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Cognitive models of depression suggest that depressed individuals exhibit a tendency to attribute negative meaning to neutral stimuli, and enhanced processing of mood-congruent stimuli. However, evidence thus far has been inconsistent. In this study, we sought to identify both differential interpretation of neutral information as well as emotion processing biases associated with depression. Fifty adult participants completed standardized mood-related questionnaires, a novel immediate mood scale questionnaire (IMS-12), and a novel task, Emotion Matcher, in which they were required to indicate whether pairs of emotional faces show the same expression or not. We found that overall success rate and reaction time on the Emotion Matcher task did not differ as a function of severity of depression. However, more depressed participants had significantly worse performance when presented with sad-neutral face pairs, as well as increased reaction times to happy-happy pairs. In addition, accuracy of the sad-neutral pairs was found to be significantly associated with depression severity in a regression model. Our study provides partial support for the mood-congruent hypothesis, revealing only a potential bias in interpretation of sad and neutral expressions, but not a general deficit in processing of facial expressions. The potential of such bias in serving as a predictor for depression should be further examined in future studies.

The ability to appropriately recognize the facial expression of emotions is essential for the development of adaptive functioning. Studies suggest that maltreated children are hypersensitive to expression of anger. However, the neural mechanism of emotional face processing in young adults with a history of childhood maltreatment has yet to be explored. To explore whether the history of childhood maltreatment has a potential relationship with processing of emotional facial expressions, the present study used event-related potentials in investigating the early ERP components (P100 and N170) to the processing of emotional (angry, fearful, disgusted, and happy) faces in young adult victims of childhood maltreatment. Seventeen young adults with a history of childhood maltreatment and seventeen age and gender-matched non-maltreated participants performed a modified dot-probe task, using emotional faces paired with neutral faces. Results revealed no significant differences between maltreated group and non-maltreated group in P100 amplitude, but the N170 amplitude in the maltreated group was larger than non-maltreated group when processing angry, fearful, and happy faces. As such, this study provides biological evidence of altered neural processing of emotional facial expressions in young adults with a history of childhood maltreatment.

Both patients with schizophrenia and with a major depressive disorder (MDD) display deficits in identifying facial expressions of emotion during acute phases of their illness. However, specific deficit patterns have not yet been reliably demonstrated. Tasks that employ emotionally ambiguous stimuli have recently shown distinct deficit patterns in patients with schizophrenia compared to other mental disorders as well as healthy controls. We here investigate whether a task which uses an ambiguous Japanese (Noh) mask and a corresponding human stimulus generates distinctive emotion attribution patterns in thirty-two Caucasian patients with schizophrenia, matched MDD patients and healthy controls. Results show that patients with schizophrenia displayed reaction time disadvantages compared to healthy controls while identifying sadness and anger. MDD patients were more likely to label stimuli with basic compared to subtle emotional expressions. Moreover, they showed more difficulties assigning emotions to the human stimulus than to the Noh mask. IQ, age and cognitive functioning did not modulate these results. Because overall group differences were not observed, this task is not suitable for diagnosing patients. However, the subtle differences that did emerge might give therapists handles that can be used in therapy.

Faces are often used in psychological and neuroimaging research to assess perceptual and emotional processes. Most available stimulus sets, however, represent minimal diversity in both race and ethnicity, which may confound understanding of these processes in diverse/racially heterogeneous samples. Having a diverse stimulus set of faces and emotional expressions could mitigate these biases and may also be useful in research that specifically examines the effects of race and ethnicity on perceptual, emotional and social processes. The racially diverse affective expression (RADIATE) face stimulus set is designed to provide an open-access set of 1,721 facial expressions of Black, White, Hispanic and Asian adult models. Moreover, the diversity of this stimulus set reflects census data showing a change in demographics in the United States from a white majority to a nonwhite majority by 2020. Psychometric results are provided describing the initial validity and reliability of the stimuli based on judgments of the emotional expressions.

