face area and amygdala in later childhood.

PubMed

Kann, Sarah J; O'Rawe, Jonathan F; Huang, Anna S; Klein, Daniel N; Leung, Hoi-Chung

2017-09-01

Negative emotionality (NE) refers to individual differences in the propensity to experience and react with negative emotions and is associated with increased risk of psychological disorder. However, research on the neural bases of NE has focused almost exclusively on amygdala activity during emotional face processing. This study broadened this framework by examining the relationship between observed NE in early childhood and subsequent neural responses to emotional faces in both the amygdala and the fusiform face area (FFA) in a late childhood/early adolescent sample. Measures of NE were obtained from children at age 3 using laboratory observations, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected when these children were between the ages of 9 and 12 while performing a visual stimulus identity matching task with houses and emotional faces as stimuli. Multiple regression analyses revealed that higher NE at age 3 is associated with significantly greater activation in the left amygdala and left FFA but lower functional connectivity between these two regions during the face conditions. These findings suggest that those with higher early NE have subsequent alterations in both activity and connectivity within an extended network during face processing. © The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press.

Childhood trauma exposure disrupts the automatic regulation of emotional processing.

PubMed

Marusak, Hilary A; Martin, Kayla R; Etkin, Amit; Thomason, Moriah E

2015-03-13

Early-life trauma is one of the strongest risk factors for later emotional psychopathology. Although research in adults highlights that childhood trauma predicts deficits in emotion regulation that persist decades later, it is unknown whether neural and behavioral changes that may precipitate illness are evident during formative, developmental years. This study examined whether automatic regulation of emotional conflict is perturbed in a high-risk urban sample of trauma-exposed children and adolescents. A total of 14 trauma-exposed and 16 age-, sex-, and IQ-matched comparison youth underwent functional MRI while performing an emotional conflict task that involved categorizing facial affect while ignoring an overlying emotion word. Engagement of the conflict regulation system was evaluated at neural and behavioral levels. Results showed that trauma-exposed youth failed to dampen dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity and engage amygdala-pregenual cingulate inhibitory circuitry during the regulation of emotional conflict, and were less able to regulate emotional conflict. In addition, trauma-exposed youth showed greater conflict-related amygdala reactivity that was associated with diminished levels of trait reward sensitivity. These data point to a trauma-related deficit in automatic regulation of emotional processing, and increase in sensitivity to emotional conflict in neural systems implicated in threat detection. Aberrant amygdala response to emotional conflict was related to diminished reward sensitivity that is emerging as a critical stress-susceptibility trait that may contribute to the emergence of mental illness during adolescence. These results suggest that deficits in conflict regulation for emotional material may underlie heightened risk for psychopathology in individuals that endure early-life trauma.

Explicit and Implicit Components of the Emotional Processing in Non-organic Vision Loss: Behavioral Evidence About the Role of Fear in Functional Blindness

PubMed Central

Scarpina, Federica; Melzi, Lisa; Castelnuovo, Gianluca; Mauro, Alessandro; Marzoli, Stefania B.; Molinari, Enrico

2018-01-01

Non-organic vision loss (NOVL), a functional partial or global vision loss, might be considered a manifestation of conversion disorder. The few previous studies focused on investigating the relationship between cerebral activity and subjective symptoms in NOVL; however, the emotional processing is still neglected. In the present case-controls study, we investigated the capability of two individuals diagnosed with NOVL to recognize implicitly the emotions of fear and anger; this was assessed through a facial emotion recognition task based on the redundant target effect. In addition, the level of alexithymia was measured by asking them to judge explicitly their ability to identify and describe emotions. Both individuals showed selective difficulties in recognizing the emotion of fear when their performance was contrasted with a matched control sample; they also mislabeled other emotional stimuli, judging them as fearful, when they were not. However, they did not report alexithymia when measured using a standard questionnaire. This preliminary investigation reports a mismatch between the implicit (i.e., the behavior in the experimental paradigm) and the explicit (i.e., the subjective evaluation of one’s own emotional capability) components of the emotional processing in NOVL. Moreover, fear seems to represent a critical emotion in this condition, as has been reported in other psychiatric disorders. However, possible difficulties in the emotional processing of fear would emerge only when they are inferred from an implicit behavior, instead of a subjective evaluation of one’s own emotional processing capability. PMID:29692751

The processing of emotional prosody and semantics in schizophrenia: relationship to gender and IQ.

PubMed

Scholten, M R M; Aleman, A; Kahn, R S

2008-06-01

Female patients with schizophrenia are less impaired in social life than male patients. Because social impairment in schizophrenia has been found to be associated with deficits in emotion recognition, we examined whether the female advantage in processing emotional prosody and semantics is preserved in schizophrenia. Forty-eight patients (25 males, 23 females) and 46 controls (23 males, 23 females) were assessed using an emotional language task (in which healthy women generally outperform healthy men), consisting of 96 sentences in four conditions: (1) neutral-content/emotional-tone (happy, sad, angry or anxious); (2) neutral-tone/emotional-content; (3) emotional-tone/incongruous emotional-content; and (4) emotional-content/incongruous emotional-tone. Participants had to ignore the emotional-content in the third condition and the emotional-tone in the fourth condition. In addition, participants were assessed with a visuospatial task (in which healthy men typically excel). Correlation coefficients were computed for associations between emotional language data, visuospatial data, IQ measures and patient variables. Overall, on the emotional language task, patients made more errors than control subjects, and women outperformed men across diagnostic groups. Controlling for IQ revealed a significant effect on task performance in all groups, especially in the incongruent tasks. On the rotation task, healthy men outperformed healthy women, but male patients, female patients and female controls obtained similar scores. The advantage in emotional prosodic and semantic processing in healthy women is preserved in schizophrenia, whereas the male advantage in visuospatial processing is lost. These findings may explain, in part, why social functioning is less compromised in women with schizophrenia than in men.

Test battery for measuring the perception and recognition of facial expressions of emotion

PubMed Central

Wilhelm, Oliver; Hildebrandt, Andrea; Manske, Karsten; Schacht, Annekathrin; Sommer, Werner

2014-01-01

Despite the importance of perceiving and recognizing facial expressions in everyday life, there is no comprehensive test battery for the multivariate assessment of these abilities. As a first step toward such a compilation, we present 16 tasks that measure the perception and recognition of facial emotion expressions, and data illustrating each task's difficulty and reliability. The scoring of these tasks focuses on either the speed or accuracy of performance. A sample of 269 healthy young adults completed all tasks. In general, accuracy and reaction time measures for emotion-general scores showed acceptable and high estimates of internal consistency and factor reliability. Emotion-specific scores yielded lower reliabilities, yet high enough to encourage further studies with such measures. Analyses of task difficulty revealed that all tasks are suitable for measuring emotion perception and emotion recognition related abilities in normal populations. PMID:24860528

Electrocortical processing of social signals of threat in combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

PubMed

MacNamara, Annmarie; Post, David; Kennedy, Amy E; Rabinak, Christine A; Phan, K Luan

2013-10-01

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by avoidance, emotional numbing, increased arousal and hypervigilance for threat following a trauma. Thirty-three veterans (19 with PTSD, 14 without PTSD) who had experienced combat trauma while on deployment in Iraq and/or Afghanistan completed an emotional faces matching task while electroencephalography was recorded. Vertex positive potentials (VPPs) elicited by happy, angry and fearful faces were smaller in veterans with versus without PTSD. In addition, veterans with PTSD exhibited smaller late positive potentials (LPPs) to angry faces and greater intrusive symptoms predicted smaller LPPs to fearful faces in the PTSD group. Veterans with PTSD were also less accurate at identifying angry faces, and accuracy decreased in the PTSD group as hyperarousal symptoms increased. These findings show reduced early processing of emotional faces, irrespective of valence, and blunted prolonged processing of social signals of threat in conjunction with impaired perception for angry faces in PTSD. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Anxious ultimatums: how anxiety disorders affect socioeconomic behaviour.

PubMed

Grecucci, Alessandro; Giorgetta, Cinzia; Brambilla, Paolo; Zuanon, Sophia; Perini, Laura; Balestrieri, Matteo; Bonini, Nicolao; Sanfey, Alan G

2013-01-01

Although the role of emotion in socioeconomic decision making is increasingly recognised, the impact of specific emotional disorders, such as anxiety disorders, on these decisions has been surprisingly neglected. Twenty anxious patients and twenty matched controls completed a commonly used socioeconomic task (the Ultimatum Game), in which they had to accept or reject monetary offers from other players. Anxious patients accepted significantly more unfair offers than controls. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of recent models of anxiety, in particular the importance of interpersonal factors and assertiveness in an integrated model of decision making. Finally, we were able to show that pharmacological serotonin used to treat anxious symptomatology tended to normalise decision making, further confirming and extending the role of serotonin in co-operation, prosocial behaviour, and social decision making. These results show, for the first time, a different pattern of socioeconomic behaviour in anxiety disordered patients, in addition to the known memory, attentional and emotional biases that are part of this pathological condition.

Bonding Pictures: Affective Ratings Are Specifically Associated to Loneliness But Not to Empathy

PubMed Central

Silva, Heraldo D.; Campagnoli, Rafaela R.; Mota, Bruna Eugênia F.; Araújo, Cássia Regina V.; Álvares, Roberta Sônia R.; Mocaiber, Izabela; Rocha-Rego, Vanessa; Volchan, Eliane; Souza, Gabriela G. L.

2017-01-01

Responding to pro-social cues plays an important adaptive role in humans. Our aims were (i) to create a catalog of bonding and matched-control pictures to compare the emotional reports of valence and arousal with the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures; (ii) to verify sex influence on the valence and arousal of bonding and matched-control pictures; (iii) to investigate if empathy and loneliness traits exert a specific influence on emotional reports for the bonding pictures. To provide a finer tool for social interaction studies, the present work defined two new sets of pictures consisting of “interacting dyads” (Bonding: N = 70) and matched controls “non-interacting dyads” (Controls: N = 70). The dyads could be either a child and an adult, or two children. Participants (N = 283, 182 women) were divided in 10 groups for the experimental sessions. The task was to rate the hedonic valence and emotional arousal of bonding and controls; and of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures from the IAPS. Effects of social-related traits, empathy and loneliness, on affective ratings were tested. Participants rated bonding pictures as more pleasant and arousing than control ones. Ratings did not differentiate bonding from IAPS pleasant pictures. Control pictures showed lower ratings than pleasant but higher ratings than neutral IAPS pictures. Women rated bonding and control pictures as more positive than men. There was no sex difference for arousal ratings. High empathic participants rated bonding and control pictures higher than low empathic participants. Also, they rated pleasant IAPS pictures more positive and arousing; and unpleasant pictures more negative and arousing than the less empathic ones. Loneliness trait, on the other hand, affected very specifically the ratings of bonding pictures; lonelier participants rated them less pleasant and less arousing than less lonely. Loneliness trait did not modulate ratings of other categories. In conclusion, high empathy seems related to emotional strength in general, while high loneliness seems to weaken the engagement in social interaction cues. PMID:28740473

Bonding Pictures: Affective Ratings Are Specifically Associated to Loneliness But Not to Empathy.

PubMed

Silva, Heraldo D; Campagnoli, Rafaela R; Mota, Bruna Eugênia F; Araújo, Cássia Regina V; Álvares, Roberta Sônia R; Mocaiber, Izabela; Rocha-Rego, Vanessa; Volchan, Eliane; Souza, Gabriela G L

2017-01-01

Responding to pro-social cues plays an important adaptive role in humans. Our aims were (i) to create a catalog of bonding and matched-control pictures to compare the emotional reports of valence and arousal with the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures; (ii) to verify sex influence on the valence and arousal of bonding and matched-control pictures; (iii) to investigate if empathy and loneliness traits exert a specific influence on emotional reports for the bonding pictures. To provide a finer tool for social interaction studies, the present work defined two new sets of pictures consisting of "interacting dyads" (Bonding: N = 70) and matched controls "non-interacting dyads" (Controls: N = 70). The dyads could be either a child and an adult, or two children. Participants ( N = 283, 182 women) were divided in 10 groups for the experimental sessions. The task was to rate the hedonic valence and emotional arousal of bonding and controls; and of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures from the IAPS. Effects of social-related traits, empathy and loneliness, on affective ratings were tested. Participants rated bonding pictures as more pleasant and arousing than control ones. Ratings did not differentiate bonding from IAPS pleasant pictures. Control pictures showed lower ratings than pleasant but higher ratings than neutral IAPS pictures. Women rated bonding and control pictures as more positive than men. There was no sex difference for arousal ratings. High empathic participants rated bonding and control pictures higher than low empathic participants. Also, they rated pleasant IAPS pictures more positive and arousing; and unpleasant pictures more negative and arousing than the less empathic ones. Loneliness trait, on the other hand, affected very specifically the ratings of bonding pictures; lonelier participants rated them less pleasant and less arousing than less lonely. Loneliness trait did not modulate ratings of other categories. In conclusion, high empathy seems related to emotional strength in general, while high loneliness seems to weaken the engagement in social interaction cues.

Subjective emotional over-arousal to neutral social scenes in paranoid schizophrenia.

PubMed

Haralanova, Evelina; Haralanov, Svetlozar; Beraldi, Anna; Möller, Hans-Jürgen; Hennig-Fast, Kristina

2012-02-01

From the clinical practice and some experimental studies, it is apparent that paranoid schizophrenia patients tend to assign emotional salience to neutral social stimuli. This aberrant cognitive bias has been conceptualized to result from increased emotional arousal, but direct empirical data are scarce. The aim of the present study was to quantify the subjective emotional arousal (SEA) evoked by emotionally non-salient (neutral) compared to emotionally salient (negative) social stimuli in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Thirty male inpatients with paranoid schizophrenia psychosis and 30 demographically matched healthy controls rated their level of SEA in response to neutral and negative social scenes from the International Affective Picture System and the Munich Affective Picture System. Schizophrenia patients compared to healthy controls had an increased overall SEA level. This relatively higher SEA was evoked only by the neutral but not by the negative social scenes. To our knowledge, the present study is the first designed to directly demonstrate subjective emotional over-arousal to neutral social scenes in paranoid schizophrenia. This finding might explain previous clinical and experimental data and could be viewed as the missing link between the primary neurobiological and secondary psychological mechanisms of paranoid psychotic-symptom formation. Furthermore, despite being very short and easy to perform, the task we used appeared to be sensitive enough to reveal emotional dysregulation, in terms of emotional disinhibition/hyperactivation in paranoid schizophrenia patients. Thus, it could have further research and clinical applications, including as a neurobehavioral probe for imaging studies.

[Emotional Memory and Electrocortical Activity in Schizophrenia].

PubMed

Lavoie, Marc E; Champagne, Julie; Glaser, Emma; Mendrek, Adrianna

Context Abnormal emotion processing is frequent in schizophrenia and affects social and functional outcome. Past event-related potential (ERP) research investigating processing of affective stimuli in schizophrenia was done mainly with facial expressions and revealed impaired facial emotion recognition in patients relative to control subjects. Experimentations involving fMRI with this group of patients, showed alteration of limbic and frontal regions in response to emotional unpleasant images, compared to neutral stimuli during a memory task. Other studies have also noted an increase in brain activity when the activation of the stimuli was high compared to low arousal stimuli. This may indicate a different sensitivity threshold to emotional arousal and emotional valence involving frontal pathways in these patients. But very few studies attempted to separate the contributions of emotional valence and arousal within an episodic memory protocol with ERP, in that population.Goal The aim of the current research is to investigate brain electro-cortical activity in schizophrenia in response to emotional images during an episodic memory task.Method ERP components were analyzed in 16 schizophrenic and 17 control participants matched for age, sex and intelligence. ERPs were obtained from 56 EEG electrodes. The tasks consisted in a classical episodic memory task that presented 100 repeated old and 100 new photographic images divided into four categories (unpleasant-high arousal, unpleasant-low arousal, pleasant-high arousal and pleasant-low arousal) selected from the International Affective Picture System. The N200, P300 and late positive component (LPC) mean amplitude, were analyzed using repeated-measure analyses of variance (MANOVA).Results Patients with schizophrenia and control subjects gave comparable subjective evaluations of arousal and valence. However, the frontal N200 and the P300 both showed an interaction of the group x memory x valence x hemisphere (F [1.32]=8.36; p <.01). Thus, this complex interaction denotes an increase of the episodic memory effect in the right hemisphere in response to unpleasant stimuli, with schizophrenic patients. With respect to the control group, there is also an increase of this memory effect in the right hemisphere, but in response to pleasant stimuli. The schizophrenic patients presented a smaller LPC memory effect, especially at the frontal region. More specifically, the frontal LPC was reduced, and the clinical group was less reactive to the emotional arousal content, compared to the control group.Discussion Altogether, our results revealed that while the subjective evaluation of emotional pictures is equivalent across groups, cerebral differences are present in schizophrenic patients during emotional recognition. N200 and P300 results in the frontal region suggest impaired selective attention and episodic memory to unpleasant stimuli in patients, while later processes related to conscious recollection (parietal LPC) are not affected with patients affected with schizophrenia.Conclusion This finding provides further support for the notion of a possible discrepancy between the subjective experience and the physiological expression of emotions in schizophrenia patients. Those results could open the door to new clinical research investigations in psychiatry, particularly in the comprehension of a relationship between frontal cortex vulnerability and episodic memory often present in psychosis.

Test-retest reliability of evoked BOLD signals from a cognitive-emotive fMRI test battery.

PubMed

Plichta, Michael M; Schwarz, Adam J; Grimm, Oliver; Morgen, Katrin; Mier, Daniela; Haddad, Leila; Gerdes, Antje B M; Sauer, Carina; Tost, Heike; Esslinger, Christine; Colman, Peter; Wilson, Frederick; Kirsch, Peter; Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas

2012-04-15

Even more than in cognitive research applications, moving fMRI to the clinic and the drug development process requires the generation of stable and reliable signal changes. The performance characteristics of the fMRI paradigm constrain experimental power and may require different study designs (e.g., crossover vs. parallel groups), yet fMRI reliability characteristics can be strongly dependent on the nature of the fMRI task. The present study investigated both within-subject and group-level reliability of a combined three-task fMRI battery targeting three systems of wide applicability in clinical and cognitive neuroscience: an emotional (face matching), a motivational (monetary reward anticipation) and a cognitive (n-back working memory) task. A group of 25 young, healthy volunteers were scanned twice on a 3T MRI scanner with a mean test-retest interval of 14.6 days. FMRI reliability was quantified using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) applied at three different levels ranging from a global to a localized and fine spatial scale: (1) reliability of group-level activation maps over the whole brain and within targeted regions of interest (ROIs); (2) within-subject reliability of ROI-mean amplitudes and (3) within-subject reliability of individual voxels in the target ROIs. Results showed robust evoked activation of all three tasks in their respective target regions (emotional task=amygdala; motivational task=ventral striatum; cognitive task=right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parietal cortices) with high effect sizes (ES) of ROI-mean summary values (ES=1.11-1.44 for the faces task, 0.96-1.43 for the reward task, 0.83-2.58 for the n-back task). Reliability of group level activation was excellent for all three tasks with ICCs of 0.89-0.98 at the whole brain level and 0.66-0.97 within target ROIs. Within-subject reliability of ROI-mean amplitudes across sessions was fair to good for the reward task (ICCs=0.56-0.62) and, dependent on the particular ROI, also fair-to-good for the n-back task (ICCs=0.44-0.57) but lower for the faces task (ICC=-0.02-0.16). In conclusion, all three tasks are well suited to between-subject designs, including imaging genetics. When specific recommendations are followed, the n-back and reward task are also suited for within-subject designs, including pharmaco-fMRI. The present study provides task-specific fMRI reliability performance measures that will inform the optimal use, powering and design of fMRI studies using comparable tasks. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotional priming with facial exposures in euthymic patients with bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Kim, Taek Su; Lee, Su Young; Ha, Ra Yeon; Kim, Eosu; An, Suk Kyoon; Ha, Kyooseob; Cho, Hyun-Sang

2011-12-01

People with bipolar disorder have abnormal emotional processing. We investigated the automatic and controlled emotional processing via a priming paradigm with subliminal and supraliminal facial exposure. We compared 20 euthymic bipolar patients and 20 healthy subjects on their performance in subliminal and supraliminal tasks. Priming tasks consisted of three different primes according to facial emotions (happy, sad, and neutral) followed by a neutral face as a target stimulus. The prime stimuli were presented subliminally (17 msec) or supraliminally (1000 msec). In subliminal tasks, both patients and controls judged the neutral target face as significantly more unpleasant (negative judgment shift) when presented with negative emotion primes compared with positive primes. In supraliminal tasks, bipolar subjects showed significant negative judgment shift, whereas healthy subjects did not. There was a significant group × emotion interaction for the judgment rate in supraliminal tasks. Our finding of persistent affective priming even at conscious awareness may suggest that bipolar patients have impaired cognitive control on emotional processing rather than automatically spreading activation of emotion.

Caring more and knowing more reduces age-related differences in emotion perception.

PubMed

Stanley, Jennifer Tehan; Isaacowitz, Derek M

2015-06-01

Traditional emotion perception tasks show that older adults are less accurate than are young adults at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Recently, we proposed that socioemotional factors might explain why older adults seem impaired in lab tasks but less so in everyday life (Isaacowitz & Stanley, 2011). Thus, in the present research we empirically tested whether socioemotional factors such as motivation and familiarity can alter this pattern of age effects. In 1 task, accountability instructions eliminated age differences in the traditional emotion perception task. Using a novel emotion perception paradigm featuring spontaneous dynamic facial expressions of a familiar romantic partner versus a same-age stranger, we found that age differences in emotion perception accuracy were attenuated in the familiar partner condition, relative to the stranger condition. Taken together, the results suggest that both overall accuracy as well as specific patterns of age effects differ appreciably between traditional emotion perception tasks and emotion perception within a socioemotional context. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved.

Caring More and Knowing More Reduces Age-Related Differences in Emotion Perception

PubMed Central

Stanley, Jennifer Tehan; Isaacowitz, Derek M.

2015-01-01

Traditional emotion perception tasks show that older adults are less accurate than young adults at recognizing facial expressions of emotion. Recently, we proposed that socioemotional factors might explain why older adults seem impaired in lab tasks but less so in everyday life (Isaacowitz & Stanley, 2011). Thus, in the present research we empirically tested whether socioemotional factors such as motivation and familiarity can alter this pattern of age effects. In one task, accountability instructions eliminated age differences in the traditional emotion perception task. Using a novel emotion perception paradigm featuring spontaneous dynamic facial expressions of a familiar romantic partner versus a same-age stranger, we found that age differences in emotion perception accuracy were attenuated in the familiar partner condition, relative to the stranger condition. Taken together, the results suggest that both overall accuracy as well as specific patterns of age effects differ appreciably between traditional emotion perception tasks and emotion perception within a socioemotional context. PMID:26030775

What Is Going On? The Process of Generating Questions about Emotion and Social Cognition in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia with Cartoon Situations and Faces.

PubMed

Fantie, Bryan D; Kosmidis, Mary H; Giannakou, Maria; Moza, Sotiria; Karavatos, Athanasios; Bozikas, Vassilis P

2018-04-17

Regarding the notion of putative “best” practices in social neuroscience and science in general, we contend that following established procedures has advantages, but prescriptive uniformity in methodology can obscure flaws, bias thinking, stifle creativity, and restrict exploration. Generating hypotheses is at least as important as testing hypotheses. To illustrate this process, we describe the following exploratory study. Psychiatric patients have difficulties with social functioning that affect their quality of life adversely. To investigate these impediments, we compared the performances of patients with schizophrenia and those with bipolar disorder to healthy controls on a task that involved matching photographs of facial expressions to a faceless protagonist in each of a series of drawn cartoon emotion-related situations. These scenarios involved either a single character (Nonsocial) or multiple characters (Social). The Social scenarios were also Congruent, with everyone in the cartoon displaying the same emotion, or Noncongruent (with everyone displaying a different emotion than the protagonist should). In this preliminary study, both patient groups produced lower scores than controls ( p < 0.001), but did not perform differently from each other. All groups performed best on the social-congruent items and worst on the social-noncongruent items ( p < 0.001). Performance varied inversely with illness duration, but not symptom severity. Complete emotional, social, cognitive, or perceptual inability is unlikely because these patient groups could still do this task. Nevertheless, the differences we saw could be meaningful functionally and clinically significant and deserve further exploration. Therefore, we stress the need to continue developing novel, alternative ways to explore social cognition in patients with psychiatric disorders and to clarify which elements of the multidimensional process contribute to difficulties in daily functioning.

Valence of Affective Verbal Fluency: fMRI Studies on Neural Organization of Emotional Concepts "Joy" and "Fear"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gawda, Barbara; Szepietowska, Ewa; Soluch, Pawel; Wolak, Tomasz

2017-01-01

The present study was designed to examine the underlying brain mechanisms of positive and negative emotional verbal fluency. Three verbal fluency tasks (one non-emotional phonemic task, two emotional tasks: "Joy" and "Fear") were used in this study. The results were analyzed for 35 healthy, Polish-speaking, right-handed adults…

CERES: A new cerebellum lobule segmentation method.

PubMed

Romero, Jose E; Coupé, Pierrick; Giraud, Rémi; Ta, Vinh-Thong; Fonov, Vladimir; Park, Min Tae M; Chakravarty, M Mallar; Voineskos, Aristotle N; Manjón, Jose V

2017-02-15

The human cerebellum is involved in language, motor tasks and cognitive processes such as attention or emotional processing. Therefore, an automatic and accurate segmentation method is highly desirable to measure and understand the cerebellum role in normal and pathological brain development. In this work, we propose a patch-based multi-atlas segmentation tool called CERES (CEREbellum Segmentation) that is able to automatically parcellate the cerebellum lobules. The proposed method works with standard resolution magnetic resonance T1-weighted images and uses the Optimized PatchMatch algorithm to speed up the patch matching process. The proposed method was compared with related recent state-of-the-art methods showing competitive results in both accuracy (average DICE of 0.7729) and execution time (around 5 minutes). Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Sad benefit in face working memory: an emotional bias of melancholic depression.

PubMed

Linden, Stefanie C; Jackson, Margaret C; Subramanian, Leena; Healy, David; Linden, David E J

2011-12-01

Emotion biases feature prominently in cognitive theories of depression and are a focus of psychological interventions. However, there is presently no stable neurocognitive marker of altered emotion-cognition interactions in depression. One reason may be the heterogeneity of major depressive disorder. Our aim in the present study was to find an emotional bias that differentiates patients with melancholic depression from controls, and patients with melancholic from those with non-melancholic depression. We used a working memory paradigm for emotional faces, where two faces with angry, happy, neutral, sad or fearful expression had to be retained over one second. Twenty patients with melancholic depression, 20 age-, education- and gender-matched control participants and 20 patients with non-melancholic depression participated in the study. We analysed performance on the working memory task using signal detection measures. We found an interaction between group and emotion on working memory performance that was driven by the higher performance for sad faces compared to other categories in the melancholic group. We computed a measure of "sad benefit", which distinguished melancholic and non-melancholic patients with good sensitivity and specificity. However, replication studies and formal discriminant analysis will be needed in order to assess whether emotion bias in working memory may become a useful diagnostic tool to distinguish these two syndromes. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Facial decoding in schizophrenia is underpinned by basic visual processing impairments.