Previous studies that aimed to support emotion recognition deficits and alexithymia in B cluster personality disorders have mainly focused on borderline personality disorder (BPD), and resulted in mixed findings. In our study we examine emotion recognition and alexithymia in patients with histrionic (HPD), narcissistic (NPD) and borderline (BPD) personality disorders compared to each other and healthy controls. Furthermore, the possibility is investigated that it is not the type of PD but the severity of psychopathology which predicts the severity of emotion recognition deficits and alexithymia. Patients with HPD, NPD, BPD and healthy controls (N = 20 for each group) were examined by using the Ekman 60 Faces Test (FEEST) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20). To measure the extent and severity of psychopathology, the Symptom-Checklist-90 Revised (SCL-90-R) was used. Patient groups performed significantly worse compared to healthy controls on the Ekman test and TAS-20, while we found no significant differences among patient groups in emotion recognition and alexithymia. Furthermore, higher scores on the SCL-90-R predicted poorer emotion recognition performance and higher alexithymic features. The empirical data supports the conclusion that the severity of psychopathology plays an important role in predicting emotion recognition deficits and alexithymia in borderline, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders.

This study aimed to be the first to measure non-verbal communication in 25 eating disorder (ED) and 25 non-ED control participants during a naturalistic social interaction incorporating positive, negative and neutrally-valenced topics. The first hypothesis, that ED participants would show significantly reduced facial emotional expression than controls, was not supported. Supporting the second hypothesis of between-group differences in non-verbal behaviour, ED participants were less likely to lean in towards their interlocutor (d=.81) discussing negatively-valanced topics and were more likely to be positioned upright when discussing positively-valenced topics (d=.1.09) than controls. Irrespective of emotional valence, ED participants positioned their gaze on their interlocutor significantly less (d=.29) and spent more time looking down (d=.54), or away than controls (d=.63). ED participants moved their hands along with speech significantly less (d=.63) and gestured fewer real/hypothetical/imagined images/actions/objects) than controls (d=.57), irrespective of emotional valence. Instead, ED participants indicated discomfort in the social interaction, touching their nose (d=.89) or playing with their nails (d=.95) more often than controls. ED participants, regardless of emotional valence, showed significantly lowered electro-dermal activity (d=.60) than controls, supporting the exploratory hypothesis. People with EDs appear to make less efficient use of non-verbal communication than controls.

Subthreshold depression (StD) is more prevalent than major depressive disorder (MDD) all over the world. Previous studies have indicated that depression is associated with impaired perception of facial expressions. However, for individuals with StD, whether perceptual sensitivity toward facial expressions could be altered and whether these alterations could stabilize over time remain largely unknown. Using the QUEST psychometric procedure, here we assessed recognition thresholds of five facial expressions (angry, fear, happy, sad and neutral) for individuals with StD and non-depressed controls. These subjects were retested after approximately 2-month time intervals. At the initial assessment, individuals with StD demonstrated lower recognition thresholds (i.e., stronger sensitivity) for only sadness compared to non-depressed controls. At the follow-up assessment, we classified the StD group as two subgroups: the non-remitted and the remitted group. For the former, lower recognition thresholds for only sadness were again found; for the latter, there was no significant difference. More importantly, individuals displaying lower recognition thresholds for sadness at the initial assessment were less likely to improve in depressive symptoms at the follow-up assessment. These results indicate that the alteration of perceptual sensitivity toward the sad expression for individuals with StD is associated with the current clinical state.

The vast majority of research on attentional biases to threat focusses on selective attention, even though several cognitive-behavioral models furthermore assume hypervigilance to be important in this regard. Thus, the current study examined hypervigilance in trait and state social anxiety. We analyzed visual scanpath lengths and fixation counts of participants with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) (n = 61) and healthy controls (n = 60) in a combined visual search and eye tracking paradigm, including photographs of facial expressions. Half of all participants were randomly assigned to a state anxiety induction. Interaction effects revealed opposed attentional patterns of participants with SAD as compared to healthy controls considering overall visual scanpath lengths (F(1,117) = 5.32, p = 0.023, η2partial = 0.043) and fixation counts (F(1,117) = 5.10, p = 0.026, η2partial = 0.042). Accordingly, participants with SAD showed signs of hypervigilance in the anxiety induction condition. In contrast, there was no main effect of diagnostic group, indicating that individuals with SAD shift their attentional focus to broad scanning behavior only under conditions of threat. Our results add to the small number of existing studies on hypervigilance in SAD and suggest the topic to be promising for future research.

Abnormal patterns of attention to emotional faces and images are proposed by theories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and this has been demonstrated empirically. However, few studies have examined how PTSD symptoms are associated with attention to emotional faces in the context of emotional background images. Eye tracking data were collected from seventy-eight undergraduates with a history of experiencing at least one traumatic event as they completed the Contextual Recognition of Affective Faces Task (CRAFT; Milanak and Berenbaum, 2014), which requires subjects to identify the emotion depicted by faces superimposed on an emotional background image. Greater PTSD symptom severity was associated with more time spent looking at background contexts and less time looking at target faces. This is consistent with greater susceptibility to distraction by task-irrelevant emotional stimuli. The duration of each gaze fixation upon fear faces was shorter for those with greater PTSD symptoms, and this pattern was marginally significant for disgust faces. These findings suggest that PTSD symptoms may relate to greater attention toward non-facial background scenes and less attention toward facial stimuli, especially when conveying a fear or disgust expression.

Hoarding disorder (HD) has been hypothesized to arise from deficits in error monitoring and abnormalities in emotional processing, but the relationship between error monitoring and emotional processing has not been examined. We examined measures of self-report, as well as behavioral, physiological, and facial responses to errors during a Stop-Change task. 25 participants with HD and 32 healthy controls (HC) were recruited. Participants reported on number of errors committed and pre/post emotional response to errors. Skin conductance response (SCR) during correct and error commission trials was examined. Facial expression during task performance was coded for self-conscious and negative emotions. HD and HC participants had significantly different error rates but comparable error correction and post-error slowing. SCR was significantly lower for HD during error commission than for HC. During error trials, HD participants showed a significant deficit in displays of self-conscious emotions compared to HC. Self-reported emotions were increased in HD, with more negative and self-conscious emotion reported than was reported for HC participants. These findings suggest that hypoactive emotional responding at a physiological level may play a role in how errors are processed in individuals with HD.

Victimized women are thought to have impairments in identifying risk and to have dysfunctional reactions to threatening situations, which increase the risk for revictimization. To investigate possible deficits in revictimized women, we used a method examining women's perceptions of an implicit facial cue of aggressiveness – the facial Width-to-Height Ratio (fWHR). We tested whether revictimized women show impairments in detecting aggressiveness in male faces by neglecting cues of fWHR and choosing a smaller preferred distance to men. Fifty-two revictimized PTSD patients and 52 healthy controls provided ratings of aggressiveness and attractiveness for 65 photographed men and chose their preferred distance towards 11 pictured men. Multiple regression analyses indicated that revictimized women do not show impairments in perceiving and reacting to cues of aggression accurately. Hierarchical linear models, however, indicated that revictimized women rated all men as less aggressive. Revictimized women with histories of intimate partner violence (IPV) rated men with larger fWHRs and higher values of actual aggression to be more attractive than did revictimized women without IPV histories. A reduced appraisal of threat signals as threatening and an attraction to wider-faced and more aggressive men might increase the risk for revictimization.

Cognitive theories of depression assume biased attention towards mood-congruent information as a central vulnerability and maintaining factor. Among other symptoms, depression is characterized by excessive negative affect (NA). Yet, little is known about the impact of naturally occurring NA on the allocation of attention to emotional information. The study investigates how implicit and explicit NA as well as self-reported depressive symptoms predict attentional biases in a sample of healthy individuals (N = 104). Attentional biases were assessed using eye-tracking during a free viewing task in which images of sad, angry, happy and neutral faces were shown simultaneously. Participants’ implicit affectivity was measured indirectly using the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test. Questionnaires were administered to assess actual and habitual explicit NA and presence of depressive symptoms. Higher levels of depressive symptoms were associated with sustained attention to sad faces and reduced attention to happy faces. Implicit but not explicit NA significantly predicted gaze behavior towards sad faces independently from depressive symptoms. The present study supports the idea that naturally occurring implicit NA is associated with attention allocation to dysphoric facial expression. The findings demonstrate the utility of implicit affectivity measures in studying individual differences in depression-relevant attentional biases and cognitive vulnerability.