PubMed

Belge, Jan-Baptist; Maurage, Pierre; Mangelinckx, Camille; Leleux, Dominique; Delatte, Benoît; Constant, Eric

2017-09-01

Schizophrenia is associated with a strong deficit in the decoding of emotional facial expression (EFE). Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether this deficit is specific for emotions or due to a more general impairment for any type of facial processing. This study was designed to clarify this issue. Thirty patients suffering from schizophrenia and 30 matched healthy controls performed several tasks evaluating the recognition of both changeable (i.e. eyes orientation and emotions) and stable (i.e. gender, age) facial characteristics. Accuracy and reaction times were recorded. Schizophrenic patients presented a performance deficit (accuracy and reaction times) in the perception of both changeable and stable aspects of faces, without any specific deficit for emotional decoding. Our results demonstrate a generalized face recognition deficit in schizophrenic patients, probably caused by a perceptual deficit in basic visual processing. It seems that the deficit in the decoding of emotional facial expression (EFE) is not a specific deficit of emotion processing, but is at least partly related to a generalized perceptual deficit in lower-level perceptual processing, occurring before the stage of emotion processing, and underlying more complex cognitive dysfunctions. These findings should encourage future investigations to explore the neurophysiologic background of these generalized perceptual deficits, and stimulate a clinical approach focusing on more basic visual processing. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Judgment of musical emotions after cochlear implantation in adults with progressive deafness

PubMed Central

Ambert-Dahan, Emmanuèle; Giraud, Anne-Lise; Sterkers, Olivier; Samson, Séverine

2015-01-01

While cochlear implantation is rather successful in restoring speech comprehension in quiet environments (Nimmons et al., 2008), other auditory tasks, such as music perception, can remain challenging for implant users. Here, we tested how patients who had received a cochlear implant (CI) after post-lingual progressive deafness perceive emotions in music. Thirteen adult CI recipients with good verbal comprehension (dissyllabic words ≥70%) and 13 normal hearing participants matched for age, gender, and education listened to 40 short musical excerpts that selectively expressed fear, happiness, sadness, and peacefulness ( Vieillard et al., 2008). The participants were asked to rate (on a 0–100 scale) how much the musical stimuli expressed these four cardinal emotions, and to judge their emotional valence (unpleasant–pleasant) and arousal (relaxing–stimulating). Although CI users performed above chance level, their emotional judgments (mean correctness scores) were generally impaired for happy, scary, and sad, but not for peaceful excerpts. CI users also demonstrated deficits in perceiving arousal of musical excerpts, whereas rating of valence remained unaffected. The current findings indicate that judgments of emotional categories and dimensions of musical excerpts are not uniformly impaired after cochlear implantation. These results are discussed in relation to the relatively spared abilities of CI users in perceiving temporal (rhythm and metric) as compared to spectral (pitch and timbre) musical dimensions, which might benefit the processing of musical emotions (Cooper et al., 2008). PMID:25814961

The role of the right hemisphere in semantic control: A case-series comparison of right and left hemisphere stroke.

PubMed

Thompson, Hannah E; Henshall, Lauren; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2016-05-01

Semantic control processes guide conceptual retrieval so that we are able to focus on non-dominant associations and features when these are required for the task or context, yet the neural basis of semantic control is not fully understood. Neuroimaging studies have emphasised the role of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in controlled retrieval, while neuropsychological investigations of semantic control deficits have almost exclusively focussed on patients with left-sided damage (e.g., patients with semantic aphasia, SA). Nevertheless, activation in fMRI during demanding semantic tasks typically extends to right IFG. To investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in semantic control, we compared nine RH stroke patients with 21 left-hemisphere SA patients, 11 mild SA cases and 12 healthy, aged-matched controls on semantic and executive tasks, plus experimental tasks that manipulated semantic control in paradigms particularly sensitive to RH damage. RH patients had executive deficits to parallel SA patients but they performed well on standard semantic tests. Nevertheless, multimodal semantic control deficits were found in experimental tasks involving facial emotions and the 'summation' of meaning across multiple items. On these tasks, RH patients showed effects similar to those in SA cases - multimodal deficits that were sensitive to distractor strength and cues and miscues, plus increasingly poor performance in cyclical matching tasks which repeatedly probed the same set of concepts. Thus, despite striking differences in single-item comprehension, evidence presented here suggests semantic control is bilateral, and disruption of this component of semantic cognition can be seen following damage to either hemisphere. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

The emotional counting Stroop: a task for assessing emotional interference during brain imaging.

PubMed

Whalen, Paul J; Bush, George; Shin, Lisa M; Rauch, Scott L

2006-01-01

The emotional counting Stroop (ecStroop) is an emotional variant of the counting Stroop. Both of these tasks require a motor response instead of a spoken response for the purpose of minimizing head movement during functional MRI (fMRI). During this task, subjects report, by button press, the number of words (1-4) that appear on a screen, regardless of word meaning. Neutral word-control trials contain common words (e.g., 'cabinet' written three times), while interference trials contain emotional words (e.g., 'murder' written three times). The degree to which this task represents a true 'Stroop' interference task, in the sense that emotional words will increase motor-response times compared with neutral words, depends upon the subjects of the study and the words that are presented. Much research on the emotional Stroop task demonstrates that interference effects are observed in psychopathological groups in response to words that are specific to their disorder, and in normal subjects when the words are related to current concerns endorsed by them. The ecStroop task described here will produce reaction time-interference effects that are comparable to the traditional color-naming emotional Stroop. This protocol can be completed in approximately 20 min per subject. The protocol described here employs neutral words and emotional words that include general-negative words, as well as words specific to combat-related trauma. However, this protocol is amenable to any emotional word lists.

Face and body perception in schizophrenia: a configural processing deficit?

PubMed

Soria Bauser, Denise; Thoma, Patrizia; Aizenberg, Victoria; Brüne, Martin; Juckel, Georg; Daum, Irene

2012-01-30

Face and body perception rely on common processing mechanisms and activate similar but not identical brain networks. Patients with schizophrenia show impaired face perception, and the present study addressed for the first time body perception in this group. Seventeen patients diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were compared to 17 healthy controls on standardized tests assessing basic face perception skills (identity discrimination, memory for faces, recognition of facial affect). A matching-to-sample task including emotional and neutral faces, bodies and cars either in an upright or in an inverted position was administered to assess potential category-specific performance deficits and impairments of configural processing. Relative to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients showed poorer performance on the tasks assessing face perception skills. In the matching-to-sample task, they also responded more slowly and less accurately than controls, regardless of the stimulus category. Accuracy analysis showed significant inversion effects for faces and bodies across groups, reflecting configural processing mechanisms; however reaction time analysis indicated evidence of reduced inversion effects regardless of category in schizophrenia patients. The magnitude of the inversion effects was not related to clinical symptoms. Overall, the data point towards reduced configural processing, not only for faces but also for bodies and cars in individuals with schizophrenia. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dissociable Patterns in the Control of Emotional Interference in Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and in Adults with Alcohol Dependence

PubMed Central

Marx, Ivo; Krause, John; Berger, Christoph; Häßler, Frank

2014-01-01

Objectives To effectively manage current task demands, attention must be focused on task-relevant information while task-irrelevant information is rejected. However, in everyday life, people must cope with emotions, which may interfere with actual task demands and may challenge functional attention allocation. Control of interfering emotions has been associated with the proper functioning of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). As DLPFC dysfunction is evident in subjects with ADHD and in subjects with alcohol dependence, the current study sought to examine the bottom-up effect of emotional distraction on task performance in both disorders. Methods Male adults with ADHD (n = 22), male adults with alcohol dependence (n = 16), and healthy controls (n = 30) performed an emotional working memory task (n-back task). In the background of the task, we presented neutral and negative stimuli that varied in emotional saliency. Results In both clinical groups, a working memory deficit was evident. Moreover, both clinical groups displayed deficient emotional interference control. The n-back performance of the controls was not affected by the emotional distractors, whereas that of subjects with ADHD deteriorated in the presence of low salient distractors, and that of alcoholics did not deteriorate until high salient distractors were presented. Subsequent to task performance, subjects with ADHD accurately recognized more distractors than did alcoholics and controls. In alcoholics, picture recognition accuracy was negatively associated with n-back performance, suggesting a functional association between the ability to suppress emotional distractors and successful task performance. In subjects with ADHD, performance accuracy was negatively associated with ADHD inattentive symptoms, suggesting that inattention contributes to the performance deficit. Conclusions Subjects with ADHD and alcoholics both display an emotional interference control deficit, which is especially pronounced in subjects with ADHD. Beyond dysfunctional attention allocation processes, a more general attention deficit seems to contribute to the more pronounced performance deficit pattern in ADHD. PMID:25265290

Time course of implicit processing and explicit processing of emotional faces and emotional words.

PubMed

Frühholz, Sascha; Jellinghaus, Anne; Herrmann, Manfred

2011-05-01

Facial expressions are important emotional stimuli during social interactions. Symbolic emotional cues, such as affective words, also convey information regarding emotions that is relevant for social communication. Various studies have demonstrated fast decoding of emotions from words, as was shown for faces, whereas others report a rather delayed decoding of information about emotions from words. Here, we introduced an implicit (color naming) and explicit task (emotion judgment) with facial expressions and words, both containing information about emotions, to directly compare the time course of emotion processing using event-related potentials (ERP). The data show that only negative faces affected task performance, resulting in increased error rates compared to neutral faces. Presentation of emotional faces resulted in a modulation of the N170, the EPN and the LPP components and these modulations were found during both the explicit and implicit tasks. Emotional words only affected the EPN during the explicit task, but a task-independent effect on the LPP was revealed. Finally, emotional faces modulated source activity in the extrastriate cortex underlying the generation of the N170, EPN and LPP components. Emotional words led to a modulation of source activity corresponding to the EPN and LPP, but they also affected the N170 source on the right hemisphere. These data show that facial expressions affect earlier stages of emotion processing compared to emotional words, but the emotional value of words may have been detected at early stages of emotional processing in the visual cortex, as was indicated by the extrastriate source activity. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Hyposmia, not emotion perception, is associated with psychosocial outcome after severe traumatic brain injury.

PubMed

Osborne-Crowley, Katherine; McDonald, Skye

2016-10-01

The current study aimed to determine whether 2 variables associated with orbitofrontal damage, hyposmia and emotion perception deficits, are associated with socially disinhibited behavior and psychosocial outcome after traumatic brain injury (TBI). The Brief Smell Identification Test (BSIT), an emotion labeling task, an emotion intensity rating task, and an observational measure of social disinhibition were completed by 23 individuals with severe TBI. The disinhibition domain of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory and the interpersonal relationships subscale of the Sydney Psychosocial Reintegration Scale (SPRS-IR) were completed by a close other. Fifteen control participants provided norms against which to assess performance on the emotion intensity rating task. BSIT scores predicted informant-reported change in interpersonal relationships on the SPRS-IR. Hyposmia, though, was not associated with informant-reported or observed social disinhibition. An impairment in accuracy scores on both emotion perceptions tasks was found for participants with TBI, yet intensity ratings did not differ between groups. This suggests that people with TBI are not actually impaired at detecting intensity of emotion but are less likely to perceive the target emotion as the dominant emotion. Emotion perception was not related to disinhibition or change in interpersonal relationships. These results support previous claims that hyposmia has prognostic significance following TBI. On the other hand, emotion perception impairment measured by standardized tasks does not appear to be an important factor in interpersonal outcomes. Finally, these results suggest that standardized emotion perception tasks may underestimate the emotion perception capabilities of people with TBI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

ERP Correlates of Target-Distracter Differentiation in Repeated Runs of a Continuous Recognition Task with Emotional and Neutral Faces

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Treese, Anne-Cecile; Johansson, Mikael; Lindgren, Magnus

2010-01-01

The emotional salience of faces has previously been shown to induce memory distortions in recognition memory tasks. This event-related potential (ERP) study used repeated runs of a continuous recognition task with emotional and neutral faces to investigate emotion-induced memory distortions. In the second and third runs, participants made more…

Effects of emotional stimuli on working memory processes in male criminal offenders with borderline and antisocial personality disorder.

PubMed

Prehn, Kristin; Schulze, Lars; Rossmann, Sabine; Berger, Christoph; Vohs, Knut; Fleischer, Monika; Hauenstein, Karlheinz; Keiper, Peter; Domes, Gregor; Herpertz, Sabine C

2013-02-01

OBJECTIVE. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the influence of concurrently presented emotional stimuli on cognitive task processing in violent criminal offenders primarily characterized by affective instability. METHODS. Fifteen male criminal offenders with antisocial and borderline personality disorder (ASPD and BPD) and 17 healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a working memory task with low and high working memory load. In a second experimental run, to investigate the interaction of emotion and cognition, we presented emotionally neutral, low, or high salient social scenes in the background of the task. RESULTS. During the memory task without pictures, both groups did not differ in general task performance and neural representation of working memory processes. During the memory task with emotional background pictures, however, ASPD-BPD subjects compared to healthy controls showed delayed responses and enhanced activation of the left amygdala in the presence of emotionally high salient pictures independent of working memory load. CONCLUSIONS. These results illustrate an interaction of emotion and cognition in affective instable individuals with enhanced reactivity to emotionally salient stimuli which might be an important factor regarding the understanding of aggressive and violent behaviour in these individuals.

Can White children grow up to be Black? Children’s reasoning about the stability of emotion and race

PubMed Central

Roberts, Steven O.; Gelman, Susan A.

2016-01-01

Recent research questions whether children conceptualize race as stable. We examined participants' beliefs about the relative stability of race and emotion, a temporary feature. Participants were White adults and children ages 5–6 and 9–10 (Study 1) and racial minority children ages 5–6 (Study 2). Participants were presented with target children who were happy or angry, and Black or White, and asked to indicate which of two adults (a race- but not emotion-match or an emotion- but not race-match) each child would grow up to be. White adults, White 9- to 10-year-olds, and racial minority 5- to 6-year-olds selected race-matches, whereas White 5- to 6-year-olds selected race- and emotion-matches equally. These data suggest that beliefs about racial stability vary by age and social group. PMID:27148779

Brief Online Training Enhances Competitive Performance: Findings of the BBC Lab UK Psychological Skills Intervention Study

PubMed Central

Lane, Andrew M.; Totterdell, Peter; MacDonald, Ian; Devonport, Tracey J.; Friesen, Andrew P.; Beedie, Christopher J.; Stanley, Damian; Nevill, Alan

2016-01-01

In conjunction with BBC Lab UK, the present study developed 12 brief psychological skill interventions for online delivery. A protocol was designed that captured data via self-report measures, used video recordings to deliver interventions, involved a competitive concentration task against an individually matched computer opponent, and provided feedback on the effects of the interventions. Three psychological skills were used; imagery, self-talk, and if-then planning, with each skill directed to one of four different foci: outcome goal, process goal, instruction, or arousal-control. This resulted in 12 different intervention participant groups (randomly assigned) with a 13th group acting as a control. Participants (n = 44,742) completed a competitive task four times—practice, baseline, following an intervention, and again after repeating the intervention. Results revealed performance improved following practice with incremental effects for imagery-outcome, imagery-process, and self-talk-outcome and self-talk-process over the control group, with the same interventions increasing the intensity of effort invested, arousal and pleasant emotion. Arousal-control interventions associated with pleasant emotions, low arousal, and low effort invested in performance. Instructional interventions were not effective. Results offer support for the utility of online interventions in teaching psychological skills and suggest brief interventions that focus on increasing motivation, increased arousal, effort invested, and pleasant emotions were the most effective. PMID:27065904

Risky decision making in adults with ADHD.

PubMed

Matthies, S; Philipsen, A; Svaldi, J

2012-09-01

Risky decision making and disadvantageous choices constitute core characteristics of patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Consequences include negative psychosocial and health-related outcomes. However, risky decision making and its interrelations with emotional states in ADHD are poorly understood. Therefore, the authors investigated risky decision making without and after boredom induction in adults with and without ADHD. In study 1, ADHD patients (n = 15) and age/education matched controls (CG; n = 16) were compared on the Game of Dice Task (GDT), an established task measuring decision making in unambiguous situations. In study 2, ADHD patients (n = 14) and CG (n = 13) underwent boredom induction prior to the GDT. In study 1, ADHD patients selected the disadvantageous alternatives significantly more often than CG. In study 2, no significant group differences were found due to an increase in risky decision making in CG following the boredom induction. Even if severity of depression did not affect our results, it may be necessary to compare GDT responses in ADHD patients with and without current depression. Risk as a motor of disadvantageous decision making needs to be taken into account in therapeutic contexts as a maintenance factor of dysfunctional behaviour. The findings of study 2 are in line with postulated alterations of emotional state adjustment in ADHD. The link between decisions making and emotional regulation in ADHD needs further attention in research. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Modulation of brain response to emotional conflict as a function of current mood in bipolar disorder: preliminary findings from a follow-up state-based fMRI study.

PubMed

Rey, Gwladys; Desseilles, Martin; Favre, Sophie; Dayer, Alexandre; Piguet, Camille; Aubry, Jean-Michel; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2014-08-30

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine affective control longitudinally in a group of patients with bipolar disorder (BD). Participants comprised 12 BD patients who underwent repeated fMRI scans in euthymic (n=11), depressed (n=9), or hypomanic (n=9) states, and were compared with 12 age-matched healthy controls. During fMRI, participants performed an emotional face-word interference task with either low or high attentional demands. Relative to healthy controls, patients showed decreased activation of the cognitive control network normally associated with conflict processing, more severely during hypomania than during depression, but regardless of level of task demand in both cases. During euthymia, a decreased response to conflict was observed only during the high load condition. Additionally, unlike healthy participants, patients exhibited deactivation in several key areas in response to emotion-conflict trials - including the rostral anterior cingulate cortex during euthymia, the hippocampus during depression, and the posterior cingulate cortex during hypomania. Our results indicate that the ability of BD patients to recruit control networks when processing affective conflict, and the abnormal suppression of activity in distinct components of the default mode network, may depend on their current clinical state and attentional demand. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Emotional modulation of motor response inhibition in women with borderline personality disorder: an fMRI study.

PubMed

Jacob, Gitta A; Zvonik, Kerstin; Kamphausen, Susanne; Sebastian, Alexandra; Maier, Simon; Philipsen, Alexandra; Tebartz van Elst, Ludger; Lieb, Klaus; Tüscher, Oliver

2013-05-01

Both emotion regulation and impulsivity are core aspects of borderline personality disorder (BPD) pathology. Although both problems may be combined specifically in BPD, few studies to date have investigated the emotional modulation of impulsivity in BPD. Women with BPD and matched healthy controls performed go/no-go tasks after induction of anger, joy or a neutral mood by vocally presented short stories. Dependent variables were the behavioural results and functional magnetic resonance imaging data. We included 17 women with BPD and 18 controls in our study. No behavioural group differences were found. However, patients with BPD showed stronger activation of the left amygdala and weaker activation of the subgenual anterior cingulate during anger induction than controls. Inhibition in the go/no-go task after anger induction increased activity in the left inferior frontal cortex in controls, but not in women with BPD, who, in turn, showed increased activation in the subthalamic nucleus. Findings cannot be generalized to men, and 4 patients were taking antidepressant medication (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). In addition, no patient control group was investigated, thus we do not know whether findings are specific to BPD compared with other disorders. Our findings are consistent with the view that a disturbed amygdala-prefrontal network in patients with BPD is compensated by a subcortical loop involving the subthalamic nucleus, leading to normal behavioural inhibition in these patients.

Emotional reactivity and regulation in preschool-age children who stutter.

PubMed

Ntourou, Katerina; Conture, Edward G; Walden, Tedra A

2013-09-01

This study experimentally investigated behavioral correlates of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation and their relation to speech (dis)fluency in preschool-age children who do (CWS) and do not (CWNS) stutter during emotion-eliciting conditions. Participants (18 CWS, 14 boys; 18 CWNS, 14 boys) completed two experimental tasks (1) a neutral ("apples and leaves in a transparent box," ALTB) and (2) a frustrating ("attractive toy in a transparent box," ATTB) task, both of which were followed by a narrative task. Dependent measures were emotional reactivity (positive affect, negative affect), emotion regulation (self-speech, distraction) exhibited during the ALTB and the ATTB tasks, percentage of stuttered disfluencies (SDs) and percentage of non-stuttered disfluencies (NSDs) produced during the narratives. Results indicated that preschool-age CWS exhibited significantly more negative emotion and more self-speech than preschool-age CWNS. For CWS only, emotion regulation behaviors (i.e., distraction, self-speech) during the experimental tasks were predictive of stuttered disfluencies during the subsequent narrative tasks. Furthermore, for CWS there was no relation between emotional processes and non-stuttered disfluencies, but CWNS's negative affect was significantly related to nonstuttered disfluencies. In general, present findings support the notion that emotional processes are associated with childhood stuttering. Specifically, findings are consistent with the notion that preschool-age CWS are more emotionally reactive than CWNS and that their self-speech regulatory attempts may be less than effective in modulating their emotions. The reader will be able to: (a) communicate the relevance of studying the role of emotion in developmental stuttering close to the onset of stuttering and (b) describe the main findings of the present study in relation to previous studies that have used different methodologies to investigate the role of emotion in developmental stuttering of young children who stutter. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Congruent bodily arousal promotes the constructive recognition of emotional words.

PubMed

Kever, Anne; Grynberg, Delphine; Vermeulen, Nicolas

2017-08-01

Considerable research has shown that bodily states shape affect and cognition. Here, we examined whether transient states of bodily arousal influence the categorization speed of high arousal, low arousal, and neutral words. Participants realized two blocks of a constructive recognition task, once after a cycling session (increased arousal), and once after a relaxation session (reduced arousal). Results revealed overall faster response times for high arousal compared to low arousal words, and for positive compared to negative words. Importantly, low arousal words were categorized significantly faster after the relaxation than after the cycling, suggesting that a decrease in bodily arousal promotes the recognition of stimuli matching one's current arousal state. These findings highlight the importance of the arousal dimension in emotional processing, and suggest the presence of arousal-congruency effects. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Emotion recognition training using composite faces generalises across identities but not all emotions.

PubMed

Dalili, Michael N; Schofield-Toloza, Lawrence; Munafò, Marcus R; Penton-Voak, Ian S

2017-08-01

Many cognitive bias modification (CBM) tasks use facial expressions of emotion as stimuli. Some tasks use unique facial stimuli, while others use composite stimuli, given evidence that emotion is encoded prototypically. However, CBM using composite stimuli may be identity- or emotion-specific, and may not generalise to other stimuli. We investigated the generalisability of effects using composite faces in two experiments. Healthy adults in each study were randomised to one of four training conditions: two stimulus-congruent conditions, where same faces were used during all phases of the task, and two stimulus-incongruent conditions, where faces of the opposite sex (Experiment 1) or faces depicting another emotion (Experiment 2) were used after the modification phase. Our results suggested that training effects generalised across identities. However, our results indicated only partial generalisation across emotions. These findings suggest effects obtained using composite stimuli may extend beyond the stimuli used in the task but remain emotion-specific.

Cerebral Correlates of Emotional and Action Appraisals During Visual Processing of Emotional Scenes Depending on Spatial Frequency: A Pilot Study

PubMed Central

Campagne, Aurélie; Fradcourt, Benoit; Pichat, Cédric; Baciu, Monica; Kauffmann, Louise; Peyrin, Carole

2016-01-01

Visual processing of emotional stimuli critically depends on the type of cognitive appraisal involved. The present fMRI pilot study aimed to investigate the cerebral correlates involved in the visual processing of emotional scenes in two tasks, one emotional, based on the appraisal of personal emotional experience, and the other motivational, based on the appraisal of the tendency to action. Given that the use of spatial frequency information is relatively flexible during the visual processing of emotional stimuli depending on the task’s demands, we also explored the effect of the type of spatial frequency in visual stimuli in each task by using emotional scenes filtered in low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequencies (HSF). Activation was observed in the visual areas of the fusiform gyrus for all emotional scenes in both tasks, and in the amygdala for unpleasant scenes only. The motivational task induced additional activation in frontal motor-related areas (e.g. premotor cortex, SMA) and parietal regions (e.g. superior and inferior parietal lobules). Parietal regions were recruited particularly during the motivational appraisal of approach in response to pleasant scenes. These frontal and parietal activations, respectively, suggest that motor and navigation processes play a specific role in the identification of the tendency to action in the motivational task. Furthermore, activity observed in the motivational task, in response to both pleasant and unpleasant scenes, was significantly greater for HSF than for LSF scenes, suggesting that the tendency to action is driven mainly by the detailed information contained in scenes. Results for the emotional task suggest that spatial frequencies play only a small role in the evaluation of unpleasant and pleasant emotions. Our preliminary study revealed a partial distinction between visual processing of emotional scenes during identification of the tendency to action, and during identification of personal emotional experiences. It also illustrates flexible use of the spatial frequencies contained in scenes depending on their emotional valence and on task demands. PMID:26757433

Age-Related Changes in Amygdala-Frontal Connectivity during Emotional Face Processing from Childhood into Young Adulthood

PubMed Central

Wu, Minjie; Kujawa, Autumn; Lu, Lisa H.; Fitzgerald, Daniel A.; Klumpp, Heide; Fitzgerald, Kate D.; Monk, Christopher S.; Phan, K. Luan

2016-01-01

The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7–25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing. PMID:26931629

The endocannabinoid system and emotional processing: a pharmacological fMRI study with ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol.

PubMed

Bossong, Matthijs G; van Hell, Hendrika H; Jager, Gerry; Kahn, René S; Ramsey, Nick F; Jansma, J Martijn

2013-12-01

Various psychiatric disorders such as major depression are associated with abnormalities in emotional processing. Evidence indicating involvement of the endocannabinoid system in emotional processing, and thus potentially in related abnormalities, is increasing. In the present study, we examined the role of the endocannabinoid system in processing of stimuli with a positive and negative emotional content in healthy volunteers. A pharmacological functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was conducted with a placebo-controlled, cross-over design, investigating effects of the endocannabinoid agonist ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on brain function related to emotional processing in 11 healthy subjects. Performance and brain activity during matching of stimuli with a negative ('fearful faces') or a positive content ('happy faces') were assessed after placebo and THC administration. After THC administration, performance accuracy was decreased for stimuli with a negative but not for stimuli with a positive emotional content. Our task activated a network of brain regions including amygdala, orbital frontal gyrus, hippocampus, parietal gyrus, prefrontal cortex, and regions in the occipital cortex. THC interacted with emotional content, as activity in this network was reduced for negative content, while activity for positive content was increased. These results indicate that THC administration reduces the negative bias in emotional processing. This adds human evidence to support the hypothesis that the endocannabinoid system is involved in modulation of emotional processing. Our findings also suggest a possible role for the endocannabinoid system in abnormal emotional processing, and may thus be relevant for psychiatric disorders such as major depression. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

Early effects of duloxetine on emotion recognition in healthy volunteers

PubMed Central

Bamford, Susan; Penton-Voak, Ian; Pinkney, Verity; Baldwin, David S; Munafò, Marcus R; Garner, Matthew

2015-01-01

The serotonin-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) duloxetine is an effective treatment for major depression and generalised anxiety disorder. Neuropsychological models of antidepressant drug action suggest therapeutic effects might be mediated by the early correction of maladaptive biases in emotion processing, including the recognition of emotional expressions. Sub-chronic administration of duloxetine (for two weeks) produces adaptive changes in neural circuitry implicated in emotion processing; however, its effects on emotional expression recognition are unknown. Forty healthy participants were randomised to receive either 14 days of duloxetine (60 mg/day, titrated from 30 mg after three days) or matched placebo (with sham titration) in a double-blind, between-groups, repeated-measures design. On day 0 and day 14 participants completed a computerised emotional expression recognition task that measured sensitivity to the six primary emotions. Thirty-eight participants (19 per group) completed their course of tablets and were included in the analysis. Results provide evidence that duloxetine, compared to placebo, may reduce the accurate recognition of sadness. Drug effects were driven by changes in participants’ ability to correctly detect subtle expressions of sadness, with greater change observed in the placebo relative to the duloxetine group. These effects occurred in the absence of changes in mood. Our preliminary findings require replication, but complement recent evidence that sadness recognition is a therapeutic target in major depression, and a mechanism through which SNRIs could resolve negative biases in emotion processing to achieve therapeutic effects. PMID:25759400

Emotional reactivity and cognitive performance in aversively motivated tasks: a comparison between four rat strains.

PubMed

van der Staay, F Josef; Schuurman, Teun; van Reenen, Cornelis G; Korte, S Mechiel

2009-12-15

Cognitive function might be affected by the subjects' emotional reactivity. We assessed whether behavior in different tests of emotional reactivity is correlated with performance in aversively motivated learning tasks, using four strains of rats generally considered to have a different emotional reactivity. The performance of male Brown Norway, Lewis, Fischer 344, and Wistar Kyoto rats in open field (OF), elevated plus-maze (EPM), and circular light-dark preference box (cLDB) tasks, which are believed to provide measures of emotional reactivity, was evaluated. Spatial working and reference memory were assessed in two aversively motivated learning and memory tasks: the standard and the "repeated acquisition" versions of the Morris water maze escape task, respectively. All rats were also tested in a passive avoidance task. At the end of the study, levels of serotonin (5-HT) and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, and 5-HT turnover in the hippocampus and frontal cortex were determined. Strain differences showed a complex pattern across behavioral tests and serotonergic measures. Fischer 344 rats had the poorest performance in both versions of the Morris water escape task, whereas Brown Norway rats performed these tasks very well but the passive avoidance task poorly. Neither correlation analysis nor principal component analysis provided convincing support for the notion that OF, EPM, and cLDB tasks measure the same underlying trait. Our findings do not support the hypothesis that the level of emotional reactivity modulates cognitive performance in aversively motivated tasks. Concepts such as "emotional reactivity" and "learning and memory" cannot adequately be tapped with only one behavioral test. Our results emphasize the need for multiple testing.

Emotional and cardiovascular reactivity to a child-focused interpersonal stressor among depressed mothers of psychiatrically ill children.

PubMed

Cyranowski, Jill M; Swartz, Holly A; Hofkens, Tara L; Frank, Ellen

2009-01-01

Impairment in maternal interpersonal function represents a risk factor for poor psychiatric outcomes among children of depressed mothers. However, the mechanisms by which this effect occurs have yet to be fully elucidated. Elevated levels of emotional or physiological reactivity to interpersonal stress may impact depressed mothers' ability to effectively negotiate child-focused conflicts. This effect may become particularly pronounced when depressed mothers are parenting a psychiatrically ill child. The current feasibility study evaluated mothers' emotional and cardiovascular reactivity in response to an acute, child-focused stress task. Twenty-two depressed mothers of psychiatrically ill children were recruited from a larger clinical trial; half were randomly assigned to receive an adapted form of interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT-MOMS), while the other half received treatment as usual (TAU). For comparison purposes, a matched sample of 22 nondepressed mothers of psychiatrically healthy children was also evaluated. Depressed mothers receiving minimal-treatment TAU displayed the greatest increases in depressed mood, heart rate, and diastolic blood pressure in response to the child-focused stress task, and significantly differed from the relatively low levels of reactivity observed among nondepressed mothers of healthy children. In contrast, depressed mothers receiving IPT-MOMS displayed patterns of reactivity that fell between these extreme groups. Maternal stress reactivity was associated not only with maternal psychiatric symptoms, but also with levels of chronic parental stress and maternal history of childhood emotional abuse. Future, more definitive research is needed to evaluate depressed mothers' interpersonal stress reactivity, its amenability to treatment, and its long-term impact on child psychiatric outcomes. (c) 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Memory for emotional words: The role of semantic relatedness, encoding task and affective valence.

PubMed

Ferré, Pilar; Fraga, Isabel; Comesaña, Montserrat; Sánchez-Casas, Rosa

2015-01-01

Emotional stimuli have been repeatedly demonstrated to be better remembered than neutral ones. The aim of the present study was to test whether this advantage in memory is mainly produced by the affective content of the stimuli or it can be rather accounted for by factors such as semantic relatedness or type of encoding task. The valence of the stimuli (positive, negative and neutral words that could be either semantically related or unrelated) as well as the type of encoding task (focused on either familiarity or emotionality) was manipulated. The results revealed an advantage in memory for emotional words (either positive or negative) regardless of semantic relatedness. Importantly, this advantage was modulated by the encoding task, as it was reliable only in the task which focused on emotionality. These findings suggest that congruity with the dimension attended at encoding might contribute to the superiority in memory for emotional words, thus offering us a more complex picture of the underlying mechanisms behind the advantage for emotional information in memory.

Valence Specific Laterality Effects in Free Viewing Conditions: The Role of Expectancy and Gender of Image

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stafford, Lorenzo D.; Brandaro, Nicola

2010-01-01

Recent research has looked at whether the expectancy of an emotion can account for subsequent valence specific laterality effects of prosodic emotion, though no research has examined this effect for facial emotion. In the study here (n = 58), we investigated this issue using two tasks; an emotional face perception task and a novel word task that…

Acute effects of Sceletium tortuosum (Zembrin), a dual 5-HT reuptake and PDE4 inhibitor, in the human amygdala and its connection to the hypothalamus.

PubMed

Terburg, David; Syal, Supriya; Rosenberger, Lisa A; Heany, Sarah; Phillips, Nicole; Gericke, Nigel; Stein, Dan J; van Honk, Jack

2013-12-01

The South African endemic plant Sceletium tortuosum has a long history of traditional use as a masticatory and medicine by San and Khoikhoi people and subsequently by European colonial farmers as a psychotropic in tincture form. Over the past decade, the plant has attracted increasing attention for its possible applications in promoting a sense of wellbeing and relieving stress in healthy individuals and for treating clinical anxiety and depression. The pharmacological actions of a standardized extract of the plant (Zembrin) have been reported to be dual PDE4 inhibition and 5-HT reuptake inhibition, a combination that has been argued to offer potential therapeutic advantages. Here we tested the acute effects of Zembrin administration in a pharmaco-fMRI study focused on anxiety-related activity in the amygdala and its connected neurocircuitry. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over design, 16 healthy participants were scanned during performance in a perceptual-load and an emotion-matching task. Amygdala reactivity to fearful faces under low perceptual load conditions was attenuated after a single 25 mg dose of Zembrin. Follow-up connectivity analysis on the emotion-matching task showed that amygdala-hypothalamus coupling was also reduced. These results demonstrate, for the first time, the attenuating effects of S. tortuosum on the threat circuitry of the human brain and provide supporting evidence that the dual 5-HT reuptake inhibition and PDE4 inhibition of this extract might have anxiolytic potential by attenuating subcortical threat responsivity.

Acute Effects of Sceletium tortuosum (Zembrin), a Dual 5-HT Reuptake and PDE4 Inhibitor, in the Human Amygdala and its Connection to the Hypothalamus

PubMed Central

Terburg, David; Syal, Supriya; Rosenberger, Lisa A; Heany, Sarah; Phillips, Nicole; Gericke, Nigel; Stein, Dan J; van Honk, Jack

2013-01-01

The South African endemic plant Sceletium tortuosum has a long history of traditional use as a masticatory and medicine by San and Khoikhoi people and subsequently by European colonial farmers as a psychotropic in tincture form. Over the past decade, the plant has attracted increasing attention for its possible applications in promoting a sense of wellbeing and relieving stress in healthy individuals and for treating clinical anxiety and depression. The pharmacological actions of a standardized extract of the plant (Zembrin) have been reported to be dual PDE4 inhibition and 5-HT reuptake inhibition, a combination that has been argued to offer potential therapeutic advantages. Here we tested the acute effects of Zembrin administration in a pharmaco-fMRI study focused on anxiety-related activity in the amygdala and its connected neurocircuitry. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over design, 16 healthy participants were scanned during performance in a perceptual-load and an emotion-matching task. Amygdala reactivity to fearful faces under low perceptual load conditions was attenuated after a single 25 mg dose of Zembrin. Follow-up connectivity analysis on the emotion-matching task showed that amygdala–hypothalamus coupling was also reduced. These results demonstrate, for the first time, the attenuating effects of S. tortuosum on the threat circuitry of the human brain and provide supporting evidence that the dual 5-HT reuptake inhibition and PDE4 inhibition of this extract might have anxiolytic potential by attenuating subcortical threat responsivity. PMID:23903032

Emotional body-word conflict evokes enhanced n450 and slow potential.

PubMed

Ma, Jianling; Liu, Chang; Zhong, Xin; Wang, Lu; Chen, Xu

2014-01-01

Emotional conflict refers to the influence of task irrelevant affective stimuli on current task set. Previously used emotional face-word tasks have produced certain electrophysiological phenomena, such as an enhanced N450 and slow potential; however, it remains unknown whether these effects emerge in other tasks. The present study used an emotional body-word conflict task to investigate the neural dynamics of emotional conflict as reflected by response time, accuracy, and event-related potentials, which were recorded with the aim of replicating the previously observed N450 and slow potential effect. Results indicated increased response time and decreased accuracy in the incongruent condition relative to the congruent condition, indicating a robust interference effect. Furthermore, the incongruent condition evoked pronounced N450 amplitudes and a more positive slow potential, which might be associated with conflict-monitoring and conflict resolution. The present findings extend our understanding of emotional conflict to the body-word domain.

Age differences in the neural response to emotional distraction during working memory encoding.

PubMed

Ziaei, Maryam; Samrani, George; Persson, Jonas

2018-06-11

Age-related declines in attention and working memory (WM) are well documented and may be worsened by the occurrence of distracting information. Emotionally valenced stimuli may have particularly strong distracting effects on cognition. We investigated age-related differences in emotional distraction using task-fMRI. WM performance in older adults was lower for emotional compared with neutral distractors, suggesting a disproportional impairment elicited by emotional task-irrelevant information. Critically, older adults were particularly distracted by task-irrelevant positive information, whereas the opposite pattern was found for younger adults. Age groups differed markedly in the brain response to emotional distractors; younger adults activated posterior cortical regions and the striatum, and older adults activated frontal regions. Also, an age by valence interaction was found for IFG and ACC, suggesting differential modulation of attention to task-relevant emotional information. These results provide new insights into age-related changes in emotional processing and the ability to resolve interference from emotional distraction.

Toward an implicit measure of emotions: ratings of abstract images reveal distinct emotional states.

PubMed

Bartoszek, Gregory; Cervone, Daniel

2017-11-01

Although implicit tests of positive and negative affect exist, implicit measures of distinct emotional states are scarce. Three experiments examined whether a novel implicit emotion-assessment task, the rating of emotion expressed in abstract images, would reveal distinct emotional states. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to a sadness-inducing story inferred more sadness, and less happiness, in abstract images. In Experiment 2, an anger-provoking interaction increased anger ratings. In Experiment 3, compared to neutral images, spider images increased fear ratings in spider-fearful participants but not in controls. In each experiment, the implicit task indicated elevated levels of the target emotion and did not indicate elevated levels of non-target negative emotions; the task thus differentiated among emotional states of the same valence. Correlations also supported the convergent and discriminant validity of the implicit task. Supporting the possibility that heuristic processes underlie the ratings, group differences were stronger among those who responded relatively quickly.

Amygdala-prefrontal cortical functional connectivity during implicit emotion processing differentiates youth with bipolar spectrum from youth with externalizing disorders.

PubMed

Hafeman, Danella; Bebko, Genna; Bertocci, Michele A; Fournier, Jay C; Chase, Henry W; Bonar, Lisa; Perlman, Susan B; Travis, Michael; Gill, Mary Kay; Diwadkar, Vaibhav A; Sunshine, Jeffrey L; Holland, Scott K; Kowatch, Robert A; Birmaher, Boris; Axelson, David; Horwitz, Sarah M; Arnold, L Eugene; Fristad, Mary A; Frazier, Thomas W; Youngstrom, Eric A; Findling, Robert L; Phillips, Mary L

2017-01-15

Both bipolar spectrum disorders (BPSD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) present with emotion-regulation deficits, but require different clinical management. We examined how the neurobiological underpinnings of emotion regulation might differentiate youth with BPSD versus ADHD (and healthy controls, HCs), specifically assessing functional connectivity (FxC) of amygdala-prefrontal circuitry during an implicit emotion processing task. We scanned a subset of the Longitudinal Assessment of Manic Symptoms (LAMS) sample, a clinically recruited cohort with elevated behavioral and emotional dysregulation, and age/sex-ratio matched HCs. Our sample consisted of 22 youth with BPSD, 30 youth with ADHD/no BPSD, and 26 HCs. We used generalized psychophysiological interaction (gPPI) to calculate group differences to emerging emotional faces vs. morphing shapes in FxC between bilateral amygdala and ventral prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex. FxC between amygdala and left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) in response to emotions vs. shapes differed by group (p=.05): while BPSD showed positive FxC (emotions>shapes), HC and ADHD showed inverse FxC (emotions

The Emotional Stroop as an Emotion Regulation Task.

PubMed

Kappes, Cathleen; Bermeitinger, Christina

2016-01-01

The present studies investigate age differences observed when performing the emotional Stroop task considered as an expression of emotion regulation. Previous studies employing this task showed mixed findings regarding age differences, with a lack of evidence for positivity effects. However, moderating factors such as arousal or dispositional (emotion) regulation strategies were mostly not taken into account. Moreover, relations between Stroop effects and emotional reactions were not examined. In two studies (Study 1/2: nyoung = 26/41; nold = 19/39), an emotional Stroop task was employed and valence (negative, neutral, positive [Study 2 only]) and arousal of the word stimuli were varied. Additionally, flexible goal adjustment (FGA), positive and negative affect in the last 12 months, and change in momentary affect (Study 2 only) were measured. Study 1 showed larger emotional Stroop effects (ESE) in older than younger adults with medium arousing negative words. We also found correlations between FGA (positive correlation) as well as negative affect (negative correlation) and the ESE with medium arousing negative words. Study 2 corroborates these findings by exhibiting positive change in momentary affect with larger ESEs for medium arousing negative words in the older age group. The findings emphasize the importance of including arousal level and dispositional regulation measures (such as FGA) as moderating factors in age differences and within-group differences in emotion regulation. Although we did not find evidence for a positivity effect, processing in the emotional Stroop task was related to positive change in momentary affect and less negative affect in the older age group. Taken together, our experiments demonstrate that the emotional Stroop task is suited as a measure for emotion induction and related emotion regulation mechanisms.

Social cognition dysfunction in adolescents with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (velo-cardio-facial syndrome): relationship with executive functioning and social competence/functioning.

PubMed

Campbell, L E; McCabe, K L; Melville, J L; Strutt, P A; Schall, U

2015-09-01

Social difficulties are often noted among people with intellectual disabilities. Children and adults with 22q.11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) often have poorer social competence as well as poorer performance on measures of executive and social-cognitive skills compared with typically developing young people. However, the relationship between social functioning and more basic processes of social cognition and executive functioning are not well understood in 22q11DS. The present study examined the relationship between social-cognitive measures of emotion attribution and theory of mind with executive functioning and their contribution to social competence in 22q11DS. The present cross-sectional study measured social cognition and executive performance of 24 adolescents with 22q11DS compared with 27 age-matched typically developing controls. Social cognition was tested using the emotion attribution task (EAT) and a picture sequencing task (PST), which tested mentalising (false-belief), sequencing, cause and effect, and inhibition. Executive functioning was assessed using computerised versions of the Tower of London task and working memory measures of spatial and non-spatial ability. Social competence was also assessed using the parent-reported Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Adolescents with 22q11DS showed impaired false-belief, emotion attribution and executive functioning compared with typically developing control participants. Poorer performance was reported on all story types in the PST, although, patterns of errors and response times across story types were similar in both groups. General sequencing ability was the strongest predictor of false-belief, and performance on the false-belief task predicted emotion attribution accuracy. Intellectual functioning, rather than theory of mind or executive functioning, predicted social competence in 22q11DS. Performance on social-cognitive tasks of theory of mind indicate evidence of a general underlying dysfunction in 22q11DS that includes executive ability to understand cause and effect, to logically reason about social scenarios and also to inhibit responses to salient, but misleading cues. However, general intellectual ability is closely related to actual social competence suggesting that a generalised intellectual deficit coupled with more specific executive impairments may best explain poor social cognition in 22q11DS. © 2015 MENCAP and International Association of the Scientific Study of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Reward expectation regulates brain responses to task-relevant and task-irrelevant emotional words: ERP evidence.

PubMed

Wei, Ping; Wang, Di; Ji, Liyan

2016-02-01

We investigated the effect of reward expectation on the processing of emotional words in two experiments using event-related potentials (ERPs). A cue indicating the reward condition of each trial (incentive vs non-incentive) was followed by the presentation of a negative or neutral word, the target. Participants were asked to discriminate the emotional content of the target word in Experiment 1 and to discriminate the color of the target word in Experiment 2, rendering the emotionality of the target word task-relevant in Experiment 1, but task-irrelevant in Experiment 2. The negative bias effect, in terms of the amplitude difference between ERPs for negative and neutral targets, was modulated by the task-set. In Experiment 1, P31 and early posterior negativity revealed a larger negative bias effect in the incentive condition than that in the non-incentive condition. However, in Experiment 2, P31 revealed a diminished negative bias effect in the incentive condition compared with that in the non-incentive condition. These results indicate that reward expectation improves top-down attentional concentration to task-relevant information, with enhanced sensitivity to the emotional content of target words when emotionality is task-relevant, but with reduced differential brain responses to emotional words when their content is task-irrelevant. © The Author (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Early Sign Language Experience Goes Along with an Increased Cross-modal Gain for Affective Prosodic Recognition in Congenitally Deaf CI Users.

PubMed

Fengler, Ineke; Delfau, Pia-Céline; Röder, Brigitte

2018-04-01

It is yet unclear whether congenitally deaf cochlear implant (CD CI) users' visual and multisensory emotion perception is influenced by their history in sign language acquisition. We hypothesized that early-signing CD CI users, relative to late-signing CD CI users and hearing, non-signing controls, show better facial expression recognition and rely more on the facial cues of audio-visual emotional stimuli. Two groups of young adult CD CI users-early signers (ES CI users; n = 11) and late signers (LS CI users; n = 10)-and a group of hearing, non-signing, age-matched controls (n = 12) performed an emotion recognition task with auditory, visual, and cross-modal emotionally congruent and incongruent speech stimuli. On different trials, participants categorized either the facial or the vocal expressions. The ES CI users more accurately recognized affective prosody than the LS CI users in the presence of congruent facial information. Furthermore, the ES CI users, but not the LS CI users, gained more than the controls from congruent visual stimuli when recognizing affective prosody. Both CI groups performed overall worse than the controls in recognizing affective prosody. These results suggest that early sign language experience affects multisensory emotion perception in CD CI users.

Do Dynamic Compared to Static Facial Expressions of Happiness and Anger Reveal Enhanced Facial Mimicry?

PubMed Central

Rymarczyk, Krystyna; Żurawski, Łukasz; Jankowiak-Siuda, Kamila; Szatkowska, Iwona

2016-01-01

Facial mimicry is the spontaneous response to others’ facial expressions by mirroring or matching the interaction partner. Recent evidence suggested that mimicry may not be only an automatic reaction but could be dependent on many factors, including social context, type of task in which the participant is engaged, or stimulus properties (dynamic vs static presentation). In the present study, we investigated the impact of dynamic facial expression and sex differences on facial mimicry and judgment of emotional intensity. Electromyography recordings were recorded from the corrugator supercilii, zygomaticus major, and orbicularis oculi muscles during passive observation of static and dynamic images of happiness and anger. The ratings of the emotional intensity of facial expressions were also analysed. As predicted, dynamic expressions were rated as more intense than static ones. Compared to static images, dynamic displays of happiness also evoked stronger activity in the zygomaticus major and orbicularis oculi, suggesting that subjects experienced positive emotion. No muscles showed mimicry activity in response to angry faces. Moreover, we found that women exhibited greater zygomaticus major muscle activity in response to dynamic happiness stimuli than static stimuli. Our data support the hypothesis that people mimic positive emotions and confirm the importance of dynamic stimuli in some emotional processing. PMID:27390867

Hypopituitarism is associated with lower oxytocin concentrations and reduced empathic ability.

PubMed

Daughters, Katie; Manstead, Antony S R; Rees, D Aled

2017-07-01

Central diabetes insipidus is characterised by arginine vasopressin deficiency. Oxytocin is structurally related to vasopressin and is synthesised in the same hypothalamic nuclei, thus we hypothesised that patients with acquired central diabetes insipidus and anterior hypopituitarism would display an oxytocin deficiency. Moreover, psychological research has demonstrated that oxytocin influences social and emotional behaviours, particularly empathic behaviour. We therefore further hypothesised that central diabetes insipidus patients would perform worse on empathy-related tasks, compared to age-matched and gender-matched clinical control (clinical control-isolated anterior hypopituitarism) and healthy control groups. Fifty-six participants (age 46.54 ± 16.30 yrs; central diabetes insipidus: n = 20, 8 males; clinical control: n = 15, 6 males; healthy control: n = 20, 7 males) provided two saliva samples which were analysed for oxytocin and completed two empathy tasks. Hypopituitary patients (both central diabetes insipidus and clinical control groups) had significantly lower oxytocin concentrations compared to healthy control participants. Hypopituitary patients also performed significantly worse on both the reading the mind in the eyes task and the facial expression recognition task compared to healthy control participants. Regression analyses further revealed that central diabetes insipidus patients' oxytocin concentrations significantly predicted their performance on easy items of the reading the mind in the eyes task. Hypopituitarism may therefore be associated with reduced oxytocin concentrations and impaired empathic ability. While further studies are needed to replicate these findings, our data suggest that oxytocin replacement may offer a therapeutic approach to improve psychological well-being in patients with hypopituitarism.

Dysfunctions in brain networks supporting empathy: An fMRI study in adults with autism spectrum disorders

PubMed Central

Schulte-Rüther, Martin; Greimel, Ellen; Markowitsch, Hans J.; Kamp-Becker, Inge; Remschmidt, Helmut; Fink, Gereon R.; Piefke, Martina

2010-01-01

The present study aimed at identifying dysfunctions in brain networks that may underlie disturbed empathic behavior in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). During functional magnetic resonance imaging, subjects were asked to identify the emotional state observed in a facial stimulus (other-task) or to evaluate their own emotional response (self-task). Behaviorally, ASD subjects performed equally to the control group during the other-task, but showed less emotionally congruent responses in the self-task. Activations in brain regions related to theory of mind were observed in both groups. Activations of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) were located in dorsal subregions in ASD subjects and in ventral areas in control subjects. During the self-task, ASD subjects activated an additional network of frontal and inferior temporal areas. Frontal areas previously associated with the human mirror system were activated in both tasks in control subjects, while ASD subjects recruited these areas during the self-task only. Activations in the ventral MPFC may provide the basis for one's “emotional bond” with other persons’ emotions. Such atypical patterns of activation may underlie disturbed empathy in individuals with ASD. Subjects with ASD may use an atypical cognitive strategy to gain access to their own emotional state in response to other people's emotions. PMID:20945256

Dysfunctions in brain networks supporting empathy: an fMRI study in adults with autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Schulte-Rüther, Martin; Greimel, Ellen; Markowitsch, Hans J; Kamp-Becker, Inge; Remschmidt, Helmut; Fink, Gereon R; Piefke, Martina

2011-01-01

The present study aimed at identifying dysfunctions in brain networks that may underlie disturbed empathic behavior in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). During functional magnetic resonance imaging, subjects were asked to identify the emotional state observed in a facial stimulus (other-task) or to evaluate their own emotional response (self-task). Behaviorally, ASD subjects performed equally to the control group during the other-task, but showed less emotionally congruent responses in the self-task. Activations in brain regions related to theory of mind were observed in both groups. Activations of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) were located in dorsal subregions in ASD subjects and in ventral areas in control subjects. During the self-task, ASD subjects activated an additional network of frontal and inferior temporal areas. Frontal areas previously associated with the human mirror system were activated in both tasks in control subjects, while ASD subjects recruited these areas during the self-task only. Activations in the ventral MPFC may provide the basis for one's "emotional bond" with other persons' emotions. Such atypical patterns of activation may underlie disturbed empathy in individuals with ASD. Subjects with ASD may use an atypical cognitive strategy to gain access to their own emotional state in response to other people's emotions.

Role of Emotion and Cognition on Age Differences in the Framing Effect.

PubMed

Pu, Bingyan; Peng, Huamao; Xia, Shiyong

2017-09-01

Framing effect studies indicate that individuals are risk averse for decisions framed as gains but risk-seeking for decisions framed as losses. Findings of age-related differences in susceptibility to framing are mixed. In the current study, we examined emotional arousal in two decision tasks (life saving vs. money gambling) to evaluate the effects of emotion on age differences in the framing effect. When cognitive abilities and styles were controlled, there was a framing effect in the younger group in the life-saving task, a high-emotional arousal task, while older adults did not display this classic framing effect pattern. They showed risk aversion in both positive and negative framing. Age differences existed in the framing effect. Conversely, younger and older adults in the money-gambling task both displayed the framing effect; there was no age difference. When the cognitive abilities were not controlled, the pattern of results in the high-emotional arousal task remained unchanged, while greater framing effects were found, from the perspective of effect size, for older than younger adults in the low-emotional arousal task. Limited cognitive resources would not hamper older adults' performances when their emotional arousal was high. However, older adults with low-level emotional arousal were more susceptible than younger adults to framing because of declining cognitive capacities. This implied the importance of emotion in older adults' decision making and supported the selective engagement hypothesis.

Facial emotion recognition in Williams syndrome and Down syndrome: A matching and developmental study.

PubMed

Martínez-Castilla, Pastora; Burt, Michael; Borgatti, Renato; Gagliardi, Chiara

2015-01-01

In this study both the matching and developmental trajectories approaches were used to clarify questions that remain open in the literature on facial emotion recognition in Williams syndrome (WS) and Down syndrome (DS). The matching approach showed that individuals with WS or DS exhibit neither proficiency for the expression of happiness nor specific impairments for negative emotions. Instead, they present the same pattern of emotion recognition as typically developing (TD) individuals. Thus, the better performance on the recognition of positive compared to negative emotions usually reported in WS and DS is not specific of these populations but seems to represent a typical pattern. Prior studies based on the matching approach suggested that the development of facial emotion recognition is delayed in WS and atypical in DS. Nevertheless, and even though performance levels were lower in DS than in WS, the developmental trajectories approach used in this study evidenced that not only individuals with DS but also those with WS present atypical development in facial emotion recognition. Unlike in the TD participants, where developmental changes were observed along with age, in the WS and DS groups, the development of facial emotion recognition was static. Both individuals with WS and those with DS reached an early maximum developmental level due to cognitive constraints.

Protocol for a between-group experimental study examining cultural differences in emotion processing between Malay and Caucasian adults with and without major depressive disorder

PubMed Central

Mohan, S N; Mukhtar, F; Jobson, L

2016-01-01

Introduction Depression is a mood disorder that affects a significant proportion of the population worldwide. In Malaysia and Australia, the number of people diagnosed with depression is on the rise. It has been found that impairments in emotion processing and emotion regulation play a role in the development and maintenance of depression. This study is based on Matsumoto and Hwang's biocultural model of emotion and Triandis' Subjective Culture model. It aims to investigate the influence of culture on emotion processing among Malaysians and Australians with and without major depressive disorder (MDD). Methods and analysis This study will adopt a between-group design. Participants will include Malaysian Malays and Caucasian Australians with and without MDD (N=320). There will be four tasks involved in this study, namely: (1) the facial emotion recognition task, (2) the biological motion task, (3) the subjective experience task and (4) the emotion meaning task. It is hypothesised that there will be cultural differences in how participants with and without MDD respond to these emotion tasks and that, pan-culturally, MDD will influence accuracy rates in the facial emotion recognition task and the biological motion task. Ethics and dissemination This study is approved by the Universiti Putra Malaysia Research Ethics Committee (JKEUPM) and the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC). Permission to conduct the study has also been obtained from the National Medical Research Register (NMRR; NMRR-15-2314-26919). On completion of the study, data will be kept by Universiti Putra Malaysia for a specific period of time before they are destroyed. Data will be published in a collective manner in the form of journal articles with no reference to a specific individual. PMID:27798019

The effect of acute citalopram on face emotion processing in remitted depression: a pharmacoMRI study.

PubMed

Anderson, Ian M; Juhasz, Gabriella; Thomas, Emma; Downey, Darragh; McKie, Shane; Deakin, J F William; Elliott, Rebecca

2011-01-01

Both reduced serotonergic (5-HT) function and negative emotional biases have been associated with vulnerability to depression. In order to investigate whether these might be related we examined 5-HT modulation of affective processing in 14 remitted depressed subjects compared with 12 never depressed controls matched for age and sex. Participants underwent function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a covert face emotion task with and without intravenous citalopram (7.5mg) pretreatment. Compared with viewing neutral faces, and irrespective of group, citalopram enhanced left anterior cingulate blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response to happy faces, right posterior insula and right lateral orbitofrontal responses to sad faces, and reduced amygdala responses bilaterally to fearful faces. In controls, relative to remitted depressed subjects, citalopram increased bilateral hippocampal responses to happy faces and increased right anterior insula response to sad faces. These findings were not accounted for by changes in BOLD responses to viewing neutral faces. These results are consistent with previous findings showing 5-HT modulation of affective processing; differences found in previously depressed participants compared with controls may contribute to emotional processing biases underlying vulnerability to depressive relapse. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

Emotion recognition in girls with conduct problems.

PubMed

Schwenck, Christina; Gensthaler, Angelika; Romanos, Marcel; Freitag, Christine M; Schneider, Wolfgang; Taurines, Regina

2014-01-01

A deficit in emotion recognition has been suggested to underlie conduct problems. Although several studies have been conducted on this topic so far, most concentrated on male participants. The aim of the current study was to compare recognition of morphed emotional faces in girls with conduct problems (CP) with elevated or low callous-unemotional (CU+ vs. CU-) traits and a matched healthy developing control group (CG). Sixteen girls with CP-CU+, 16 girls with CP-CU- and 32 controls (mean age: 13.23 years, SD=2.33 years) were included. Video clips with morphed faces were presented in two runs to assess emotion recognition. Multivariate analysis of variance with the factors group and run was performed. Girls with CP-CU- needed more time than the CG to encode sad, fearful, and happy faces and they correctly identified sadness less often. Girls with CP-CU+ outperformed the other groups in the identification of fear. Learning effects throughout runs were the same for all groups except that girls with CP-CU- correctly identified fear less often in the second run compared to the first run. Results need to be replicated with comparable tasks, which might result in subgroup-specific therapeutic recommendations.

Midbrain-Driven Emotion and Reward Processing in Alcoholism

PubMed Central

Müller-Oehring, E M; Jung, Y-C; Sullivan, E V; Hawkes, W C; Pfefferbaum, A; Schulte, T

2013-01-01

Alcohol dependence is associated with impaired control over emotionally motivated actions, possibly associated with abnormalities in the frontoparietal executive control network and midbrain nodes of the reward network associated with automatic attention. To identify differences in the neural response to alcohol-related word stimuli, 26 chronic alcoholics (ALC) and 26 healthy controls (CTL) performed an alcohol-emotion Stroop Match-to-Sample task during functional MR imaging. Stroop contrasts were modeled for color-word incongruency (eg, word RED printed in green) and for alcohol (eg, BEER), positive (eg, HAPPY) and negative (eg, MAD) emotional word content relative to congruent word conditions (eg, word RED printed in red). During color-Stroop processing, ALC and CTL showed similar left dorsolateral prefrontal activation, and CTL, but not ALC, deactivated posterior cingulate cortex/cuneus. An interaction revealed a dissociation between alcohol-word and color-word Stroop processing: ALC activated midbrain and parahippocampal regions more than CTL when processing alcohol-word relative to color-word conditions. In ALC, the midbrain region was also invoked by negative emotional Stroop words thereby showing significant overlap of this midbrain activation for alcohol-related and negative emotional processing. Enhanced midbrain activation to alcohol-related words suggests neuroadaptation of dopaminergic midbrain systems. We speculate that such tuning is normally associated with behavioral conditioning to optimize responses but here contributed to automatic bias to alcohol-related stimuli. PMID:23615665

Midbrain-driven emotion and reward processing in alcoholism.

PubMed

Müller-Oehring, E M; Jung, Y-C; Sullivan, E V; Hawkes, W C; Pfefferbaum, A; Schulte, T

2013-09-01

Alcohol dependence is associated with impaired control over emotionally motivated actions, possibly associated with abnormalities in the frontoparietal executive control network and midbrain nodes of the reward network associated with automatic attention. To identify differences in the neural response to alcohol-related word stimuli, 26 chronic alcoholics (ALC) and 26 healthy controls (CTL) performed an alcohol-emotion Stroop Match-to-Sample task during functional MR imaging. Stroop contrasts were modeled for color-word incongruency (eg, word RED printed in green) and for alcohol (eg, BEER), positive (eg, HAPPY) and negative (eg, MAD) emotional word content relative to congruent word conditions (eg, word RED printed in red). During color-Stroop processing, ALC and CTL showed similar left dorsolateral prefrontal activation, and CTL, but not ALC, deactivated posterior cingulate cortex/cuneus. An interaction revealed a dissociation between alcohol-word and color-word Stroop processing: ALC activated midbrain and parahippocampal regions more than CTL when processing alcohol-word relative to color-word conditions. In ALC, the midbrain region was also invoked by negative emotional Stroop words thereby showing significant overlap of this midbrain activation for alcohol-related and negative emotional processing. Enhanced midbrain activation to alcohol-related words suggests neuroadaptation of dopaminergic midbrain systems. We speculate that such tuning is normally associated with behavioral conditioning to optimize responses but here contributed to automatic bias to alcohol-related stimuli.

Visualising fragrances through colours: the mediating role of emotions.

PubMed

Schifferstein, Hendrik N J; Tanudjaja, Inge

2004-01-01

To facilitate communication about fragrances, one can use the colours people tend to associate with their smells. We investigated to what extent odour-colour correspondences for fine fragrances can be accounted for by underlying emotional associations. Odour-colour matches and degree-of-fit judgments revealed that odours were matched to colours non-randomly. Matching colours differed mainly on blackness (brightness), and less on chromaticness (saturation) and hue. Furthermore, we found a consistent negative relationship between odour-colour degree-of-fit ratings and the difference between the odour scores and the colour scores on one of the emotion dimensions (pleasure). This suggests that emotional associations may partly underlie odour-colour correspondences.

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender.

PubMed

Li, Yongna; Tse, Chi-Shing

2016-01-01

People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender).

Interference among the Processing of Facial Emotion, Face Race, and Face Gender

PubMed Central

Li, Yongna; Tse, Chi-Shing

2016-01-01

People can process multiple dimensions of facial properties simultaneously. Facial processing models are based on the processing of facial properties. The current study examined the processing of facial emotion, face race, and face gender using categorization tasks. The same set of Chinese, White and Black faces, each posing a neutral, happy or angry expression, was used in three experiments. Facial emotion interacted with face race in all the tasks. The interaction of face race and face gender was found in the race and gender categorization tasks, whereas the interaction of facial emotion and face gender was significant in the emotion and gender categorization tasks. These results provided evidence for a symmetric interaction between variant facial properties (emotion) and invariant facial properties (race and gender). PMID:27840621

Exposure to smoking cues during an emotion recognition task can modulate limbic fMRI activation in cigarette smokers.

PubMed

Artiges, Eric; Ricalens, Emmanuel; Berthoz, Sylvie; Krebs, Marie-Odile; Penttilä, Jani; Trichard, Christian; Martinot, Jean-Luc

2009-09-01

Smoking cues (SCs) refer to smoking-associated environmental stimuli that may trigger craving and withdrawal symptoms, and predispose to relapse in smokers. Although previous brain imaging studies have explored neural responses to SCs, no study has characterized the effects of SCs on cerebral activity in smokers engaged in an attention-demanding cognitive task that is unrelated to smoking. Thirteen tobacco smokers and a demographically matched group of 13 healthy non-smokers participated in a fast event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study that involved a visual task integrating SCs and neutral cues (NCs) during emotion recognition trials requiring a high level of attention. No significant SC-induced alterations were detected in smokers' behavioural performance. fMRI results show that non-smokers exhibited no difference between SC and NC trials; in contrast, smokers showed SC-induced widespread deactivations in a limbic, paralimbic and striatal network classically involved in addiction, and activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In addition, a correlation between deactivation of the right insula and the severity of smoking dependence (Fagerström test) was detected in smokers. These results suggest that the neural reactivity of smokers to SCs can be modified in the context of a cognitive challenge. This could reflect smokers' ability to inhibit cue-induced craving and may help in smoking cessation.

Hot and cold cognition in unmedicated depressed subjects with bipolar disorder.

PubMed

Roiser, Jonathan P; Cannon, Dara M; Gandhi, Shilpa K; Taylor Tavares, Joana; Erickson, Kristine; Wood, Suzanne; Klaver, Jacqueline M; Clark, Luke; Zarate, Carlos A; Sahakian, Barbara J; Drevets, Wayne C

2009-03-01

Neuropsychological studies in subjects with bipolar disorder (BD) have reported deficits on a variety of cognitive measures. However, because the majority of subjects were medicated at the time of testing in previous studies, it is currently unclear whether the pattern of deficits reported is related to BD itself or to psychotropic medication. We addressed this issue by examining cognitive performance in a group of unmedicated, currently depressed subjects with BD. Forty-nine unmedicated subjects who met DSM-IV criteria for BD, depressed phase, and 55 control subjects participated in this study. Most patients were diagnosed with bipolar II disorder. Performance on emotion-dependent, or 'hot', and emotion-independent, or 'cold', cognitive tasks was assessed using tests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery. The groups were well matched with respect to general intelligence and demographic variables. Deficits in the unmedicated depressed BD group were apparent on tests tapping 'hot' cognitive processing, for example the Cambridge Gamble task and the Probabilistic Reversal Learning task. However, other than a deficit on the Spatial Span test in the depressed BD subjects, the groups performed equivalently on most measures of 'cold' cognitive processing, for example visual memory, attention, and working memory. These data suggest that deficits on tests involving reward processing, short-term spatial memory storage, and sensitivity to negative feedback in depressed BD subjects represent an effect of the illness itself and not mood-stabilizing medication.

Curvilinear relationship between phonological working memory load and social-emotional modulation

PubMed Central

Mano, Quintino R.; Brown, Gregory G.; Bolden, Khalima; Aupperle, Robin; Sullivan, Sarah; Paulus, Martin P.; Stein, Murray B.

2015-01-01

Accumulating evidence suggests that working memory load is an important factor for the interplay between cognitive and facial-affective processing. However, it is unclear how distraction caused by perception of faces interacts with load-related performance. We developed a modified version of the delayed match-to-sample task wherein task-irrelevant facial distracters were presented early in the rehearsal of pseudoword memoranda that varied incrementally in load size (1-syllable, 2-syllables, or 3-syllables). Facial distracters displayed happy, sad, or neutral expressions in Experiment 1 (N=60) and happy, fearful, or neutral expressions in Experiment 2 (N=29). Facial distracters significantly disrupted task performance in the intermediate load condition (2-syllable) but not in the low or high load conditions (1- and 3-syllables, respectively), an interaction replicated and generalised in Experiment 2. All facial distracters disrupted working memory in the intermediate load condition irrespective of valence, suggesting a primary and general effect of distraction caused by faces. However, sad and fearful faces tended to be less disruptive than happy faces, suggesting a secondary and specific valence effect. Working memory appears to be most vulnerable to social-emotional information at intermediate loads. At low loads, spare capacity is capable of accommodating the combinatorial load (1-syllable plus facial distracter), whereas high loads maximised capacity and deprived facial stimuli from occupying working memory slots to cause disruption. PMID:22928750

Impairment in face processing in autism spectrum disorder: a developmental perspective.

PubMed

Greimel, Ellen; Schulte-Rüther, Martin; Kamp-Becker, Inge; Remschmidt, Helmut; Herpertz-Dahlmann, Beate; Konrad, Kerstin

2014-09-01

Findings on face identity and facial emotion recognition in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are inconclusive. Moreover, little is known about the developmental trajectory of face processing skills in ASD. Taking a developmental perspective, the aim of this study was to extend previous findings on face processing skills in a sample of adolescents and adults with ASD. N = 38 adolescents and adults (13-49 years) with high-functioning ASD and n = 37 typically developing (TD) control subjects matched for age and IQ participated in the study. Moreover, n = 18 TD children between the ages of 8 and 12 were included to address the question whether face processing skills in ASD follow a delayed developmental pattern. Face processing skills were assessed using computerized tasks of face identity recognition (FR) and identification of facial emotions (IFE). ASD subjects showed impaired performance on several parameters of the FR and IFE task compared to TD control adolescents and adults. Whereas TD adolescents and adults outperformed TD children in both tasks, performance in ASD adolescents and adults was similar to the group of TD children. Within the groups of ASD and control adolescents and adults, no age-related changes in performance were found. Our findings corroborate and extend previous studies showing that ASD is characterised by broad impairments in the ability to process faces. These impairments seem to reflect a developmentally delayed pattern that remains stable throughout adolescence and adulthood.

Emotional reactivity and cognitive performance in aversively motivated tasks: a comparison between four rat strains

PubMed Central

2009-01-01

Background Cognitive function might be affected by the subjects' emotional reactivity. We assessed whether behavior in different tests of emotional reactivity is correlated with performance in aversively motivated learning tasks, using four strains of rats generally considered to have a different emotional reactivity. Methods The performance of male Brown Norway, Lewis, Fischer 344, and Wistar Kyoto rats in open field (OF), elevated plus-maze (EPM), and circular light-dark preference box (cLDB) tasks, which are believed to provide measures of emotional reactivity, was evaluated. Spatial working and reference memory were assessed in two aversively motivated learning and memory tasks: the standard and the "repeated acquisition" versions of the Morris water maze escape task, respectively. All rats were also tested in a passive avoidance task. At the end of the study, levels of serotonin (5-HT) and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid, and 5-HT turnover in the hippocampus and frontal cortex were determined. Results Strain differences showed a complex pattern across behavioral tests and serotonergic measures. Fischer 344 rats had the poorest performance in both versions of the Morris water escape task, whereas Brown Norway rats performed these tasks very well but the passive avoidance task poorly. Neither correlation analysis nor principal component analysis provided convincing support for the notion that OF, EPM, and cLDB tasks measure the same underlying trait. Conclusions Our findings do not support the hypothesis that the level of emotional reactivity modulates cognitive performance in aversively motivated tasks. Concepts such as "emotional reactivity" and "learning and memory" cannot adequately be tapped with only one behavioral test. Our results emphasize the need for multiple testing. PMID:20003525

Specific biases for identifying facial expression of emotion in children and adolescents with conversion disorders.

PubMed

Kozlowska, Kasia; Brown, Kerri J; Palmer, Donna M; Williams, Lea M

2013-04-01

This study aimed to assess how children and adolescents with conversion disorders identify universal facial expressions of emotion and to determine whether identification of emotion in faces relates to subjective emotional distress. Fifty-seven participants (41 girls and 16 boys) aged 8.5 to 18 years with conversion disorders and 57 age- and sex-matched healthy controls completed a computerized task in which their accuracy and reaction times for identifying facial expressions were recorded. To isolate the effect of individual emotional expressions, participants' reaction times for each emotion (fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and happiness) were subtracted from their reaction times for the neutral control face. Participants also completed self-report measures of subjective emotional distress. Children/Adolescents with conversion disorders showed faster reaction times for identifying expressions of sadness (t(112) = -2.2, p = .03; 444 [609] versus 713 [695], p = .03) and slower reactions times for happy expressions (t(99.3) = 2.28, p ≤ .024; -33 [35] versus 174 [51], p = .024), compared with controls (F(33.75, 419.81) = 3.76, p < .001). There were no significant correlations (at the corrected p value of .01) between reaction times and subjective reports of perceived distress (r values ranged from 092 to 0.221; p > .018). There were also no differences in identification accuracy for any emotion (p > .82). The observation of faster reaction times to sad faces in children and adolescents with conversion disorders suggests increased vigilance and motor readiness to emotional signals that are potential threats to self or to close others. These effects may occur before conscious processing.

Age-Related Changes in the Processing of Emotional Faces in a Dual-Task Paradigm.

PubMed

Casares-Guillén, Carmen; García-Rodríguez, Beatriz; Delgado, Marisa; Ellgring, Heiner

2016-01-01

Background/ Study Context: Age-related changes appear to affect the ability to identify emotional facial expressions in dual-task conditions (i.e., while simultaneously performing a second visual task). The level of interference generated by the secondary task depends on the phase of emotional processing affected by the interference and the nature of the secondary task. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of these variables on age-related changes in the processing of emotional faces. The identification of emotional facial expressions (EFEs) was assessed in a dual-task paradigm using the following variables: (a) the phase during which interference was applied (encoding vs. retrieval phase); and (b) the nature of the interfering stimulus (visuospatial vs. verbal). The sample population consisted of 24 healthy aged adults (mean age = 75.38) and 40 younger adults (mean age = 26.90). The accuracy of EFE identification was calculated for all experimental conditions. Consistent with our hypothesis, the performance of the older group was poorer than that of the younger group in all experimental conditions. Dual-task performance was poorer when the interference occurred during the encoding phase of emotional face processing and when both tasks were of the same nature (i.e., when the experimental condition was more demanding in terms of attention). These results provide empirical evidence of age-related deficits in the identification of emotional facial expressions, which may be partially explained by the impairment of cognitive resources specific to this task. These findings may account for the difficulties experienced by the elderly during social interactions that require the concomitant processing of emotional and environmental information.

Does incongruence of lexicosemantic and prosodic information cause discernible cognitive conflict?

PubMed

Mitchell, Rachel L C

2006-12-01

We are often required to interpret discordant emotional signals. Whereas equivalent cognitive paradigms cause noticeable conflict via their behavioral and psychophysiological effects, the same may not necessarily be true for discordant emotions. Skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rates (HRs) were measured during a classic Stroop task and one in which the emotions conveyed by lexicosemantic content and prosody were congruent or incongruent. The participants' task was to identify the emotion conveyed by lexicosemantic content or prosody. No relationship was observed between HR and congruence. SCR was higher during incongruent than during congruent conditions of the experimental task (as well as in the classic Stroop task), but no difference in SCR was observed in a comparison between congruence effects during lexicosemantic emotion identification and those during prosodic emotion identification. It is concluded that incongruence between lexicosemantic and prosodic emotion does cause notable cognitive conflict. Functional neuroanatomic implications are discussed.

Task difficulty modulates brain activation in the emotional oddball task.

PubMed

Siciliano, Rachel E; Madden, David J; Tallman, Catherine W; Boylan, Maria A; Kirste, Imke; Monge, Zachary A; Packard, Lauren E; Potter, Guy G; Wang, Lihong

2017-06-01

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have reported that task-irrelevant, emotionally salient events can disrupt target discrimination, particularly when attentional demands are low, while others demonstrate alterations in the distracting effects of emotion in behavior and neural activation in the context of attention-demanding tasks. We used fMRI, in conjunction with an emotional oddball task, at different levels of target discrimination difficulty, to investigate the effects of emotional distractors on the detection of subsequent targets. In addition, we distinguished different behavioral components of target detection representing decisional, nondecisional, and response criterion processes. Results indicated that increasing target discrimination difficulty led to increased time required for both the decisional and nondecisional components of the detection response, as well as to increased target-related neural activation in frontoparietal regions. The emotional distractors were associated with activation in ventral occipital and frontal regions and dorsal frontal regions, but this activation was attenuated with increased difficulty. Emotional distraction did not alter the behavioral measures of target detection, but did lead to increased target-related frontoparietal activation for targets following emotional images as compared to those following neutral images. This latter effect varied with target discrimination difficulty, with an increased influence of the emotional distractors on subsequent target-related frontoparietal activation in the more difficult discrimination condition. This influence of emotional distraction was in addition associated specifically with the decisional component of target detection. These findings indicate that emotion-cognition interactions, in the emotional oddball task, vary depending on the difficulty of the target discrimination and the associated limitations on processing resources. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Proficiency in positive vs. negative emotion identification and subjective well-being among long-term married elderly couples.

PubMed

Petrican, Raluca; Moscovitch, Morris; Grady, Cheryl

2014-01-01

Evidence is accruing that positive emotions play a crucial role in shaping a healthy interpersonal climate. Inspired by this research, the current investigation sought to shed light on the link between proficiency in identifying positive vs. negative emotions and a close partner's well-being. To this end, we conducted two studies with neurologically intact elderly married couples (Study 1) and an age-matched clinical sample, comprising married couples in which one spouse had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (Study 2), which tends to hinder emotional expressivity. To assess proficiency in identifying emotions from whole body postures, we had participants in both studies complete a pointlight walker task, featuring four actors (two male, two female) expressing one positive (i.e., happiness) and three negative (i.e., sadness, anger, fear) basic emotions. Participants also filled out measures of subjective well-being. Among Study 1's neurologically intact spouses, greater expertise in identifying positive (but not negative) emotions was linked to greater partner life satisfaction (but not hedonic balance). Spouses of PD patients exhibited increased proficiency in identifying positive emotions relative to controls, possibly reflective of compensatory mechanisms. Complementarily, relative to controls, spouses of PD patients exhibited reduced proficiency in identifying negative emotions and a tendency to underestimate their intensity. Importantly, all of these effects attenuated with longer years from PD onset. Finally, there was evidence that it was increased partner expertise in identifying negative (rather than positive) emotional states that predicted greater life satisfaction levels among the PD patients and their spouses. Our results thus suggest that positive vs. negative emotions may play distinct roles in close relationship dynamics as a function of neurological status and disability trajectory.

Proficiency in positive vs. negative emotion identification and subjective well-being among long-term married elderly couples

PubMed Central

Petrican, Raluca; Moscovitch, Morris; Grady, Cheryl

2014-01-01

Evidence is accruing that positive emotions play a crucial role in shaping a healthy interpersonal climate. Inspired by this research, the current investigation sought to shed light on the link between proficiency in identifying positive vs. negative emotions and a close partner's well-being. To this end, we conducted two studies with neurologically intact elderly married couples (Study 1) and an age-matched clinical sample, comprising married couples in which one spouse had been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (Study 2), which tends to hinder emotional expressivity. To assess proficiency in identifying emotions from whole body postures, we had participants in both studies complete a pointlight walker task, featuring four actors (two male, two female) expressing one positive (i.e., happiness) and three negative (i.e., sadness, anger, fear) basic emotions. Participants also filled out measures of subjective well-being. Among Study 1's neurologically intact spouses, greater expertise in identifying positive (but not negative) emotions was linked to greater partner life satisfaction (but not hedonic balance). Spouses of PD patients exhibited increased proficiency in identifying positive emotions relative to controls, possibly reflective of compensatory mechanisms. Complementarily, relative to controls, spouses of PD patients exhibited reduced proficiency in identifying negative emotions and a tendency to underestimate their intensity. Importantly, all of these effects attenuated with longer years from PD onset. Finally, there was evidence that it was increased partner expertise in identifying negative (rather than positive) emotional states that predicted greater life satisfaction levels among the PD patients and their spouses. Our results thus suggest that positive vs. negative emotions may play distinct roles in close relationship dynamics as a function of neurological status and disability trajectory. PMID:24803910

Generalizability of carry-over effects in the emotional Stroop task.

PubMed

Waters, Andrew J; Sayette, Michael A; Franken, Ingmar H A; Schwartz, Joseph E

2005-06-01

The emotional Stroop task has been the most widely used task to examine attentional bias to emotionally salient stimuli. In one format of this task, words are presented to participants in a mixed randomized or quasi-randomized sequence. Using a mixed smoking Stroop task, we have previously demonstrated that smokers are slower to respond to words which follow smoking-related words than words which follow neutral words. Here we show that this carry-over effect is present in heroin addicts-but not control subjects-in a heroin Stroop task, and in normal subjects in a stress Stroop task. Thus, the effect generalizes to other populations. In addition, an examination of the studies that have collected data from both mixed and blocked formats provides converging evidence for the presence of carry-over effects. We discuss the implications of the carry-over effect for research using the emotional Stroop task.

Multisensory integration and attention in autism spectrum disorder: evidence from event-related potentials.

PubMed

Magnée, Maurice J C M; de Gelder, Beatrice; van Engeland, Herman; Kemner, Chantal

2011-01-01

Successful integration of various simultaneously perceived perceptual signals is crucial for social behavior. Recent findings indicate that this multisensory integration (MSI) can be modulated by attention. Theories of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) suggest that MSI is affected in this population while it remains unclear to what extent this is related to impairments in attentional capacity. In the present study Event-related potentials (ERPs) following emotionally congruent and incongruent face-voice pairs were measured in 23 high-functioning, adult ASD individuals and 24 age- and IQ-matched controls. MSI was studied while the attention of the participants was manipulated. ERPs were measured at typical auditory and visual processing peaks, namely, P2 and N170. While controls showed MSI during divided attention and easy selective attention tasks, individuals with ASD showed MSI during easy selective attention tasks only. It was concluded that individuals with ASD are able to process multisensory emotional stimuli, but this is differently modulated by attention mechanisms in these participants, especially those associated with divided attention. This atypical interaction between attention and MSI is also relevant to treatment strategies, with training of multisensory attentional control possibly being more beneficial than conventional sensory integration therapy.

The impact of threat and cognitive stress on speech motor control in people who stutter.

PubMed

Lieshout, Pascal van; Ben-David, Boaz; Lipski, Melinda; Namasivayam, Aravind

2014-06-01

In the present study, an Emotional Stroop and Classical Stroop task were used to separate the effect of threat content and cognitive stress from the phonetic features of words on motor preparation and execution processes. A group of 10 people who stutter (PWS) and 10 matched people who do not stutter (PNS) repeated colour names for threat content words and neutral words, as well as for traditional Stroop stimuli. Data collection included speech acoustics and movement data from upper lip and lower lip using 3D EMA. PWS in both tasks were slower to respond and showed smaller upper lip movement ranges than PNS. For the Emotional Stroop task only, PWS were found to show larger inter-lip phase differences compared to PNS. General threat words were executed with faster lower lip movements (larger range and shorter duration) in both groups, but only PWS showed a change in upper lip movements. For stutter specific threat words, both groups showed a more variable lip coordination pattern, but only PWS showed a delay in reaction time compared to neutral words. Individual stuttered words showed no effects. Both groups showed a classical Stroop interference effect in reaction time but no changes in motor variables. This study shows differential motor responses in PWS compared to controls for specific threat words. Cognitive stress was not found to affect stuttering individuals differently than controls or that its impact spreads to motor execution processes. After reading this article, the reader will be able to: (1) discuss the importance of understanding how threat content influences speech motor control in people who stutter and non-stuttering speakers; (2) discuss the need to use tasks like the Emotional Stroop and Regular Stroop to separate phonetic (word-bound) based impact on fluency from other factors in people who stutter; and (3) describe the role of anxiety and cognitive stress on speech motor processes. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Training in Goal-Oriented Attentional Self-Regulation Improves Executive Functioning in Veterans with Chronic TBI.

PubMed

Novakovic-Agopian, Tatjana; Kornblith, Erica S; Abrams, Gary; Burciaga-Rosales, Joaquin; Loya, Fred; D'Esposito, Mark; Chen, Anthony J-W

2018-05-02

Deficits in executive control functions are some of the most common and disabling consequences of both military and civilian brain injury. However, effective interventions are scant. The goal of this study was to assess whether cognitive rehabilitation training that was successfully applied in chronic civilian brain injury would be effective for military Veterans with TBI. In a prior study, participants with chronic acquired brain injury significantly improved after training in goal-oriented attentional self-regulation (GOALS) on measures of attention/executive function, functional task performance, and goal-directed control over neural processing on fMRI. The objective of this study was to assess effects of GOALS training in Veterans with chronic TBI. 33 Veterans with chronic TBI and executive difficulties in their daily life completed either five weeks of manualized Goal-Oriented Attentional Self-Regulation (GOALS) training or Brain-Health Education (BHE) matched in time and intensity. Evaluator-blinded assessments at baseline and post training included neuropsychological and complex functional task performance and self-report measures of emotional regulation. After GOALS, but not BHE training, participants significantly improved from baseline on primary outcome measures of: Overall Complex Attention/Executive Function composite neuropsychological performance score [F = 7.10, p =.01; partial 2 = .19], and on overall complex functional task performance (Goal Processing Scale Overall Performance) [F=6.92, p=.01, partial 2 =.20]. Additionally, post-GOALS participants indicated significant improvement on emotional regulation self-report measures [POMS Confusion Score F=6.05, p=.02, partial2=.20]. Training in attentional self-regulation applied to participant defined goals may improve cognitive functioning in Veterans with chronic TBI. Attention regulation training may not only impact executive control functioning in real world complex tasks, but may also improve emotional regulation and functioning. Implications for treatment of Veterans with TBI are discussed.

Emotion Word Processing: Effects of Word Type and Valence in Spanish-English Bilinguals

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kazanas, Stephanie A.; Altarriba, Jeanette

2016-01-01

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in "Int J Billing" 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in "Am J Psychol", in press), and rapid serial visual processing…

Lax decision criteria lead to negativity bias: evidence from the emotional stroop task.

PubMed

Liu, Guofang; Xin, Ziqiang; Lin, Chongde

2014-06-01

Negativity bias means that negative information is usually given more emphasis than comparable positive information. Under signal detection theory, recent research found that people more frequently and incorrectly identify negative task-related words as having been presented originally than positive words, even when they were not presented. That is, people have lax decision criteria for negative words. However, the response biases for task-unrelated negative words and for emotionally important words are still unclear. This study investigated response bias for these two kinds of words. Study 1 examined the response bias for task-unrelated negative words using an emotional Stroop task. Proportions of correct recognition to negative and positive words were assessed by non-parametric signal detection analysis. Participants have lower (i.e., more lax) decision criteria for task-unrelated negative words than for positive words. Study 2 supported and expanded this result by investigating participants' response bias for highly emotional words. Participants have lower decision criteria for highly emotional words than for less emotional words. Finally, possible evolutionary sources of the response bias were discussed.

Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks

PubMed Central

Zhou, Pingyan; Liu, Xun

2013-01-01

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle this controversy, the current study examined whether and to what degrees attention modulated processing of emotion using a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) paradigm. We conducted two flanker experiments using color scale faces in neutral expressions or gray scale faces in emotional expressions. We found SRC effects for all three dimensions (color, gender, and emotion) and SRC effects were larger when the conflicts were task relevant than when they were task irrelevant, suggesting that conflict processing of emotion was modulated by attention, similar to those of color and face identity (gender). However, task modulation on color SRC effect was significantly greater than that on gender or emotion SRC effect, indicating that processing of salient information was modulated by attention to a lesser degree than processing of non-emotional stimuli. We proposed that emotion processing can be influenced by attentional control, but at the same time salience of emotional information may bias toward bottom-up processing, rendering less top-down modulation than that on non-emotional stimuli. PMID:23544155

Attentional modulation of emotional conflict processing with flanker tasks.

PubMed

Zhou, Pingyan; Liu, Xun

2013-01-01

Emotion processing has been shown to acquire priority by biasing allocation of attentional resources. Aversive images or fearful expressions are processed quickly and automatically. Many existing findings suggested that processing of emotional information was pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Other studies argued that attention gated the processing of emotion. To tackle this controversy, the current study examined whether and to what degrees attention modulated processing of emotion using a stimulus-response-compatibility (SRC) paradigm. We conducted two flanker experiments using color scale faces in neutral expressions or gray scale faces in emotional expressions. We found SRC effects for all three dimensions (color, gender, and emotion) and SRC effects were larger when the conflicts were task relevant than when they were task irrelevant, suggesting that conflict processing of emotion was modulated by attention, similar to those of color and face identity (gender). However, task modulation on color SRC effect was significantly greater than that on gender or emotion SRC effect, indicating that processing of salient information was modulated by attention to a lesser degree than processing of non-emotional stimuli. We proposed that emotion processing can be influenced by attentional control, but at the same time salience of emotional information may bias toward bottom-up processing, rendering less top-down modulation than that on non-emotional stimuli.

Finding an emotional face in a crowd: emotional and perceptual stimulus factors influence visual search efficiency.

PubMed

Lundqvist, Daniel; Bruce, Neil; Öhman, Arne

2015-01-01

In this article, we examine how emotional and perceptual stimulus factors influence visual search efficiency. In an initial task, we run a visual search task, using a large number of target/distractor emotion combinations. In two subsequent tasks, we then assess measures of perceptual (rated and computational distances) and emotional (rated valence, arousal and potency) stimulus properties. In a series of regression analyses, we then explore the degree to which target salience (the size of target/distractor dissimilarities) on these emotional and perceptual measures predict the outcome on search efficiency measures (response times and accuracy) from the visual search task. The results show that both emotional and perceptual stimulus salience contribute to visual search efficiency. The results show that among the emotional measures, salience on arousal measures was more influential than valence salience. The importance of the arousal factor may be a contributing factor to contradictory history of results within this field.

Is there less to social anxiety than meets the eye? Behavioral and neural responses to three socio-emotional tasks

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is widely thought to be characterized by heightened behavioral and limbic reactivity to socio-emotional stimuli. However, although behavioral findings are clear, neural findings are surprisingly mixed. Methods Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined behavioral and brain responses in a priori emotion generative regions of interest (amygdala and insula) in 67 patients with generalized SAD and in 28 healthy controls (HC) during three distinct socio-emotional tasks. We administered these socio-emotional tasks during one fMRI scanning session: 1) looming harsh faces (Faces); 2) videotaped actors delivering social criticism (Criticism); and 3) written negative self-beliefs (Beliefs). Results In each task, SAD patients reported heightened negative emotion, compared to HC. There were, however, no SAD versus HC differential brain responses in the amygdala and insula. Between-group whole-brain analyses confirmed no group differences in the responses of the amygdala and insula, and indicated different brain networks activated during each of the tasks. In SAD participants, social anxiety symptom severity was associated with increased BOLD signal in the left insula during the Faces task. Conclusions The similar responses in amygdala and insula in SAD and HC participants suggest that heightened negative emotion responses reported by patients with SAD may be related to dysfunction in higher cognitive processes (e.g., distorted appraisal, attention biases, or ineffective cognitive reappraisal). In addition, the findings of this study emphasize the differential effects of socio-emotional experimental tasks. PMID:23448192

Survey of Technologies for the Airport Border of the Future

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-04-01

geometry Handwriting recognition ID cards Image classification Image enhancement Image fusion Image matching Image processing Image segmentation Iris...00 Tongue print Footstep recognition Odour recognition Retinal recognition Emotion recognition Periocular recognition Handwriting recognition Ear...recognition Palmprint recognition Hand geometry DNA matching Vein matching Ear recognition Handwriting recognition Periocular recognition Emotion

Intermodal Matching of Emotional Expressions in Young Children with Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kahana-Kalman, Ronit; Goldman, Sylvie

2008-01-01

This study examined the ability of young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to detect affective correspondences between facial and vocal expressions of emotion using an intermodal matching paradigm. Four-year-old children with ASD (n = 18) and their age-matched normally developing peers (n = 18) were presented pairs of videotaped facial…

Selective Attention to Emotional Stimuli: What IQ and Openness Do, and Emotional Intelligence Does Not

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fiori, Marina; Antonakis, John

2012-01-01

We examined how general intelligence, personality, and emotional intelligence--measured as an ability using the MSCEIT--predicted performance on a selective-attention task requiring participants to ignore distracting emotion information. We used a visual prime in which participants saw a pair of faces depicting emotions; their task was to focus on…

Retro-Active Emotion: Do Negative Emotional Stimuli Disrupt Consolidation in Working Memory?

PubMed

Kandemir, Güven; Akyürek, Elkan G; Nieuwenstein, Mark R

2017-01-01

While many studies have shown that a task-irrelevant emotionally arousing stimulus can interfere with the processing of a shortly following target, it remains unclear whether an emotional stimulus can also retro-actively interrupt the ongoing processing of an earlier target. In two experiments, we examined whether the presentation of a negative emotionally arousing picture can disrupt working memory consolidation of a preceding visual target. In both experiments, the effects of negative emotional pictures were compared with the effects of neutral pictures. In Experiment 1, the pictures were entirely task-irrelevant whereas in Experiment 2 the pictures were associated with a 2-alternative forced choice task that required participants to respond to the color of a frame surrounding the pictures. The results showed that the appearance of the pictures did not interfere with target consolidation when the pictures were task-irrelevant, whereas such interference was observed when the pictures were associated with a 2-AFC task. Most importantly, however, the results showed no effects of whether the picture had neutral or emotional content. Implications for further research are discussed.

The Right Place at the Right Time: Priming Facial Expressions with Emotional Face Components in Developmental Visual Agnosia

PubMed Central

Aviezer, Hillel; Hassin, Ran. R.; Perry, Anat; Dudarev, Veronica; Bentin, Shlomo

2012-01-01

The current study examined the nature of deficits in emotion recognition from facial expressions in case LG, an individual with a rare form of developmental visual agnosia (DVA). LG presents with profoundly impaired recognition of facial expressions, yet the underlying nature of his deficit remains unknown. During typical face processing, normal sighted individuals extract information about expressed emotions from face regions with activity diagnostic for specific emotion categories. Given LG’s impairment, we sought to shed light on his emotion perception by examining if priming facial expressions with diagnostic emotional face components would facilitate his recognition of the emotion expressed by the face. LG and control participants matched isolated face components with components appearing in a subsequently presented full-face and then categorized the face’s emotion. Critically, the matched components were from regions which were diagnostic or non-diagnostic of the emotion portrayed by the full face. In experiment 1, when the full faces were briefly presented (150 ms), LG’s performance was strongly influenced by the diagnosticity of the components: His emotion recognition was boosted within normal limits when diagnostic components were used and was obliterated when non-diagnostic components were used. By contrast, in experiment 2, when the face-exposure duration was extended (2000 ms), the beneficial effect of the diagnostic matching was diminished as was the detrimental effect of the non-diagnostic matching. These data highlight the impact of diagnostic facial features in normal expression recognition and suggest that impaired emotion recognition in DVA results from deficient visual integration across diagnostic face components. PMID:22349446

Associations Between Childhood Abuse, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Implicit Emotion Regulation Deficits: Evidence From a Low-Income, Inner-City Population.

PubMed

Powers, Abigail; Etkin, Amit; Gyurak, Anett; Bradley, Bekh; Jovanovic, Tanja

2015-01-01

Childhood abuse is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes, including increased risk for development of emotion dysregulation and psychopathology, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The goal of the present study was to examine associations between child abuse, PTSD symptoms, and performance on an emotional conflict regulation task that assesses implicit emotion regulation abilities. The sample consisted of 67 (94% African American) females recruited from a public, urban hospital. Childhood abuse was measured using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, and PTSD was measured using the modified PTSD Symptom Scale. Task accuracy and implicit emotion regulation were measured through an emotional conflict regulation behavioral task. A multivariate analysis of covariance showed that exposure to moderate to severe childhood abuse was significantly related to worse emotional conflict regulation scores independent of current PTSD symptoms, depressive symptoms, and adult trauma exposure, suggesting a deficit in implicit emotion regulation. We also found an interaction between PTSD symptoms and abuse exposure in predicting accuracy on the behavioral task; high levels of PTSD symptoms were associated with poorer task accuracy among individuals who reported moderate to severe exposure to childhood abuse. However, no relationship between implicit emotion regulation abilities and overall PTSD symptom severity was found. This study provides preliminary evidence of an implicit emotion regulation deficit for individuals exposed to significant childhood abuse and further supports the growing evidence that addressing various aspects of emotion dysregulation, such as awareness of emotions and strategies to manage strong emotions, in the context of treatment would be valuable.

Quantitative work demands, emotional demands, and cognitive stress symptoms in surgery nurses.

PubMed

Elfering, Achim; Grebner, Simone; Leitner, Monika; Hirschmüller, Anja; Kubosch, Eva Johanna; Baur, Heiner

2017-06-01

In surgery, cognitive stress symptoms, including problems in concentrating, deciding, memorising, and reflecting are risks to patient safety. Recent evidence points to social stressors as antecedents of cognitive stress symptoms in surgery personnel. The current study tests whether cognitive stress symptoms are positively associated with emotional abuse, emotional- and task-related demands and resources in surgery work. Forty-eight surgery nurses from two hospitals filled out the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire in its German version. Task-related and emotional demands were positively related to cognitive stress symptoms. In a stepwise, multiple, linear regression of cognitive stress symptoms on task-related and emotional demands, emotional abuse and emotional demands were unique predictors (p < .05). Efforts to increase patient safety should address emotional abuse, emotional demands, and, therefore, communication and cooperation team climate in surgery personnel.

Selective Attention to Emotion in the Aging Brain

PubMed Central

Samanez-Larkin, Gregory R.; Robertson, Elaine R.; Mikels, Joseph A.; Carstensen, Laura L.; Gotlib, Ian H.

2009-01-01

A growing body of research suggests that the ability to regulate emotion remains stable or improves across the adult life span. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that this pattern of findings reflects the prioritization of emotional goals. Given that goal-directed behavior requires attentional control, the present study was designed to investigate age differences in selective attention to emotional lexical stimuli under conditions of emotional interference. Both neural and behavioral measures were obtained during an experiment in which participants completed a flanker task that required them to make categorical judgments about emotional and non-emotional stimuli. Older adults showed interference in both the behavioral and neural measures on control trials, but not on emotion trials. Although older adults typically show relatively high levels of interference and reduced cognitive control during non-emotional tasks, they appear to be able successfully to reduce interference during emotional tasks. PMID:19739908

Domain-specific control mechanisms for emotional and nonemotional conflict processing.

PubMed

Soutschek, Alexander; Schubert, Torsten

2013-02-01

Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that the human brain activates dissociable cognitive control networks in response to conflicts arising within the cognitive and the affective domain. The present study tested the hypothesis that nonemotional and emotional conflict regulation can also be dissociated on a functional level. For that purpose, we examined the effects of a working memory and an emotional Go/Nogo task on cognitive control in an emotional and a nonemotional variant of the Stroop paradigm. The data confirmed the hypothesized dissociation: Working memory efforts selectively suppressed conflict regulation in the nonemotional Stroop task, while the demands of an emotional Go/Nogo task impaired only conflict regulation in the emotional Stroop task. We conclude that these findings support a modular architecture of cognitive control with domain-specific conflict regulation processes. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The 'Reading the Mind in Films' Task [child version]: complex emotion and mental state recognition in children with and without autism spectrum conditions.

PubMed

Golan, Ofer; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Golan, Yael

2008-09-01

Children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties recognizing others' emotions. Research has mostly focused on basic emotion recognition, devoid of context. This study reports the results of a new task, assessing recognition of complex emotions and mental states in social contexts. An ASC group (n = 23) was compared to a general population control group (n = 24). Children with ASC performed lower than controls on the task. Using task scores, more than 87% of the participants were allocated to their group. This new test quantifies complex emotion and mental state recognition in life-like situations. Our findings reveal that children with ASC have residual difficulties in this aspect of empathy. The use of language-based compensatory strategies for emotion recognition is discussed.

[Assessment of sociocognitive functions in neurological patients Presentation of a French adaptation of two tools and implementation in frontal dementia].

PubMed

Ehrlé, Nathalie; Henry, Audrey; Pesa, Audrey; Bakchine, Serge

2011-03-01

This paper presents a French battery designed to assess emotional and sociocognitive abilities in neurological patients in clinical practice. The first part of this battery includes subtests assessing emotions: a recognition task of primary facial emotions, a discrimination task of facial emotions, a task of expressive intensity judgment, a task of gender identification, a recognition task of musical emotions. The second part intends to assess some sociocognitive abilities, that is mainly theory of mind (attribution tasks of mental states to others: false believe tasks of first and second order, faux-pas task) and social norms (moral/conventional distinction task, social situations task) but also abstract language and humour. We present a general description of the battery with special attention to specific methodological constraints for the assessment of neurological patients. After a brief introduction to moral and conventional judgments (definition and current theoretical basis), the French version of the social norm task from RJR Blair (Blair and Cipolotti, 2000) is developed. The relevance of these tasks in frontal variant of frontotemporal dementia (fvFTD is illustrated by the report of the results of a study conducted in 18 patients by the Cambridge group and by the personal study of a patient with early stage of vfFTD. The relevance of the diagnostic of sociocognitive impairment in neurological patients is discussed.

Comparison of inhibition in two timed reaction tasks: the color and emotion Stroop tasks.

PubMed

Cothran, D Lisa; Larsen, Randy

2008-07-01

The authors examined the cross-task consistency of the ability to inhibit the processing of irrelevant information. They compared interference scores on 2 widely used inhibition tasks and found that color word Stroop interference scores correlated with emotion word Stroop interference scores. An examination of physiological reactivity showed that, in general, the color Stroop was more arousing than was the emotion Stroop, most likely due to increased response conflict.

Neural Correlates of Emotion Processing in Word Detection Task

PubMed Central

Zhao, Wenshuang; Chen, Liang; Zhou, Chunxia; Luo, Wenbo

2018-01-01

In our previous study, we have proposed a three-stage model of emotion processing; in the current study, we investigated whether the ERP component may be different when the emotional content of stimuli is task-irrelevant. In this study, a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task was used to investigate how the emotional content of words modulates the time course of neural dynamics. Participants performed the task in which affectively positive, negative, and neutral adjectives were rapidly presented while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 18 undergraduates. The N170 component was enhanced for negative words relative to positive and neutral words. This indicates that automatic processing of negative information occurred at an early perceptual processing stage. In addition, later brain potentials such as the late positive potential (LPP) were only enhanced for positive words in the 480–580-ms post-stimulus window, while a relatively large amplitude signal was elicited by positive and negative words between 580 and 680 ms. These results indicate that different types of emotional content are processed distinctly at different time windows of the LPP, which is in contrast with the results of studies on task-relevant emotional processing. More generally, these findings suggest that a negativity bias to negative words remains to be found in emotion-irrelevant tasks, and that the LPP component reflects dynamic separation of emotion valence. PMID:29887824

Recognizing biological motion and emotions from point-light displays in autism spectrum disorders.

PubMed

Nackaerts, Evelien; Wagemans, Johan; Helsen, Werner; Swinnen, Stephan P; Wenderoth, Nicole; Alaerts, Kaat

2012-01-01

One of the main characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are problems with social interaction and communication. Here, we explored ASD-related alterations in 'reading' body language of other humans. Accuracy and reaction times were assessed from two observational tasks involving the recognition of 'biological motion' and 'emotions' from point-light displays (PLDs). Eye movements were recorded during the completion of the tests. Results indicated that typically developed-participants were more accurate than ASD-subjects in recognizing biological motion or emotions from PLDs. No accuracy differences were revealed on two control-tasks (involving the indication of color-changes in the moving point-lights). Group differences in reaction times existed on all tasks, but effect sizes were higher for the biological and emotion recognition tasks. Biological motion recognition abilities were related to a person's ability to recognize emotions from PLDs. However, ASD-related atypicalities in emotion recognition could not entirely be attributed to more basic deficits in biological motion recognition, suggesting an additional ASD-specific deficit in recognizing the emotional dimension of the point light displays. Eye movements were assessed during the completion of tasks and results indicated that ASD-participants generally produced more saccades and shorter fixation-durations compared to the control-group. However, especially for emotion recognition, these altered eye movements were associated with reductions in task-performance.

How Does Sam Feel?: Children's Labelling and Drawing of Basic Emotions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brechet, Claire; Baldy, Rene; Picard, Delphine

2009-01-01

This study compares the ability of children aged from 6 to 11 to freely produce emotional labels based on detailed scenarios (labelling task), and their ability to depict basic emotions in their human figure drawing (subsequent drawing task). This comparison assesses the relevance of the use of a human figure drawing task in order to test…

Changes in brain activity of somatoform disorder patients during emotional empathy after multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy

PubMed Central

de Greck, Moritz; Bölter, Annette F.; Lehmann, Lisa; Ulrich, Cornelia; Stockum, Eva; Enzi, Björn; Hoffmann, Thilo; Tempelmann, Claus; Beutel, Manfred; Frommer, Jörg; Northoff, Georg

2013-01-01

Somatoform disorder patients show a variety of emotional disturbances including impaired emotion recognition and increased empathic distress. In a previous paper, our group showed that several brain regions involved in emotional processing, such as the parahippocampal gyrus and other regions, were less activated in pre-treatment somatoform disorder patients (compared to healthy controls) during an empathy task. Since the parahippocampal gyrus is involved in emotional memory, its decreased activation might reflect the repression of emotional memories (which—according to psychoanalytical concepts—plays an important role in somatoform disorder). Psychodynamic psychotherapy aims at increasing the understanding of emotional conflicts as well as uncovering repressed emotions. We were interested, whether brain activity in the parahippocampal gyrus normalized after (inpatient) multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy. Using fMRI, subjects were scanned while they shared the emotional states of presented facial stimuli expressing anger, disgust, joy, and a neutral expression; distorted stimuli with unrecognizable content served as control condition. 15 somatoform disorder patients were scanned twice, pre and post multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy; in addition, 15 age-matched healthy control subjects were investigated. Effects of psychotherapy on hemodynamic responses were analyzed implementing two approaches: (1) an a priori region of interest approach and (2) a voxelwise whole brain analysis. Both analyses revealed increased hemodynamic responses in the left and right parahippocampal gyrus (and other regions) after multimodal psychotherapy in the contrast “empathy with anger”—“control.” Our results are in line with psychoanalytical concepts about somatoform disorder. They suggest the parahippocampal gyrus is crucially involved in the neurobiological mechanisms which underly the emotional deficits of somatoform disorder patients. PMID:23966922

Age-related changes in amygdala-frontal connectivity during emotional face processing from childhood into young adulthood.

PubMed

Wu, Minjie; Kujawa, Autumn; Lu, Lisa H; Fitzgerald, Daniel A; Klumpp, Heide; Fitzgerald, Kate D; Monk, Christopher S; Phan, K Luan

2016-05-01

The ability to process and respond to emotional facial expressions is a critical skill for healthy social and emotional development. There has been growing interest in understanding the neural circuitry underlying development of emotional processing, with previous research implicating functional connectivity between amygdala and frontal regions. However, existing work has focused on threatening emotional faces, raising questions regarding the extent to which these developmental patterns are specific to threat or to emotional face processing more broadly. In the current study, we examined age-related changes in brain activity and amygdala functional connectivity during an fMRI emotional face matching task (including angry, fearful, and happy faces) in 61 healthy subjects aged 7-25 years. We found age-related decreases in ventral medial prefrontal cortex activity in response to happy faces but not to angry or fearful faces, and an age-related change (shifting from positive to negative correlation) in amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (ACC/mPFC) functional connectivity to all emotional faces. Specifically, positive correlations between amygdala and ACC/mPFC in children changed to negative correlations in adults, which may suggest early emergence of bottom-up amygdala excitatory signaling to ACC/mPFC in children and later development of top-down inhibitory control of ACC/mPFC over amygdala in adults. Age-related changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity did not vary for processing of different facial emotions, suggesting changes in amygdala-ACC/mPFC connectivity may underlie development of broad emotional processing, rather than threat-specific processing. Hum Brain Mapp 37:1684-1695, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Emotion processing in Parkinson's disease: an EEG spectral power study.

PubMed

Yuvaraj, R; Murugappan, M; Omar, Mohd Iqbal; Ibrahim, Norlinah Mohamed; Sundaraj, Kenneth; Mohamad, Khairiyah; Satiyan, M

2014-07-01

Although an emotional deficit is a common finding in Parkinson's disease (PD), its neurobiological mechanism on emotion recognition is still unknown. This study examined the emotion processing deficits in PD patients using electroencephalogram (EEG) signals in response to multimodal stimuli. EEG signals were investigated on both positive and negative emotions in 14 PD patients and 14 aged-matched normal controls (NCs). The relative power (i.e., ratio of EEG signal power in each frequency band compared to the total EEG power) was computed over three brain regions: the anterior (AF3, F7, F3, F4, F8 and AF4), central (FC5 and FC6) and posterior (T7, P7, O1, O2, P8 and T8) regions for theta (4-8 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz) and gamma (30-60 Hz) frequency sub-bands, respectively. Behaviorally, PD patients showed decreased performance in classifying emotional stimuli as measured by subjective ratings. EEG power at theta, alpha, beta, and gamma bands in all regions were significantly different between the NC and PD groups during both the emotional tasks, with p-values less than 0.05. Furthermore, an increase of relative spectral powers in the theta and gamma bands and a decrease of relative powers in the alpha and beta bands were observed for PD patients compared with NCs during emotional information processing. The results suggest the possibility of the existence of a distinctive neurobiological substrate of PD patients during emotional information processing. Also, these distributed spectral powers in different frequency bands might provide meaningful information about emotional processing in PD patients.

Threat perception in mild cognitive impairment and early dementia.

PubMed

Henry, Julie D; Thompson, Claire; Ruffman, Ted; Leslie, Felicity; Withall, Adrienne; Sachdev, Perminder; Brodaty, Henry

2009-09-01

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia affect many aspects of emotion processing. Even though the ability to detect threat is a particularly important aspect of emotion processing, no study to date has assessed threat perception in either of these groups. The purpose of the present study was to test whether individuals with MCI (n = 38) and mild dementia (n = 34) have difficulty differentiating between faces and situations normatively judged to be either high or low in threat relative to age-matched controls (n = 34). To achieve this aim, all participants completed 2 danger rating tasks that involved viewing and rating high- and low-danger images. It was also assessed whether threat perception was related to cognitive functioning and emotion recognition. The results indicated that all 3 groups were accurately, and comparably, able to differentiate high from low-danger faces. However, the dementia group had difficulties differentiating high from low-danger situations, which reflected a bias to overattribute the level of threat posed by normatively judged nonthreatening situations. This difficulty was related to more general cognitive decline.

Improving cognitive control in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

PubMed

Schweizer, Susanne; Samimi, Zobair; Hasani, Jafar; Moradi, Alireza; Mirdoraghi, Fatemeh; Khaleghi, Mohammad

2017-06-01

The adverse impact of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on the developing mind in adolescence can extend well into adulthood. The developmental malleability of cognitive control capacity in this age group, however, may hold particular promise for cognitive training interventions. The present study investigated the effects of affective working memory (aWMT) compared to placebo-training on cognitive and affective functioning in adolescents with PTSD. 30 treatment-seeking adolescents trained for 20 days on either an affective dual n-back task (aWMT; n = 15) or a feature match task (placebo; n = 15). The aWMT group showed greater pre-to post-training increases in cognitive control as measured by the GoNogo task as well as improvements in symptoms of PTSD and increased use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies. These preliminary findings are promising given the potential for free and easy dissemination of the aWMT in schools and online. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Research on Multirobot Pursuit Task Allocation Algorithm Based on Emotional Cooperation Factor

PubMed Central

Fang, Baofu; Chen, Lu; Wang, Hao; Dai, Shuanglu; Zhong, Qiubo

2014-01-01

Multirobot task allocation is a hot issue in the field of robot research. A new emotional model is used with the self-interested robot, which gives a new way to measure self-interested robots' individual cooperative willingness in the problem of multirobot task allocation. Emotional cooperation factor is introduced into self-interested robot; it is updated based on emotional attenuation and external stimuli. Then a multirobot pursuit task allocation algorithm is proposed, which is based on emotional cooperation factor. Combined with the two-step auction algorithm recruiting team leaders and team collaborators, set up pursuit teams, and finally use certain strategies to complete the pursuit task. In order to verify the effectiveness of this algorithm, some comparing experiments have been done with the instantaneous greedy optimal auction algorithm; the results of experiments show that the total pursuit time and total team revenue can be optimized by using this algorithm. PMID:25152925

Research on multirobot pursuit task allocation algorithm based on emotional cooperation factor.

PubMed

Fang, Baofu; Chen, Lu; Wang, Hao; Dai, Shuanglu; Zhong, Qiubo

2014-01-01

Multirobot task allocation is a hot issue in the field of robot research. A new emotional model is used with the self-interested robot, which gives a new way to measure self-interested robots' individual cooperative willingness in the problem of multirobot task allocation. Emotional cooperation factor is introduced into self-interested robot; it is updated based on emotional attenuation and external stimuli. Then a multirobot pursuit task allocation algorithm is proposed, which is based on emotional cooperation factor. Combined with the two-step auction algorithm recruiting team leaders and team collaborators, set up pursuit teams, and finally use certain strategies to complete the pursuit task. In order to verify the effectiveness of this algorithm, some comparing experiments have been done with the instantaneous greedy optimal auction algorithm; the results of experiments show that the total pursuit time and total team revenue can be optimized by using this algorithm.

Threat prompts defensive brain responses independently of attentional control.

PubMed

Pichon, Swann; de Gelder, Beatrice; Grèzes, Julie

2012-02-01

Negative emotional signals are known to influence task performance, but so far, investigations have focused on how emotion interacts with perceptual processes by mobilizing attentional resources. The attention-independent effects of negative emotional signals are less well understood. Here, we show that threat signals trigger defensive responses independently of what observers pay attention to. Participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while watching short video clips of threatening actions and performed either color or emotion judgments. Seeing threatening actions interfered with performance in both tasks. Amygdala activation reflected both stimulus and task conditions. In contrast, threat stimuli prompted a constant activity in a network underlying reflexive defensive behavior (periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus, and premotor cortex). Threat stimuli also disrupted ongoing behavior and provoked motor conflict in prefrontal regions during both tasks. The present results are consistent with the view that emotions trigger adaptive action tendencies independently of task settings.

Altered medial prefrontal activity during dynamic face processing in schizophrenia spectrum patients.

PubMed

Mothersill, Omar; Morris, Derek W; Kelly, Sinead; Rose, Emma Jane; Bokde, Arun; Reilly, Richard; Gill, Michael; Corvin, Aiden P; Donohoe, Gary

2014-08-01

Processing the emotional content of faces is recognised as a key deficit of schizophrenia, associated with poorer functional outcomes and possibly contributing to the severity of clinical symptoms such as paranoia. At the neural level, fMRI studies have reported altered limbic activity in response to facial stimuli. However, previous studies may be limited by the use of cognitively demanding tasks and static facial stimuli. To address these issues, the current study used a face processing task involving both passive face viewing and dynamic social stimuli. Such a task may (1) lack the potentially confounding effects of high cognitive demands and (2) show higher ecological validity. Functional MRI was used to examine neural activity in 25 patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and 21 age- and gender-matched healthy controls while they participated in a face processing task, which involved viewing videos of angry and neutral facial expressions, and a non-biological baseline condition. While viewing faces, patients showed significantly weaker deactivation of the medial prefrontal cortex, including the anterior cingulate, and decreased activation in the left cerebellum, compared to controls. Patients also showed weaker medial prefrontal deactivation while viewing the angry faces relative to baseline. Given that the anterior cingulate plays a role in processing negative emotion, weaker deactivation of this region in patients while viewing faces may contribute to an increased perception of social threat. Future studies examining the neurobiology of social cognition in schizophrenia using fMRI may help establish targets for treatment interventions. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The interaction of working memory and emotion in persons clinically at risk for psychosis: an fMRI pilot study.

PubMed

Pauly, Katharina; Seiferth, Nina Y; Kellermann, Thilo; Ruhrmann, Stephan; Daumann, Bianca; Backes, Volker; Klosterkötter, Joachim; Shah, N Jon; Schneider, Frank; Kircher, Tilo T; Habel, Ute

2010-07-01

Subtle emotional and cognitive dysfunctions may already be apparent in individuals at risk for psychosis. However, there is a paucity of research on the neural correlates of the interaction of both domains. It remains unclear whether those correlates are already dysfunctional before a transition to psychosis. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the interaction of working memory and emotion in 12 persons clinically at high risk for psychosis (CHR) and 12 healthy subjects individually matched for age, gender and parental education. Participants performed an n-back task while negative or neutral emotion was induced by olfactory stimulation. Although healthy and psychosis-prone subjects did not differ in their working memory performance or the evaluation of the induced emotion, decreased activations were found in CHR subjects in the superior parietal lobe and the precuneus during working memory and in the insula during emotion induction. Looking at the interaction, CHR subjects, showed decreased activation in the right superior temporal gyrus, which correlated negatively with psychopathological scores. Decreased activation was also found in the thalamus. However, an increase of activation emerged in several cerebellar regions. Dysfunctions in areas associated with controlling whether incoming information is linked to emotional content and in the integration of multimodal information might lead to compensatory activations of cerebellar regions known to be involved in olfactory and working memory processes. Our study underlines that cerebral dysfunctions related to cognitive and emotional processes, as well as their interaction, can emerge in persons with CHR, even in absence of behavioral differences. (c) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Use of Computer-Generated Fading Materials to Teach Visual-Visual Non-Identity Matching Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Murphy, Colleen; Figueroa, Maria; Martin, Garry L.; Yu, C. T.; Figueroa, Josue

2008-01-01

Many everyday matching tasks taught to persons with developmental disabilities are visual-visual non-identity matching (VVNM) tasks, such as matching the printed word DOG to a picture of a dog, or matching a sock to a shoe. Research has shown that, for participants who have failed a VVNM prototype task, it is very difficult to teach them various…

Relations Between Self-reported Executive Functioning and Speech Perception Skills in Adult Cochlear Implant Users.

PubMed

Moberly, Aaron C; Patel, Tirth R; Castellanos, Irina

2018-02-01

As a result of their hearing loss, adults with cochlear implants (CIs) would self-report poorer executive functioning (EF) skills than normal-hearing (NH) peers, and these EF skills would be associated with performance on speech recognition tasks. EF refers to a group of high order neurocognitive skills responsible for behavioral and emotional regulation during goal-directed activity, and EF has been found to be poorer in children with CIs than their NH age-matched peers. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that neurocognitive skills, including some EF skills, contribute to the ability to recognize speech through a CI. Thirty postlingually deafened adults with CIs and 42 age-matched NH adults were enrolled. Participants and their spouses or significant others (informants) completed well-validated self-reports or informant-reports of EF, the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function - Adult (BRIEF-A). CI users' speech recognition skills were assessed in quiet using several measures of sentence recognition. NH peers were tested for recognition of noise-vocoded versions of the same speech stimuli. CI users self-reported difficulty on EF tasks of shifting and task monitoring. In CI users, measures of speech recognition correlated with several self-reported EF skills. The present findings provide further evidence that neurocognitive factors, including specific EF skills, may decline in association with hearing loss, and that some of these EF skills contribute to speech processing under degraded listening conditions.

Music-induced changes in functional cerebral asymmetries.

PubMed

Hausmann, Markus; Hodgetts, Sophie; Eerola, Tuomas

2016-04-01

After decades of research, it remains unclear whether emotion lateralization occurs because one hemisphere is dominant for processing the emotional content of the stimuli, or whether emotional stimuli activate lateralised networks associated with the subjective emotional experience. By using emotion-induction procedures, we investigated the effect of listening to happy and sad music on three well-established lateralization tasks. In a prestudy, Mozart's piano sonata (K. 448) and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata were rated as the most happy and sad excerpts, respectively. Participants listened to either one emotional excerpt, or sat in silence before completing an emotional chimeric faces task (Experiment 1), visual line bisection task (Experiment 2) and a dichotic listening task (Experiment 3 and 4). Listening to happy music resulted in a reduced right hemispheric bias in facial emotion recognition (Experiment 1) and visuospatial attention (Experiment 2) and increased left hemispheric bias in language lateralization (Experiments 3 and 4). Although Experiments 1-3 revealed an increased positive emotional state after listening to happy music, mediation analyses revealed that the effect on hemispheric asymmetries was not mediated by music-induced emotional changes. The direct effect of music listening on lateralization was investigated in Experiment 4 in which tempo of the happy excerpt was manipulated by controlling for other acoustic features. However, the results of Experiment 4 made it rather unlikely that tempo is the critical cue accounting for the effects. We conclude that listening to music can affect functional cerebral asymmetries in well-established emotional and cognitive laterality tasks, independent of music-induced changes in the emotion state. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Processing of Facial Emotion in Bipolar Depression and Euthymia.

PubMed

Robinson, Lucy J; Gray, John M; Burt, Mike; Ferrier, I Nicol; Gallagher, Peter

2015-10-01

Previous studies of facial emotion processing in bipolar disorder (BD) have reported conflicting findings. In independently conducted studies, we investigate facial emotion labeling in euthymic and depressed BD patients using tasks with static and dynamically morphed images of different emotions displayed at different intensities. Study 1 included 38 euthymic BD patients and 28 controls. Participants completed two tasks: labeling of static images of basic facial emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad) shown at different expression intensities; the Eyes Test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), which involves recognition of complex emotions using only the eye region of the face. Study 2 included 53 depressed BD patients and 47 controls. Participants completed two tasks: labeling of "dynamic" facial expressions of the same five basic emotions; the Emotional Hexagon test (Young, Perret, Calder, Sprengelmeyer, & Ekman, 2002). There were no significant group differences on any measures of emotion perception/labeling, compared to controls. A significant group by intensity interaction was observed in both emotion labeling tasks (euthymia and depression), although this effect did not survive the addition of measures of executive function/psychomotor speed as covariates. Only 2.6-15.8% of euthymic patients and 7.8-13.7% of depressed patients scored below the 10th percentile of the controls for total emotion recognition accuracy. There was no evidence of specific deficits in facial emotion labeling in euthymic or depressed BD patients. Methodological variations-including mood state, sample size, and the cognitive demands of the tasks-may contribute significantly to the variability in findings between studies.

It depends: Approach and avoidance reactions to emotional expressions are influenced by the contrast emotions presented in the task.

PubMed

Paulus, Andrea; Wentura, Dirk

2016-02-01

Studies examining approach and avoidance reactions to emotional expressions have yielded conflicting results. For example, expressions of anger have been reported to elicit approach reactions in some studies but avoidance reactions in others. Nonetheless, the results were often explained by the same general underlying process, namely the influence that the social message signaled by the expression has on motivational responses. It is therefore unclear which reaction is triggered by which emotional expression, and which underlying process is responsible for these reactions. In order to address this issue, we examined the role of a potential moderator on approach and avoidance reactions to emotional expressions, namely the contrast emotion used in the task. We believe that different approach and avoidance reactions occur depending on the congruency or incongruency of the evaluation of the 2 emotions presented in the task. The results from a series of experiments supported these assumptions: Negative emotional expressions (anger, fear, sadness) elicited avoidance reactions if contrasted with expressions of happiness. However, if contrasted with a different negative emotional expression, anger and sadness triggered approach reactions and fear activated avoidance reactions. Importantly, these results also emerged if the emotional expression was not task-relevant. We propose that approach and avoidance reactions to emotional expressions are triggered by their evaluation if the 2 emotions presented in a task differ in evaluative connotation. If they have the same evaluative connotation, however, reactions are determined by their social message. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Development of response inhibition in the context of relevant versus irrelevant emotions.

PubMed

Schel, Margot A; Crone, Eveline A

2013-01-01

The present study examined the influence of relevant and irrelevant emotions on response inhibition from childhood to early adulthood. Ninety-four participants between 6 and 25 years of age performed two go/nogo tasks with emotional faces (neutral, happy, and fearful) as stimuli. In one go/nogo task emotion formed a relevant dimension of the task and in the other go/nogo task emotion was irrelevant and participants had to respond to the color of the faces instead. A special feature of the latter task, in which emotion was irrelevant, was the inclusion of free choice trials, in which participants could freely decide between acting and inhibiting. Results showed a linear increase in response inhibition performance with increasing age both in relevant and irrelevant affective contexts. Relevant emotions had a pronounced influence on performance across age, whereas irrelevant emotions did not. Overall, participants made more false alarms on trials with fearful faces than happy faces, and happy faces were associated with better performance on go trials (higher percentage correct and faster RTs) than fearful faces. The latter effect was stronger for young children in terms of accuracy. Finally, during the free choice trials participants did not base their decisions on affective context, confirming that irrelevant emotions do not have a strong impact on inhibition. Together, these findings suggest that across development relevant affective context has a larger influence on response inhibition than irrelevant affective context. When emotions are relevant, a context of positive emotions is associated with better performance compared to a context with negative emotions, especially in young children.

[Recognition of facial emotions and theory of mind in schizophrenia: could the theory of mind deficit be due to the non-recognition of facial emotions?].

PubMed

Besche-Richard, C; Bourrin-Tisseron, A; Olivier, M; Cuervo-Lombard, C-V; Limosin, F

2012-06-01

The deficits of recognition of facial emotions and attribution of mental states are now well-documented in schizophrenic patients. However, we don't clearly know about the link between these two complex cognitive functions, especially in schizophrenia. In this study, we attempted to test the link between the recognition of facial emotions and the capacities of mentalization, notably the attribution of beliefs, in health and schizophrenic participants. We supposed that the level of performance of recognition of facial emotions, compared to the working memory and executive functioning, was the best predictor of the capacities to attribute a belief. Twenty schizophrenic participants according to DSM-IVTR (mean age: 35.9 years, S.D. 9.07; mean education level: 11.15 years, S.D. 2.58) clinically stabilized, receiving neuroleptic or antipsychotic medication participated in the study. They were matched on age (mean age: 36.3 years, S.D. 10.9) and educational level (mean educational level: 12.10, S.D. 2.25) with 30 matched healthy participants. All the participants were evaluated with a pool of tasks testing the recognition of facial emotions (the faces of Baron-Cohen), the attribution of beliefs (two stories of first order and two stories of second order), the working memory (the digit span of the WAIS-III and the Corsi test) and the executive functioning (Trail Making Test A et B, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test brief version). Comparing schizophrenic and healthy participants, our results confirmed a difference between the performances of the recognition of facial emotions and those of the attribution of beliefs. The result of the simple linear regression showed that the recognition of facial emotions, compared to the performances of working memory and executive functioning, was the best predictor of the performances in the theory of mind stories. Our results confirmed, in a sample of schizophrenic patients, the deficits in the recognition of facial emotions and in the attribution of mental states. Our new result concerned the demonstration that the performances in the recognition of facial emotions are the best predictor of the performances in the attribution of beliefs. With Marshall et al.'s model on empathy, we can explain this link between the recognition of facial emotions and the comprehension of beliefs. Copyright © 2011 L’Encéphale, Paris. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Iowa Gambling Task performance and emotional distress interact to predict risky sexual behavior in individuals with dual substance and HIV diagnoses

PubMed Central

Wardle, Margaret C.; Gonzalez, Raul; Bechara, Antoine; Martin-Thormeyer, Eileen M.

2013-01-01

HIV+ substance-dependent individuals (SDIs) show emotional distress and executive impairment, but in isolation these poorly predict sexual risk. We hypothesized that an executive measure sensitive to emotional aspects of judgment (Iowa Gambling Task; IGT) would identify HIV+ SDIs whose sexual risks were influenced by emotional distress. We assessed emotional distress and performance on several executive tasks in 190 HIV+ SDIs. IGT performance interacted significantly with emotional distress, such that only in better performers were distress and risk related. Our results are interpreted using the somatic marker hypothesis and indicate that the IGT identifies HIV+ SDIs for whom psychological distress influences HIV risk. PMID:20480423

Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotions.

PubMed

Ardizzi, Martina; Martini, Francesca; Umiltà, Maria Alessandra; Evangelista, Valentina; Ravera, Roberto; Gallese, Vittorio

2015-01-01

The development of the explicit recognition of facial expressions of emotions can be affected by childhood maltreatment experiences. A previous study demonstrated the existence of an explicit recognition bias for angry facial expressions among a population of adolescent Sierra Leonean street-boys exposed to high levels of maltreatment. In the present study, the recognition bias for angry facial expressions was investigated in a younger population of street-children and age-matched controls. Participants performed a forced-choice facial expressions recognition task. Recognition bias was measured as participants' tendency to over-attribute anger label to other negative facial expressions. Participants' heart rate was assessed and related to their behavioral performance, as index of their stress-related physiological responses. Results demonstrated the presence of a recognition bias for angry facial expressions among street-children, also pinpointing a similar, although significantly less pronounced, tendency among controls. Participants' performance was controlled for age, cognitive and educational levels and for naming skills. None of these variables influenced the recognition bias for angry facial expressions. Differently, a significant effect of heart rate on participants' tendency to use anger label was evidenced. Taken together, these results suggest that childhood exposure to maltreatment experiences amplifies children's "pre-existing bias" for anger labeling in forced-choice emotion recognition task. Moreover, they strengthen the thesis according to which the recognition bias for angry facial expressions is a manifestation of a functional adaptive mechanism that tunes victim's perceptive and attentive focus on salient environmental social stimuli.

Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotions

PubMed Central

Ardizzi, Martina; Martini, Francesca; Umiltà, Maria Alessandra; Evangelista, Valentina; Ravera, Roberto; Gallese, Vittorio

2015-01-01

The development of the explicit recognition of facial expressions of emotions can be affected by childhood maltreatment experiences. A previous study demonstrated the existence of an explicit recognition bias for angry facial expressions among a population of adolescent Sierra Leonean street-boys exposed to high levels of maltreatment. In the present study, the recognition bias for angry facial expressions was investigated in a younger population of street-children and age-matched controls. Participants performed a forced-choice facial expressions recognition task. Recognition bias was measured as participants’ tendency to over-attribute anger label to other negative facial expressions. Participants’ heart rate was assessed and related to their behavioral performance, as index of their stress-related physiological responses. Results demonstrated the presence of a recognition bias for angry facial expressions among street-children, also pinpointing a similar, although significantly less pronounced, tendency among controls. Participants’ performance was controlled for age, cognitive and educational levels and for naming skills. None of these variables influenced the recognition bias for angry facial expressions. Differently, a significant effect of heart rate on participants’ tendency to use anger label was evidenced. Taken together, these results suggest that childhood exposure to maltreatment experiences amplifies children’s “pre-existing bias” for anger labeling in forced-choice emotion recognition task. Moreover, they strengthen the thesis according to which the recognition bias for angry facial expressions is a manifestation of a functional adaptive mechanism that tunes victim’s perceptive and attentive focus on salient environmental social stimuli. PMID:26509890

Negative ion treatment increases positive emotional processing in seasonal affective disorder.

PubMed

Harmer, C J; Charles, M; McTavish, S; Favaron, E; Cowen, P J

2012-08-01

Antidepressant drug treatments increase the processing of positive compared to negative affective information early in treatment. Such effects have been hypothesized to play a key role in the development of later therapeutic responses to treatment. However, it is unknown whether these effects are a common mechanism of action for different treatment modalities. High-density negative ion (HDNI) treatment is an environmental manipulation that has efficacy in randomized clinical trials in seasonal affective disorder (SAD). The current study investigated whether a single session of HDNI treatment could reverse negative affective biases seen in seasonal depression using a battery of emotional processing tasks in a double-blind, placebo-controlled randomized study. Under placebo conditions, participants with seasonal mood disturbance showed reduced recognition of happy facial expressions, increased recognition memory for negative personality characteristics and increased vigilance to masked presentation of negative words in a dot-probe task compared to matched healthy controls. Negative ion treatment increased the recognition of positive compared to negative facial expression and improved vigilance to unmasked stimuli across participants with seasonal depression and healthy controls. Negative ion treatment also improved recognition memory for positive information in the SAD group alone. These effects were seen in the absence of changes in subjective state or mood. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that early change in emotional processing may be an important mechanism for treatment action in depression and suggest that these effects are also apparent with negative ion treatment in seasonal depression.

Neural correlates of cross-modal affective priming by music in Williams syndrome.

PubMed

Lense, Miriam D; Gordon, Reyna L; Key, Alexandra P F; Dykens, Elisabeth M

2014-04-01

Emotional connection is the main reason people engage with music, and the emotional features of music can influence processing in other domains. Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder where musicality and sociability are prominent aspects of the phenotype. This study examined oscillatory brain activity during a musical affective priming paradigm. Participants with WS and age-matched typically developing controls heard brief emotional musical excerpts or emotionally neutral sounds and then reported the emotional valence (happy/sad) of subsequently presented faces. Participants with WS demonstrated greater evoked fronto-central alpha activity to the happy vs sad musical excerpts. The size of these alpha effects correlated with parent-reported emotional reactivity to music. Although participant groups did not differ in accuracy of identifying facial emotions, reaction time data revealed a music priming effect only in persons with WS, who responded faster when the face matched the emotional valence of the preceding musical excerpt vs when the valence differed. Matching emotional valence was also associated with greater evoked gamma activity thought to reflect cross-modal integration. This effect was not present in controls. The results suggest a specific connection between music and socioemotional processing and have implications for clinical and educational approaches for WS.

Stress and eating: the effects of ego-threat and cognitive demand on food intake in restrained and emotional eaters.

PubMed

Wallis, D J; Hetherington, M M

2004-08-01

Restrained and emotional eaters overeat in response to stress. To compare differential effects of cognitive demand and ego-threatening stressors on subsequent chocolate intake, 38 females completed a neutral (control), an ego threatening and an incongruent Stroop colour-naming task on three separate occasions. Participants were assigned to four groups based on median-split scores on the restrained and emotional eating scales of the Dutch Eating Behaviour Questionnaire-high restraint/high emotional, high restraint/low emotional, low restraint/high emotional and low restraint/low emotional. Higher response latencies were observed in the incongruent task, confirming its greater cognitive (attentional) demand. Overall intake was enhanced by 23% after ego-threat and 15% after the incongruent Stroop task relative to control. Restraint was associated with greater intake after both ego-threat and the incongruent task than in the control condition. In contrast, emotional eating was associated with greater intake after only the ego-threat, relative to control. A positive association between reaction time and subsequent intake in all conditions for high restraint/low emotional eaters provided support for the limited capacity hypothesis. Enhanced intake in emotional eaters is proposed to relate to escape from self-awareness. These findings demonstrate differential effects of threat and demand on stress-related eating in restrained and emotional eaters.

Neurostructural abnormalities associated with axes of emotion dysregulation in generalized anxiety.

PubMed

Makovac, Elena; Meeten, Frances; Watson, David R; Garfinkel, Sarah N; Critchley, Hugo D; Ottaviani, Cristina

2016-01-01

Despite the high prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and its negative impact on society, its neurobiology remains obscure. This study characterizes the neurostructural abnormalities associated with key symptoms of GAD, focusing on indicators of impaired emotion regulation (excessive worry, poor concentration, low mindfulness, and physiological arousal). These domains were assessed in 19 (16 women) GAD patients and 19 healthy controls matched for age and gender, using questionnaires and a low demand behavioral task performed before and after an induction of perseverative cognition (i.e. worry and rumination). Continuous pulse oximetry was used to measure autonomic physiology (heart rate variability; HRV). Observed cognitive and physiological changes in response to the induction provided quantifiable data on emotional regulatory capacity. Participants underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging; voxel-based morphometry was used to quantify the relationship between gray matter volume and psychological and physiological measures. Overall, GAD patients had lower gray matter volume than controls within supramarginal, precentral, and postcentral gyrus bilaterally. Across the GAD group, increased right amygdala volume was associated with prolonged reaction times on the tracking task (indicating increased attentional impairment following the induction) and lower scores on the 'Act with awareness' subscale of the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire. Moreover in GAD, medial frontal cortical gray matter volume correlated positively with the 'Non-react mindfulness' facet. Lastly, smaller volumes of bilateral insula, bilateral opercular cortex, right supramarginal and precentral gyri, anterior cingulate and paracingulate cortex predicted the magnitude of autonomic change following the induction (i.e. a greater decrease in HRV). Results distinguish neural structures associated with impaired capacity for cognitive, attentional and physiological disengagement from worry, suggesting that aberrant competition between these levels of emotional regulation is intrinsic to symptom expression in GAD.

Do (un)certainty appraisal tendencies reverse the influence of emotions on risk taking in sequential tasks?

PubMed

Bagneux, Virginie; Bollon, Thierry; Dantzer, Cécile

2012-01-01

According to the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007), certainty-associated emotions increase risk taking compared with uncertainty-associated emotions. To date, this general effect has only been shown in static judgement and decision-making paradigms; therefore, the present study tested the effect of certainty on risk taking in a sequential decision-making task. We hypothesised that the effect would be reversed due to the kind of processing involved, as certainty is considered to encourage heuristic processing that takes into account the emotional cues arising from previous decisions, whereas uncertainty leads to more systematic processing. One hundred and one female participants were induced to feel one of three emotions (film clips) before performing a decision-making task involving risk (Game of Dice Task; Brand et al., 2005). As expected, the angry and happy participants (certainty-associated emotions) were more likely than the fearful participants (uncertainty-associated emotion) to make safe decisions (vs. risky decisions).

[Spatiotemporal pattern analysis of event-related potentials elicited by emotional Stroop task].

PubMed

Liu, Qi; Liu, Ling; He, Hui; Zhou, Shu

2007-05-01

To investigate the spatiotemporal pattern of event-related potentials (ERPs) induced by emotional Stroop task. The ERPs of 19 channels were recorded from 13 healthy subjects while performing emotional Stroop task by pressing the buttons representing the colors in which the words denoting different emotions were displayed. A repeated-measures factorial design was adopted with three levels (word valence: positive, neutral and negative). The result of ERP analysis was presented in the form of statistical parametric mapping (SPM) of F value. No significant difference was found in either reaction time or accuracy. The SPM of ERPs suggested significant emotional valence effects in the occipital region (200-220 ms), the left and central frontal regions (270-300 ms), and the bilateral temporal and parietal cortex (560-580 and 620-630 ms, respectively). Processing of task-irrelevant emotional valence information involves the dynamic operation of extensive brain regions. The ERPs are more sensitive than the behavioral indices in emotional evaluation.

Emotional distractors can enhance attention

PubMed Central

Sussman, Tamara J.; Heller, Wendy; Miller, Gregory A.; Mohanty, Aprajita

2015-01-01

The deleterious effects of emotional distractors on attention are well demonstrated. However, it is unclear if emotional distractors inevitably disrupt task-relevant attention. Using multilevel modeling (MLM), the present study examined the impact of valence and arousal dimensions of distracting emotional stimuli and individual differences in anxiety on task-relevant processing. Consistent with prior literature, high-arousal negative distractors were associated with poor task-relevant attention compared to positive and neutral distractors. However, low-arousal negative distractors were associated with better task-relevant performance than were positive and neutral distractors. Furthermore, these effects were accentuated by individual differences in worry. These findings challenge assumptions that distraction and worry must be minimized for augmented attentional performance. Overall, these results emphasize the importance of taking into account emotional dimensions of arousal and valence as well as individual differences in anxiety when examining attention in the presence of emotional distractors. PMID:24058065

The cognitive costs of the counter-stereotypic: gender, emotion, and social presence.

PubMed

McCarty, Megan K; Kelly, Janice R; Williams, Kipling D

2014-01-01

We explored the concurrent and subsequent cognitive consequences of the experience of gender counter-stereotypic emotions. Participants experiencing gender counter-stereotypic emotions were expected to display less emotional expression and demonstrate poorer cognitive performance when in the public condition than when in the private condition. Seventy-one women and 66 men completed an anger- or sadness-inducing task privately or publicly. Participants completed two cognitive tasks: one during and one after the emotion-induction task. Participants exhibited poorer performance during and following gender counter-stereotypic emotions only in the public condition. Direct evidence for greater suppression of gender counter-stereotypic emotions in the public conditions was not obtained. These results suggest that the same public emotional events may be differentially cognitively depleting depending on one's gender, potentially contributing to the perpetuation of stereotypes.

Dissociable neural systems resolve conflict from emotional versus nonemotional distracters.

PubMed

Egner, Tobias; Etkin, Amit; Gale, Seth; Hirsch, Joy

2008-06-01

The human brain protects the processing of task-relevant stimuli from interference ("conflict") by task-irrelevant stimuli via attentional biasing mechanisms. The lateral prefrontal cortex has been implicated in resolving conflict between competing stimuli by selectively enhancing task-relevant stimulus representations in sensory cortices. Conversely, recent data suggest that conflict from emotional distracters may be resolved by an alternative route, wherein the rostral anterior cingulate cortex inhibits amygdalar responsiveness to task-irrelevant emotional stimuli. Here we tested the proposal of 2 dissociable, distracter-specific conflict resolution mechanisms, by acquiring functional magnetic resonance imaging data during resolution of conflict from either nonemotional or emotional distracters. The results revealed 2 distinct circuits: a lateral prefrontal "cognitive control" system that resolved nonemotional conflict and was associated with enhanced processing of task-relevant stimuli in sensory cortices, and a rostral anterior cingulate "emotional control" system that resolved emotional conflict and was associated with decreased amygdalar responses to emotional distracters. By contrast, activations related to both emotional and nonemotional conflict monitoring were observed in a common region of the dorsal anterior cingulate. These data suggest that the neuroanatomical networks recruited to overcome conflict vary systematically with the nature of the conflict, but that they may share a common conflict-detection mechanism.

Protocol for a between-group experimental study examining cultural differences in emotion processing between Malay and Caucasian adults with and without major depressive disorder.

PubMed

Mohan, S N; Mukhtar, F; Jobson, L

2016-10-21

Depression is a mood disorder that affects a significant proportion of the population worldwide. In Malaysia and Australia, the number of people diagnosed with depression is on the rise. It has been found that impairments in emotion processing and emotion regulation play a role in the development and maintenance of depression. This study is based on Matsumoto and Hwang's biocultural model of emotion and Triandis' Subjective Culture model. It aims to investigate the influence of culture on emotion processing among Malaysians and Australians with and without major depressive disorder (MDD). This study will adopt a between-group design. Participants will include Malaysian Malays and Caucasian Australians with and without MDD (N=320). There will be four tasks involved in this study, namely: (1) the facial emotion recognition task, (2) the biological motion task, (3) the subjective experience task and (4) the emotion meaning task. It is hypothesised that there will be cultural differences in how participants with and without MDD respond to these emotion tasks and that, pan-culturally, MDD will influence accuracy rates in the facial emotion recognition task and the biological motion task. This study is approved by the Universiti Putra Malaysia Research Ethics Committee (JKEUPM) and the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC). Permission to conduct the study has also been obtained from the National Medical Research Register (NMRR; NMRR-15-2314-26919). On completion of the study, data will be kept by Universiti Putra Malaysia for a specific period of time before they are destroyed. Data will be published in a collective manner in the form of journal articles with no reference to a specific individual. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/.

Emotional Facilitation Effect in the Picture-Word Interference Task: An ERP Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Baolin; Xin, Shuai; Jin, Zhixing; Hu, Yu; Li, Yang

2010-01-01

In this paper, we aimed to verify the emotional facilitation effect in the picture-word interference task using event-related potentials. Twenty-one healthy subjects were asked to categorize the emotional valences of pictures accompanied by emotionally congruent, either centrally or laterally positioned Chinese words. For both the foveal and…

The selective processing of emotional visual stimuli while detecting auditory targets: an ERP analysis.

PubMed

Schupp, Harald T; Stockburger, Jessica; Bublatzky, Florian; Junghöfer, Markus; Weike, Almut I; Hamm, Alfons O

2008-09-16

Event-related potential studies revealed an early posterior negativity (EPN) for emotional compared to neutral pictures. Exploring the emotion-attention relationship, a previous study observed that a primary visual discrimination task interfered with the emotional modulation of the EPN component. To specify the locus of interference, the present study assessed the fate of selective visual emotion processing while attention is directed towards the auditory modality. While simply viewing a rapid and continuous stream of pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures in one experimental condition, processing demands of a concurrent auditory target discrimination task were systematically varied in three further experimental conditions. Participants successfully performed the auditory task as revealed by behavioral performance and selected event-related potential components. Replicating previous results, emotional pictures were associated with a larger posterior negativity compared to neutral pictures. Of main interest, increasing demands of the auditory task did not modulate the selective processing of emotional visual stimuli. With regard to the locus of interference, selective emotion processing as indexed by the EPN does not seem to reflect shared processing resources of visual and auditory modality.

The right place at the right time: priming facial expressions with emotional face components in developmental visual agnosia.

PubMed

Aviezer, Hillel; Hassin, Ran R; Perry, Anat; Dudarev, Veronica; Bentin, Shlomo

2012-04-01

The current study examined the nature of deficits in emotion recognition from facial expressions in case LG, an individual with a rare form of developmental visual agnosia (DVA). LG presents with profoundly impaired recognition of facial expressions, yet the underlying nature of his deficit remains unknown. During typical face processing, normal sighted individuals extract information about expressed emotions from face regions with activity diagnostic for specific emotion categories. Given LG's impairment, we sought to shed light on his emotion perception by examining if priming facial expressions with diagnostic emotional face components would facilitate his recognition of the emotion expressed by the face. LG and control participants matched isolated face components with components appearing in a subsequently presented full-face and then categorized the face's emotion. Critically, the matched components were from regions which were diagnostic or non-diagnostic of the emotion portrayed by the full face. In experiment 1, when the full faces were briefly presented (150 ms), LG's performance was strongly influenced by the diagnosticity of the components: his emotion recognition was boosted within normal limits when diagnostic components were used and was obliterated when non-diagnostic components were used. By contrast, in experiment 2, when the face-exposure duration was extended (2000 ms), the beneficial effect of the diagnostic matching was diminished as was the detrimental effect of the non-diagnostic matching. These data highlight the impact of diagnostic facial features in normal expression recognition and suggest that impaired emotion recognition in DVA results from deficient visual integration across diagnostic face components. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The dissociable neural dynamics of cognitive conflict and emotional conflict control: An ERP study.

PubMed

Xue, Song; Li, Yu; Kong, Xia; He, Qiaolin; Liu, Jia; Qiu, Jiang

2016-04-21

This study investigated differences in the neural time-course of cognitive conflict and emotional conflict control, using event-related potentials (ERPs). Although imaging studies have provided some evidence that distinct, dissociable neural systems underlie emotional and nonemotional conflict resolution, no ERP study has directly compared these two types of conflict. Therefore, the present study used a modified face-word Stroop task to explore the electrophysiological correlates of cognitive and emotional conflict control. The behavioral data showed that the difference in response time of congruency (incongruent condition minus the congruent condition) was larger in the cognitive conflict task than in the emotional conflict task, which indicated that cognitive conflict was stronger than the emotional conflict in the present tasks. Analysis of the ERP data revealed a main effect of task type on N2, which may be associated with top-down attention. The N450 results showed an interaction between cognitive and emotional conflict, which might be related to conflict detection. In addition, we found the incongruent condition elicited a larger SP than the congruent condition, which might be related to conflict resolution. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Effectively Coping With Task Stress: A Study of the Validity of the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF).

PubMed

O'Connor, Peter; Nguyen, Jessica; Anglim, Jeromy

2017-01-01

In this study, we investigated the validity of the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire-Short Form (TEIQue-SF; Petrides, 2009) in the context of task-induced stress. We used a total sample of 225 volunteers to investigate (a) the incremental validity of the TEIQue-SF over other predictors of coping with task-induced stress, and (b) the construct validity of the TEIQue-SF by examining the mechanisms via which scores from the TEIQue-SF predict coping outcomes. Results demonstrated that the TEIQue-SF possessed incremental validity over the Big Five personality traits in the prediction of emotion-focused coping. Results also provided support for the construct validity of the TEIQue-SF by demonstrating that this measure predicted adaptive coping via emotion-focused channels. Specifically, results showed that, following a task stressor, the TEIQue-SF predicted low negative affect and high task performance via high levels of emotion-focused coping. Consistent with the purported theoretical nature of the trait emotional intelligence (EI) construct, trait EI as assessed by the TEIQue-SF primarily enhances affect and performance in stressful situations by regulating negative emotions.

Familiarity and face emotion recognition in patients with schizophrenia.

PubMed

Lahera, Guillermo; Herrera, Sara; Fernández, Cristina; Bardón, Marta; de los Ángeles, Victoria; Fernández-Liria, Alberto

2014-01-01

To assess the emotion recognition in familiar and unknown faces in a sample of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls. Face emotion recognition of 18 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia (DSM-IVTR) and 18 healthy volunteers was assessed with two Emotion Recognition Tasks using familiar faces and unknown faces. Each subject was accompanied by 4 familiar people (parents, siblings or friends), which were photographed by expressing the 6 Ekman's basic emotions. Face emotion recognition in familiar faces was assessed with this ad hoc instrument. In each case, the patient scored (from 1 to 10) the subjective familiarity and affective valence corresponding to each person. Patients with schizophrenia not only showed a deficit in the recognition of emotions on unknown faces (p=.01), but they also showed an even more pronounced deficit on familiar faces (p=.001). Controls had a similar success rate in the unknown faces task (mean: 18 +/- 2.2) and the familiar face task (mean: 17.4 +/- 3). However, patients had a significantly lower score in the familiar faces task (mean: 13.2 +/- 3.8) than in the unknown faces task (mean: 16 +/- 2.4; p<.05). In both tests, the highest number of errors was with emotions of anger and fear. Subjectively, the patient group showed a lower level of familiarity and emotional valence to their respective relatives (p<.01). The sense of familiarity may be a factor involved in the face emotion recognition and it may be disturbed in schizophrenia. © 2013.

Positive emotion inducement modulates cardiovascular responses caused by mental work.

PubMed

Liu, Xinxin; Ishimatsu, Kazuma; Sotoyama, Midori; Iwakiri, Kazuyuki

2016-11-16

Positive emotion is considered as an important factor related to health-relevant biological processes, including cardiovascular responses. To explore the possibility of using positive emotion as a tool to manage cardiovascular response of white-collar workers, we examined the influence on cardiovascular response of positive emotion inducement before a mental work. Seventeen healthy males participated and performed a 10-min, PC-based Stroop color word task as their mental work. Before the task, 60 pleasant pictures chosen from the International Affective Picture System were presented in a random order under a positive emotion inducement condition while a gray screen was presented under a control condition. A 30-min relaxation period after completing the task was provided to examine the aftereffects of positive emotion inducement. Throughout these periods, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, mean arterial blood pressure, heart rate, stroke volume, cardiac output, and total peripheral resistance were measured continuously. Blood pressure and total peripheral resistance were lower during the picture presentation period under the positive emotion inducement period compared to the control condition. All indices did not differ during the color word task period. During the relaxation period after the task, however, blood pressure and total peripheral resistance were lower under the positive emotion inducement condition compared to the control condition. Positive emotion inducement before a mental work beneficially modulates cardiovascular responses, suggesting that positive emotion inducement may be a useful tool to manage the cardiovascular response to mental work.

Is a neutral expression also a neutral stimulus? A study with functional magnetic resonance.

PubMed

Carvajal, Fernando; Rubio, Sandra; Serrano, Juan M; Ríos-Lago, Marcos; Alvarez-Linera, Juan; Pacheco, Lara; Martín, Pilar

2013-08-01

Although neutral faces do not initially convey an explicit emotional message, it has been found that individuals tend to assign them an affective content. Moreover, previous research has shown that affective judgments are mediated by the task they have to perform. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in 21 healthy participants, we focus this study on the cerebral activity patterns triggered by neutral and emotional faces in two different tasks (social or gender judgments). Results obtained, using conjunction analyses, indicated that viewing both emotional and neutral faces evokes activity in several similar brain areas indicating a common neural substrate. Moreover, neutral faces specifically elicit activation of cerebellum, frontal and temporal areas, while emotional faces involve the cuneus, anterior cingulated gyrus, medial orbitofrontal cortex, posterior superior temporal gyrus, precentral/postcentral gyrus and insula. The task selected was also found to influence brain activity, in that the social task recruited frontal areas while the gender task involved the posterior cingulated, inferior parietal lobule and middle temporal gyrus to a greater extent. Specifically, in the social task viewing neutral faces was associated with longer reaction times and increased activity of left dorsolateral frontal cortex compared with viewing facial expressions of emotions. In contrast, in the same task emotional expressions distinctively activated the left amygdale. The results are discussed taking into consideration the fact that, like other facial expressions, neutral expressions are usually assigned some emotional significance. However, neutral faces evoke a greater activation of circuits probably involved in more elaborate cognitive processing.

Task-irrelevant emotion facilitates face discrimination learning.

PubMed

Lorenzino, Martina; Caudek, Corrado

2015-03-01

We understand poorly how the ability to discriminate faces from one another is shaped by visual experience. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether face discrimination learning can be facilitated by facial emotions. To answer this question, we used a task-irrelevant perceptual learning paradigm because it closely mimics the learning processes that, in daily life, occur without a conscious intention to learn and without an attentional focus on specific facial features. We measured face discrimination thresholds before and after training. During the training phase (4 days), participants performed a contrast discrimination task on face images. They were not informed that we introduced (task-irrelevant) subtle variations in the face images from trial to trial. For the Identity group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along a morphing continuum of facial identity. For the Emotion group, the task-irrelevant features were variations along an emotional expression morphing continuum. The Control group did not undergo contrast discrimination learning and only performed the pre-training and post-training tests, with the same temporal gap between them as the other two groups. Results indicate that face discrimination improved, but only for the Emotion group. Participants in the Emotion group, moreover, showed face discrimination improvements also for stimulus variations along the facial identity dimension, even if these (task-irrelevant) stimulus features had not been presented during training. The present results highlight the importance of emotions for face discrimination learning. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Thematic Matching as Remedial Teaching for Symbolic Matching for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder

PubMed Central

Lionello-DeNolf, Karen M.; Farber, Rachel; Jones, B. Max; Dube, William V.

2014-01-01

Matching-to-sample (MTS) is often used to teach symbolic relationships between spoken or printed words and their referents to children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. However, many children have difficulty learning symbolic matching, even though they may demonstrate generalized identity matching. The current study investigated whether training on symbolic MTS tasks in which the stimuli are physically dissimilar but members of familiar categories (i.e., thematic matching) can remediate an individual’s difficulty learning symbolic MTS tasks involving non-representative stimuli. Three adolescent males diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder were first trained on symbolic MTS tasks with unfamiliar, non-representative form stimuli. Thematic matching was introduced after the participants failed to learn 0, 2 or 4 symbolic MTS tasks and before additional symbolic MTS tasks were introduced. After exposure to thematic matching, accuracy on symbolic MTS tasks with novel stimuli increased to above chance for all participants. For two participants, high accuracy (> 90%) was achieved on a majority of these sessions. Thus, thematic matching may be an effective intervention for students with limited verbal repertoires and who have difficulty learning symbolic MTS tasks. Possible explanations for the facilitative effect of thematic matching are considered and warrant further investigation. PMID:24634695

Neuroimaging evidence for a role of neural social stress processing in ethnic minority-associated environmental risk.

PubMed

Akdeniz, Ceren; Tost, Heike; Streit, Fabian; Haddad, Leila; Wüst, Stefan; Schäfer, Axel; Schneider, Michael; Rietschel, Marcella; Kirsch, Peter; Meyer-Lindenberg, Andreas

2014-06-01

Relative risk for the brain disorder schizophrenia is more than doubled in ethnic minorities, an effect that is evident across countries and linked to socially relevant cues such as skin color, making ethnic minority status a well-established social environmental risk factor. Pathoepidemiological models propose a role for chronic social stress and perceived discrimination for mental health risk in ethnic minorities, but the neurobiology is unexplored. To study neural social stress processing, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, and associations with perceived discrimination in ethnic minority individuals. Cross-sectional design in a university setting using 3 validated paradigms to challenge neural social stress processing and, to probe for specificity, emotional and cognitive brain functions. Healthy participants included those with German lineage (n = 40) and those of ethnic minority (n = 40) from different ethnic backgrounds matched for sociodemographic, psychological, and task performance characteristics. Control comparisons examined stress processing with matched ethnic background of investigators (23 Turkish vs 23 German participants) and basic emotional and cognitive tasks (24 Turkish vs 24 German participants). Blood oxygenation level-dependent response, functional connectivity, and psychological and physiological measures. There were significant increases in heart rate (P < .001), subjective emotional response (self-related emotions, P < .001; subjective anxiety, P = .006), and salivary cortisol level (P = .004) during functional magnetic resonance imaging stress induction. Ethnic minority individuals had significantly higher perceived chronic stress levels (P = .02) as well as increased activation (family-wise error-corrected [FWE] P = .005, region of interest corrected) and increased functional connectivity (PFWE = .01, region of interest corrected) of perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The effects were specific to stress and not explained by a social distance effect. Ethnic minority individuals had significant correlations between perceived group discrimination and activation in perigenual ACC (PFWE = .001, region of interest corrected) and ventral striatum (PFWE = .02, whole brain corrected) and mediation of the relationship between perceived discrimination and perigenual ACC-dorsal ACC connectivity by chronic stress (P < .05). Epidemiologists proposed a causal role of social-evaluative stress, but the neural processes that could mediate this susceptibility effect were unknown. Our data demonstrate the potential of investigating associations from epidemiology with neuroimaging, suggest brain effects of social marginalization, and highlight a neural system in which environmental and genetic risk factors for mental illness may converge.

The interplay of matching and non-matching job demands and resources on emotional exhaustion among teachers.

PubMed

Feuerhahn, Nicolas; Bellingrath, Silja; Kudielka, Brigitte M

2013-07-01

We investigated how matching and non-matching demands and resources are related to emotional exhaustion (EE) in teachers. Theoretically, we draw on the Demand-Induced Strain Compensation (DISC) model that proposes that demands, resources, and strains are multidimensional and comprise emotional, cognitive, and physical components. We first tested whether resources compensate aversive effects of demands. Second, as proposed by the triple-match principle, we tested whether interaction effects between job demands and resources are most likely if demands, resources, and outcomes relate to the same dimension. We retrieved data from 177 school teachers; a subsample was re-examined after a time lag of about 21 month (N = 56). Linear regression analyses reveal concurrent and longitudinal main and interaction effects of teacher-specific emotional and cognitive job demands and resources on EE. Results support the compensation principle and triple-match principle. Therefore, the DISC model seems to provide a valuable framework for the study of interaction effects in job stress research and, in particular, for interventions to reduce job strain in teachers. © 2013 The Authors. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being © 2013 The International Association of Applied Psychology.

Does cortisol modulate emotion recognition and empathy?

PubMed

Duesenberg, Moritz; Weber, Juliane; Schulze, Lars; Schaeuffele, Carmen; Roepke, Stefan; Hellmann-Regen, Julian; Otte, Christian; Wingenfeld, Katja

2016-04-01

Emotion recognition and empathy are important aspects in the interaction and understanding of other people's behaviors and feelings. The Human environment comprises of stressful situations that impact social interactions on a daily basis. Aim of the study was to examine the effects of the stress hormone cortisol on emotion recognition and empathy. In this placebo-controlled study, 40 healthy men and 40 healthy women (mean age 24.5 years) received either 10mg of hydrocortisone or placebo. We used the Multifaceted Empathy Test to measure emotional and cognitive empathy. Furthermore, we examined emotion recognition from facial expressions, which contained two emotions (anger and sadness) and two emotion intensities (40% and 80%). We did not find a main effect for treatment or sex on either empathy or emotion recognition but a sex × emotion interaction on emotion recognition. The main result was a four-way-interaction on emotion recognition including treatment, sex, emotion and task difficulty. At 40% task difficulty, women recognized angry faces better than men in the placebo condition. Furthermore, in the placebo condition, men recognized sadness better than anger. At 80% task difficulty, men and women performed equally well in recognizing sad faces but men performed worse compared to women with regard to angry faces. Apparently, our results did not support the hypothesis that increases in cortisol concentration alone influence empathy and emotion recognition in healthy young individuals. However, sex and task difficulty appear to be important variables in emotion recognition from facial expressions. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Attention to emotion: auditory-evoked potentials in an emotional choice reaction task and personality traits as assessed by the NEO FFI.

PubMed

Mittermeier, Verena; Leicht, Gregor; Karch, Susanne; Hegerl, Ulrich; Möller, Hans-Jürgen; Pogarell, Oliver; Mulert, Christoph

2011-03-01

Several studies suggest that attention to emotional content is related to specific changes in central information processing. In particular, event-related potential (ERP) studies focusing on emotion recognition in pictures and faces or word processing have pointed toward a distinct component of the visual-evoked potential, the EPN ('early posterior negativity'), which has been shown to be related to attention to emotional content. In the present study, we were interested in the existence of a corresponding ERP component in the auditory modality and a possible relationship with the personality dimension extraversion-introversion, as assessed by the NEO Five-Factors Inventory. We investigated 29 healthy subjects using three types of auditory choice tasks: (1) the distinction of syllables with emotional intonation, (2) the identification of the emotional content of adjectives and (3) a purely cognitive control task. Compared with the cognitive control task, emotional paradigms using auditory stimuli evoked an EPN component with a distinct peak after 170 ms (EPN 170). Interestingly, subjects with high scores in the personality trait extraversion showed significantly higher EPN amplitudes for emotional paradigms (syllables and words) than introverted subjects.

Processing of Emotional Distraction is both Automatic and Modulated by Attention: Evidence from an Event-Related fMRI Investigation

PubMed Central

Shafer, A.T.; Matveychuk, D.; Penney, T.; O’Hare, A.J.; Stokes, J.; Dolcos, F.

2015-01-01

Traditionally, emotional stimuli have been thought to be automatically processed via a bottom-up automatic “capture of attention” mechanism. Recently, this view has been challenged by evidence that emotion processing depends on the availability of attentional resources. Although these two views are not mutually exclusive, direct evidence reconciling them is lacking. One limitation of previous investigations supporting the traditional or competing views is that they have not systematically investigated the impact of emotional charge of task-irrelevant distraction in conjunction with manipulations of attentional demands. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated the nature of emotion-cognition interactions in a perceptual discrimination task with emotional distraction, by manipulating both the emotional charge of the distracting information and the demands of the main task. Findings suggest that emotion processing is both automatic and modulated by attention, but emotion and attention were only found to interact when finer assessments of emotional charge (comparison of most vs. least emotional conditions) were considered along with an effective manipulation of processing load (high vs. low). The study also identified brain regions reflecting the detrimental impact of emotional distraction on performance as well as regions involved in helping with such distraction. Activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and ventrolateral PFC was linked to a detrimental impact of emotional distraction, whereas the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and lateral occiptal cortex were involved in helping with emotional distraction. These findings demonstrate that task-irrelevant emotion processing is subjective to both the emotional content of distraction and the level of attentional demand. PMID:22332805

Intact Rapid Facial Mimicry as well as Generally Reduced Mimic Responses in Stable Schizophrenia Patients

PubMed Central

Chechko, Natalya; Pagel, Alena; Otte, Ellen; Koch, Iring; Habel, Ute

2016-01-01

Spontaneous emotional expressions (rapid facial mimicry) perform both emotional and social functions. In the current study, we sought to test whether there were deficits in automatic mimic responses to emotional facial expressions in patients (15 of them) with stable schizophrenia compared to 15 controls. In a perception-action interference paradigm (the Simon task; first experiment), and in the context of a dual-task paradigm (second experiment), the task-relevant stimulus feature was the gender of a face, which, however, displayed a smiling or frowning expression (task-irrelevant stimulus feature). We measured the electromyographical activity in the corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major muscle regions in response to either compatible or incompatible stimuli (i.e., when the required response did or did not correspond to the depicted facial expression). The compatibility effect based on interactions between the implicit processing of a task-irrelevant emotional facial expression and the conscious production of an emotional facial expression did not differ between the groups. In stable patients (in spite of a reduced mimic reaction), we observed an intact capacity to respond spontaneously to facial emotional stimuli. PMID:27303335

The effect of integrated emotion-oriented care versus usual care on elderly persons with dementia in the nursing home and on nursing assistants: a randomized clinical trial.

PubMed

Finnema, Evelyn; Dröes, Rose-Marie; Ettema, Teake; Ooms, Marcel; Adèr, Herman; Ribbe, Miel; van Tilburg, Willem

2005-04-01

To examine the effect of integrated emotion-oriented care on nursing home residents with dementia and nursing assistants. A multi-site randomized clinical trial with matched groups, and measurements at baseline and after seven months. Sixteen psychogeriatric wards in fourteen nursing homes in the Netherlands. One hundred and forty-six elderly residents with the diagnosis dementia of the Alzheimer (DAT) type, mixed DAT and vascular dementia, and dementia syndrome (NAO) and 99 nursing assistants. Integrated emotion-oriented care and usual care. MESUREMENTS: Demented elderly: Behaviour and mood related to adaptation to the illness and the institutionalization. Nursing assistants: General health as measured by feelings of stress, stress reactions, feeling of competence and illness. Positive effects in favour of the integrated emotion-oriented care were found in mild to moderately demented residents on two adaptive tasks: maintaining an emotional balance (less anxiety) and preserving a positive self-image (less dissatisfaction). In the trained group of nursing assistants fewer stress reactions were found only in those who perceived improvement in their emotion-oriented care skills after training. Emotion-oriented care is more effective with regard to the emotional adaptation in nursing homes of persons with a mild to moderate dementia. For the severely demented elderly we did not find this surplus value. This outcome is of clinical importance for elderly persons with dementia who are cared for in nursing homes. With respect to the nursing assistants it is concluded that emotion-oriented care has a positive influence on stress reactions in some of them. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Neural correlates of emotional face processing in bipolar disorder: an event-related potential study.

PubMed

Degabriele, Racheal; Lagopoulos, Jim; Malhi, Gin

2011-09-01

Behavioural and imaging studies report that individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) exhibit impairments in emotional face processing. However, few studies have studied the temporal characteristics of these impairments, and event-related potential (ERP) studies that investigate emotion perception in BD are rare. The aim of our study was to explore these processes as indexed by the face-specific P100 and N170 ERP components in a BD cohort. Eighteen subjects diagnosed with BD and 18 age- and sex-matched healthy volunteers completed an emotional go/no-go inhibition task during electroencephalogram (EEG) and ERP acquisition. Patients demonstrated faster responses to happy compared to sad faces, whereas control data revealed no emotional discrimination. Errors of omission were more frequent in the BD group in both emotion conditions, but there were no between-group differences in commission errors. Significant differences were found between groups in P100 amplitude variation across levels of affect, with the BD group exhibiting greater responses to happy compared to sad faces. Conversely, the control cohort failed to demonstrate a differentiation between emotions. A statistically significant between-group effect was also found for N170 amplitudes, indicating reduced responses in the BD group. Future studies should ideally recruit BD patients across all three mood states (manic, depressive, and euthymic) with greater scrutiny of the effects of psychotropic medication. These ERP results primarily suggest an emotion-sensitive face processing impairment in BD whereby patients are initially more attuned to positive emotions as indicated by the P100 ERP component, and this may contribute to the emergence of bipolar-like symptoms. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Does emotion help or hinder reasoning? The moderating role of relevance.

PubMed

Blanchette, Isabelle; Gavigan, Sarah; Johnston, Kathryn

2014-06-01

Some prior research has shown that emotion impairs logicality in deductive reasoning tasks, while other research suggests improved performance with emotional contents. We suggest that relevance, whether the affective state is associated with the semantic contents of the reasoning task, may be crucial in explaining these apparently inconsistent findings. This hypothesis is based on a framework distinguishing between integral emotions, where affective responses are evoked by the semantic contents of the target task, and incidental emotions, where affective responses are not related to the task. In 4 experiments we examined the effect of emotion on conditional reasoning when affective responses were relevant and irrelevant. We used images presented simultaneously with the reasoning stimuli (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or videos presented prior to the reasoning stimuli (Experiment 4) that were either emotional or neutral and semantically related or not to the conditional statements. Results showed that emotion decreased the proportion of normatively correct responses only in the irrelevant condition. In the relevant condition, emotion did not produce reliable deleterious effects. We used reaction time and skin conductance measures to investigate the physiological and cognitive correlates of these effects. Results are discussed in terms of the distinction between incidental and integral emotions. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

The role of instrumental emotion regulation in the emotions-creativity link: how worries render individuals with high neuroticism more creative.

PubMed

Leung, Angela K-Y; Liou, Shyhnan; Qiu, Lin; Kwan, Letty Y-Y; Chiu, Chi-Yue; Yong, Jose C

2014-10-01

Based on the instrumental account of emotion regulation (Tamir, 2005), the current research seeks to offer a novel perspective to the emotions-creativity debate by investigating the instrumental value of trait-consistent emotions in creativity. We hypothesize that emotions such as worry (vs. happy) are trait-consistent experiences for individuals higher on trait neuroticism and experiencing these emotions can facilitate performance in a creativity task. In 3 studies, we found support for our hypothesis. First, individuals higher in neuroticism had a greater preference for recalling worrisome (vs. happy) events in anticipation of performing a creativity task (Study 1). Moreover, when induced to recall a worrisome (vs. happy) event, individuals higher in neuroticism came up with more creative design (Study 2) and more flexible uses of a brick (Study 3) when the task was a cognitively demanding one. Further, Study 3 offers preliminary support that increased intrinsic task enjoyment and motivation mediates the relationship between trait-consistent emotion regulation and creative performance. These findings offer a new perspective to the controversy concerning the emotions-creativity relationship and further demonstrate the role of instrumental emotion regulation in the domain of creative performance. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

Distraction decreases prefrontal oxygenation: A NIRS study.

PubMed

Ozawa, Sachiyo; Hiraki, Kazuo

2017-04-01

When near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to measure emotion-related cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes in the prefrontal cortex regions, the functional distinction of CBF changes is often difficult because NIRS is unable to measure neural activity in deeper brain regions that play major roles in emotional processing. The CBF changes could represent cognitive control of emotion and emotional responses to emotional materials. Supposing that emotion-related CBF changes in the prefrontal cortex regions during distraction are emotional responses, we examined whether oxygenated hemoglobin (oxyHb) decreases. Attention-demanding tasks cause blood flow decreases, and we thus compared the effects of visually paced tapping with different tempos, on distraction. The results showed that the oxyHb level induced by emotional stimulation decreased with fast-tempo tapping significantly more than slow-tempo tapping in ventral medial prefrontal cortex regions. Moreover, a Global-Local task following tapping showed significantly greater local-minus-global response time (RT) difference scores in the fast- and mid-tempo condition compared with those in the slow-tempo, suggesting an increased attentional focus, and decreased negative emotion. The overall findings indicate that oxyHb changes in a relatively long distraction task, as measured by NIRS, are associated with emotional responses, and oxyHb can be decreased by successfully performing attention-demanding distraction tasks. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Recognizing Biological Motion and Emotions from Point-Light Displays in Autism Spectrum Disorders

PubMed Central

Nackaerts, Evelien; Wagemans, Johan; Helsen, Werner; Swinnen, Stephan P.; Wenderoth, Nicole; Alaerts, Kaat

2012-01-01

One of the main characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are problems with social interaction and communication. Here, we explored ASD-related alterations in ‘reading’ body language of other humans. Accuracy and reaction times were assessed from two observational tasks involving the recognition of ‘biological motion’ and ‘emotions’ from point-light displays (PLDs). Eye movements were recorded during the completion of the tests. Results indicated that typically developed-participants were more accurate than ASD-subjects in recognizing biological motion or emotions from PLDs. No accuracy differences were revealed on two control-tasks (involving the indication of color-changes in the moving point-lights). Group differences in reaction times existed on all tasks, but effect sizes were higher for the biological and emotion recognition tasks. Biological motion recognition abilities were related to a person’s ability to recognize emotions from PLDs. However, ASD-related atypicalities in emotion recognition could not entirely be attributed to more basic deficits in biological motion recognition, suggesting an additional ASD-specific deficit in recognizing the emotional dimension of the point light displays. Eye movements were assessed during the completion of tasks and results indicated that ASD-participants generally produced more saccades and shorter fixation-durations compared to the control-group. However, especially for emotion recognition, these altered eye movements were associated with reductions in task-performance. PMID:22970227

The face and its emotion: right N170 deficits in structural processing and early emotional discrimination in schizophrenic patients and relatives.

PubMed

Ibáñez, Agustín; Riveros, Rodrigo; Hurtado, Esteban; Gleichgerrcht, Ezequiel; Urquina, Hugo; Herrera, Eduar; Amoruso, Lucía; Reyes, Migdyrai Martin; Manes, Facundo

2012-01-30

Previous studies have reported facial emotion recognition impairments in schizophrenic patients, as well as abnormalities in the N170 component of the event-related potential. Current research on schizophrenia highlights the importance of complexly-inherited brain-based deficits. In order to examine the N170 markers of face structural and emotional processing, DSM-IV diagnosed schizophrenia probands (n=13), unaffected first-degree relatives from multiplex families (n=13), and control subjects (n=13) matched by age, gender and educational level, performed a categorization task which involved words and faces with positive and negative valence. The N170 component, while present in relatives and control subjects, was reduced in patients, not only for faces, but also for face-word differences, suggesting a deficit in structural processing of stimuli. Control subjects showed N170 modulation according to the valence of facial stimuli. However, this discrimination effect was found to be reduced both in patients and relatives. This is the first report showing N170 valence deficits in relatives. Our results suggest a generalized deficit affecting the structural encoding of faces in patients, as well as the emotion discrimination both in patients and relatives. Finally, these findings lend support to the notion that cortical markers of facial discrimination can be validly considered as vulnerability markers. © 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Sensitivity to Spatiotemporal Percepts Predicts the Perception of Emotion

PubMed Central

Castro, Vanessa L.; Boone, R. Thomas

2015-01-01

The present studies examined how sensitivity to spatiotemporal percepts such as rhythm, angularity, configuration, and force predicts accuracy in perceiving emotion. In Study 1, participants (N = 99) completed a nonverbal test battery consisting of three nonverbal emotion perception tests and two perceptual sensitivity tasks assessing rhythm sensitivity and angularity sensitivity. Study 2 (N = 101) extended the findings of Study 1 with the addition of a fourth nonverbal test, a third configural sensitivity task, and a fourth force sensitivity task. Regression analyses across both studies revealed partial support for the association between perceptual sensitivity to spatiotemporal percepts and greater emotion perception accuracy. Results indicate that accuracy in perceiving emotions may be predicted by sensitivity to specific percepts embedded within channel- and emotion-specific displays. The significance of such research lies in the understanding of how individuals acquire emotion perception skill and the processes by which distinct features of percepts are related to the perception of emotion. PMID:26339111

Selective attention to emotion in the aging brain.

PubMed

Samanez-Larkin, Gregory R; Robertson, Elaine R; Mikels, Joseph A; Carstensen, Laura L; Gotlib, Ian H

2009-09-01

A growing body of research suggests that the ability to regulate emotion remains stable or improves across the adult life span. Socioemotional selectivity theory maintains that this pattern of findings reflects the prioritization of emotional goals. Given that goal-directed behavior requires attentional control, the present study was designed to investigate age differences in selective attention to emotional lexical stimuli under conditions of emotional interference. Both neural and behavioral measures were obtained during an experiment in which participants completed a flanker task that required them to make categorical judgments about emotional and nonemotional stimuli. Older adults showed interference in both the behavioral and neural measures on control trials but not on emotion trials. Although older adults typically show relatively high levels of interference and reduced cognitive control during nonemotional tasks, they appear to be able to successfully reduce interference during emotional tasks. (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Effects of Emotional Experience for Abstract Words in the Stroop Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Siakaluk, Paul D.; Knol, Nathan; Pexman, Penny M.

2014-01-01

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A…

Convergent Validity of and Bias in Maternal Reports of Child Emotion

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Durbin, C. Emily; Wilson, Sylia

2012-01-01

This study examined the convergent validity of maternal reports of child emotion in a sample of 190 children between the ages of 3 and 6. Children completed a battery of 10 emotion-eliciting laboratory tasks; their mothers and untrained naive observers rated child emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, and anger) following each task, and…

Incremental Validity of the Subscales of the Emotional Regulation Related to Testing Scale for Predicting Test Anxiety

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Feldt, Ronald; Lindley, Kyla; Louison, Rebecca; Roe, Allison; Timm, Megan; Utinkova, Nikola

2015-01-01

The Emotional Regulation Related to Testing Scale (ERT Scale) assesses strategies students use to regulate emotion related to academic testing. It has four dimensions: Cognitive Appraising Processes (CAP), Emotion-Focusing Processes (EFP), Task-Focusing Processes (TFP), and Regaining Task-Focusing Processes (RTFP). The study examined the factor…

Impaired conditional reasoning in alcoholics: a negative impact on social interactions and risky behaviors?

PubMed

Kornreich, Charles; Delle-Vigne, Dyna; Knittel, Julian; Nerincx, Aurore; Campanella, Salvatore; Noel, Xavier; Hanak, Catherine; Verbanck, Paul; Ermer, Elsa

2011-05-01

To study the 'social brain' in alcoholics by investigating social contract reasoning, theory of mind and emotional intelligence. A behavioral study comparing recently detoxified alcoholics with normal, healthy controls. Emotional intelligence and decoding of emotional non-verbal cues have been shown to be impaired in alcoholics. This study explores whether these deficits extend to conditional reasoning about social contracts. Twenty-five recently detoxified alcoholics (17 men and eight women) were compared with 25 normal controls (17 men and eight women) matched for sex, age and education level. Wason selection task investigating conditional reasoning on three different rule types (social contract, precautionary and descriptive), revised Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (modified version) and additional control measures. Conditional reasoning was impaired in alcoholics. Performance on descriptive rules was not above chance. Reasoning performance was markedly better on social contract and precautionary rules, but this performance was still significantly lower than in controls. Several emotional intelligence measures were lower in alcoholics compared to controls, but these were not correlated with reasoning performance. Conditional reasoning, including reasoning about social contracts and emotional intelligence appear to be impaired in alcoholics. Impairment seems to be particularly severe on descriptive rules. Impairment in social contract reasoning might lead to misunderstandings and frustration in social interactions, and reasoning difficulties about precautionary rules might contribute to risky behaviors in this population. © 2011 The Authors, Addiction © 2011 Society for the Study of Addiction.

Fear, anger, fruits, and veggies: interactive effects of emotion and message framing on health behavior.

PubMed

Gerend, Mary A; Maner, Jon K

2011-07-01

Message framing is a theoretically grounded health communication strategy designed to motivate action by emphasizing either the benefits of engaging in a particular behavior (gains) or the costs of failing to engage in the behavior (losses). This study investigated whether the effectiveness of a framed message depends on the emotional state of the message recipient. We examined effects of fear versus anger, emotions that frequently occur within the context of health decision-making. Undergraduate students (N = 133) were randomly assigned to complete a fear or anger induction task after which they read a gain- or loss-framed pamphlet promoting fruit and vegetable consumption. Fruit and vegetable intake (servings per day) subsequently was assessed over the following 2 weeks. As predicted, a significant frame by emotion interaction was observed, such that participants in the fear condition reported eating more servings of fruits and vegetables after exposure to a loss-framed message than to a gain-framed message. In contrast, participants in the anger condition reported eating (marginally) more servings of fruits and vegetables after exposure to a gain-framed message than to a loss-framed message. Greater increases in fruit and vegetable intake from baseline to follow-up were observed when the message frame was matched to the participant's emotional state. The effectiveness of framed health communications depends on the message recipient's current emotional state. Affective factors that are incidental to the behavior recommended in a health communication can affect the relative success of gain- and loss-framed appeals.

Transcranial infrared laser stimulation produces beneficial cognitive and emotional effects in humans.

PubMed

Barrett, D W; Gonzalez-Lima, F

2013-01-29

This is the first controlled study demonstrating the beneficial effects of transcranial laser stimulation on cognitive and emotional functions in humans. Photobiomodulation with red to near-infrared light is a novel intervention shown to regulate neuronal function in cell cultures, animal models, and clinical conditions. Light that intersects with the absorption spectrum of cytochrome oxidase was applied to the forehead of healthy volunteers using the laser diode CG-5000, which maximizes tissue penetration and has been used in humans for other indications. We tested whether low-level laser stimulation produces beneficial effects on frontal cortex measures of attention, memory and mood. Reaction time in a sustained-attention psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) was significantly improved in the treated (n=20) vs. placebo control (n=20) groups, especially in high novelty-seeking subjects. Performance in a delayed match-to-sample (DMS) memory task showed also a significant improvement in treated vs. control groups as measured by memory retrieval latency and number of correct trials. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS-X), which tracks self-reported positive and negative affective (emotional) states over time, was administered immediately before treatment and 2 weeks after treatment. The PANAS showed that while participants generally reported more positive affective states than negative, overall affect improved significantly in the treated group due to more sustained positive emotional states as compared to the placebo control group. These data imply that transcranial laser stimulation could be used as a non-invasive and efficacious approach to increase brain functions such as those related to cognitive and emotional dimensions. Transcranial infrared laser stimulation has also been proven to be safe and successful at improving neurological outcome in humans in controlled clinical trials of stroke. This innovative approach could lead to the development of non-invasive, performance-enhancing interventions in healthy humans and in those in need of neuropsychological rehabilitation. Copyright © 2012 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A naturalistic study of the directional interpretation process of discrete emotions during high-stakes table tennis matches.

PubMed

Martinent, Guillaume; Ferrand, Claude

2009-06-01

The purpose of this study was to explore the directional interpretation process of discrete emotions experienced by table tennis players during competitive matches by adopting a naturalistic qualitative video-assisted approach. Thirty self-confrontation interviews were conducted with 11 national table tennis players (2 or 3 matches per participants). Nine discrete emotions were identified through the inductive analyses of the participants' transcriptions: anger, anxiety, discouragement, disappointment, disgust, joy, serenity, relief, and hope. Inductive analyses revealed the emergence of 4 categories and 13 themes among the 9 discrete emotions: positive direction (increased concentration, increased motivation, increased confidence, positive sensations, and adaptive behaviors), negative direction (decreased concentration, decreased motivation, too confident, decreased confidence, negative sensations, and maladaptive behaviors), neutral direction (take more risk and take less risk), and no perceived influence on own performance. Results are discussed in terms of current research on directional interpretation and emotions in sport.

Emotional event-related potentials are reduced if negative pictures presented at fixation are unattended.

PubMed

Wiens, Stefan; Sand, Anders; Norberg, Joakim; Andersson, Per

2011-05-20

Viewing of emotional pictures elicits two event-related potentials (ERPs) to emotional versus neutral pictures: an early posterior negativity (EPN) and a late positive potential (LPP). Because it is unresolved whether these indexes of emotional processing are reduced to task-irrelevant pictures at fixation, negative and neutral pictures from the International Affective Picture Set (IAPS) were shown at fixation together with 6 letters that surrounded the pictures. In separate tasks, participants were instructed to attend either the pictures or the letters. When the pictures were task relevant, results showed an EPN and LPP. In contrast, when the pictures were task irrelevant, the EPN was eliminated and the LPP reduced. Performance was high in both tasks (hit rates>87%), but somewhat better when the pictures were relevant. However, analyses showed no relationship between this performance difference and the differences in EPN and LPP between tasks. These results suggest that emotional processing of strong, negative pictures is sensitive to manipulations of attention even if the pictures are shown at fixation. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dynamic Influence of Emotional States on Novel Word Learning

PubMed Central

Guo, Jingjing; Zou, Tiantian; Peng, Danling

2018-01-01

Many researchers realize that it's unrealistic to isolate language learning and processing from emotions. However, few studies on language learning have taken emotions into consideration so far, so that the probable influences of emotions on language learning are unclear. The current study thereby aimed to examine the effects of emotional states on novel word learning and their dynamic changes with learning continuing and task varying. Positive, negative or neutral pictures were employed to induce a given emotional state, and then participants learned the novel words through association with line-drawing pictures in four successive learning phases. At the end of each learning phase, participants were instructed to fulfill a semantic category judgment task (in Experiment 1) or a word-picture semantic consistency judgment task (in Experiment 2) to explore the effects of emotional states on different depths of word learning. Converging results demonstrated that negative emotional state led to worse performance compared with neutral condition; however, how positive emotional state affected learning varied with learning task. Specifically, a facilitative role of positive emotional state in semantic category learning was observed but disappeared in word specific meaning learning. Moreover, the emotional modulation on novel word learning was quite dynamic and changeable with learning continuing, and the final attainment of the learned words tended to be similar under different emotional states. The findings suggest that the impact of emotion can be offset when novel words became more and more familiar and a part of existent lexicon. PMID:29695994

Dynamic Influence of Emotional States on Novel Word Learning.

PubMed

Guo, Jingjing; Zou, Tiantian; Peng, Danling

2018-01-01

Many researchers realize that it's unrealistic to isolate language learning and processing from emotions. However, few studies on language learning have taken emotions into consideration so far, so that the probable influences of emotions on language learning are unclear. The current study thereby aimed to examine the effects of emotional states on novel word learning and their dynamic changes with learning continuing and task varying. Positive, negative or neutral pictures were employed to induce a given emotional state, and then participants learned the novel words through association with line-drawing pictures in four successive learning phases. At the end of each learning phase, participants were instructed to fulfill a semantic category judgment task (in Experiment 1) or a word-picture semantic consistency judgment task (in Experiment 2) to explore the effects of emotional states on different depths of word learning. Converging results demonstrated that negative emotional state led to worse performance compared with neutral condition; however, how positive emotional state affected learning varied with learning task. Specifically, a facilitative role of positive emotional state in semantic category learning was observed but disappeared in word specific meaning learning. Moreover, the emotional modulation on novel word learning was quite dynamic and changeable with learning continuing, and the final attainment of the learned words tended to be similar under different emotional states. The findings suggest that the impact of emotion can be offset when novel words became more and more familiar and a part of existent lexicon.

Neural substrates of cognitive switching and inhibition in a face processing task.

PubMed

Piguet, Camille; Sterpenich, Virginie; Desseilles, Martin; Cojan, Yann; Bertschy, Gilles; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2013-11-15

We frequently need to change our current occupation, an operation requiring additional effortful cognitive demands. Switching from one task to another may involve two distinct processes: inhibition of the previously relevant task-set, and initiation of a new one. Here we tested whether these two processes are underpinned by separate neural substrates, and whether they differ depending on the nature of the task and the emotional content of stimuli. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging in healthy human volunteers who categorize emotional faces according to three different judgment rules (color, gender, or emotional expression). Our paradigm allowed us to separate neural activity associated with inhibition and switching based on the sequence of the tasks required on successive trials. We found that the bilateral medial superior parietal lobule and left intraparietal sulcus showed consistent activation during switching regardless of the task. On the other hand, no common region was activated (or suppressed) as a consequence of inhibition across all tasks. Rather, task-specific effects were observed in brain regions that were more activated when switching to a particular task but less activated after inhibition of the same task. In addition, compared to other conditions, the emotional task elicited a similar switching cost but lower inhibition cost, accompanied by selective decrease in the anterior cingulate cortex when returning to this task shortly after inhibiting it. These results demonstrate that switching relies on domain-general processes mediated by postero-medial parietal areas, engaged across all tasks, but also provide novel evidence that task inhibition produces domain-specific decreases as a function of particular task demands, with only the latter inhibition component being modulated by emotional information. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Behavioral reactivity to emotion challenge is associated with cortisol reactivity and regulation at 7, 15, and 24 months of age.

PubMed

Ursache, Alexandra; Blair, Clancy; Granger, Douglas A; Stifter, Cynthia; Voegtline, Kristin

2014-04-01

Emotionally arousing stimuli have been largely unsuccessful in eliciting cortisol responses in young children. Whether or not emotion challenge will elicit a cortisol response, however, may in part be determined by the extent to which the tasks elicit behavioral reactivity and regulation. We examined relations of behavioral reactivity and regulation to emotional arousal in the context of fear and frustration to the cortisol response at 7, 15, and 24 months of age in a low income, rural population based sample of 1,292 families followed longitudinally from birth. At each age, children participated in fear and frustration inducing tasks, and cortisol samples were taken at three time points (before the tasks began, 20 min following peak emotional arousal or after the series of tasks ended, and 40 min after peak arousal or the tasks ended) in order to capture both increases (reactivity) and subsequent decreases (regulation) in the cortisol response. Using multilevel models, we predicted the cortisol response from measures of behavioral reactivity and regulation. At 7 months of age, cortisol reactivity and recovery were related to behavioral reactivity during a frustration-eliciting task and marginally related to behavioral reactivity during a fear-eliciting task. At 15 and 24 months of age, however, cortisol reactivity and recovery were related only to behavioral reactivity during a fear-eliciting task. Results indicate that while behavioral reactivity is predictive of whether or not infants and young children will exhibit a cortisol response to emotionally arousing tasks, behavioral and cortisol reactivity are not necessarily coupled. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.