Facial emotion recognition deficits have been consistently demonstrated in patients with severe mental disorders. Expressed emotion is found to be an important predictor of relapse. However, the relationship between facial emotion recognition abilities and expressed emotions and its influence on socio-occupational functioning in schizophrenia versus bipolar disorder has not been studied. In this study we examined 91 patients with schizophrenia and 71 with bipolar disorder for psychopathology, socio occupational functioning and emotion recognition abilities. Primary caregivers of 62 patients with schizophrenia and 49 with bipolar disorder were assessed on Family Attitude Questionnaire to assess their expressed emotions. Patients of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder performed similarly on the emotion recognition task. Patients with schizophrenia group experienced higher critical comments and had a poorer socio-occupational functioning as compared to patients with bipolar disorder. Poorer socio-occupational functioning in patients with schizophrenia was significantly associated with greater dissatisfaction in their caregivers. In patients with bipolar disorder, poorer emotion recognition scores significantly correlated with poorer adaptive living skills and greater hostility and dissatisfaction in their caregivers. The findings of our study suggest that emotion recognition abilities in patients with bipolar disorder are associated with negative expressed emotions leading to problems in adaptive living skills.

This study aimed to examine the effect of emotion recognition training on social anxiety symptoms among adolescents, aged 15–18 years. The study included a screening session, which identified participants who scored above a cut-off on a self-report measure of social anxiety for enrolment into a randomized controlled trial (Clinical Trials ID: NCT02550379). Participants were randomized to an intervention condition designed to increase the perception of happiness over disgust in ambiguous facial expressions or a sham intervention control condition, and completed self-report measures of social anxiety, fear of negative evaluation, anxiety-related disorders, and depressive symptoms. The intervention group demonstrated a strong shift in the balance point at which they perceived happiness over disgust in ambiguous facial expressions. This increase in positive perception was not associated with any changes in the primary outcome of social anxiety; however, some evidence of improvement in symptomatology was observed on one of a number of secondary outcomes. Those in the intervention group had lower depression symptoms at 2-week follow-up, compared to those in the control group who received the sham intervention training. Potential reasons for why the shift in balance point measurement was not associated with a concurrent shift in symptoms of social anxiety are discussed.

Cognitive models of depression emphasize the relevance of cognitive biases for development, onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder (MDD). Attentional biases consisting of increased attention to negative, mood congruent stimuli and reduced attention to positive, mood-incongruent stimuli are postulated but have rarely been tested for early attentional processing. Furthermore, the role of concurrent depressive mood as a moderating factor has not been studied to date. Participants comprised 30 patients suffering from MDD and 30 healthy control subjects. All participants performed a dot-probe task with pictorial stimuli displaying affective facial expressions, presented either for 100 ms or for 500 ms. Attentional biases towards faces displaying joy in both MDD patients and control subjects and towards faces displaying pain in MDD subjects were found at presentation times of 100 ms. In the MDD sample, the bias indices at 100 ms were correlated with concurrent depressive mood. In patients with pronounced depressive mood, significant biases towards happy and angry faces were observed that exceed the biases obtained in control subjects and patients with less depressive mood. The results provide first evidence that MDD patients with pronounced depressive mood show an increased early attentional engagement towards emotional salient stimuli, independent from valence.

While recent research suggests that people with schizophrenia anticipate less pleasure for non-social events, considerably less is known about anticipated pleasure for social events. In this study, we investigated whether people with and without schizophrenia differ in the amount and updating of anticipated pleasure over the course of repeated interactions as well as the influence of emotional displays. Thirty-two people with schizophrenia and 29 controls rated their anticipated pleasure over the course of repeated interactions with smiling, scowling, or neutral social partners that had either positive or negative outcomes. Compared to controls, people with schizophrenia anticipated a lower amount of pleasure during interactions with smiling, but not neutral social partners that had positive outcomes. However, the groups did not differ in the amount or updating of anticipated pleasure during interactions that had negative outcomes. Both groups anticipated more pleasure over the course of repeated interactions with smiling partners and less pleasure over the course of repeated interactions with scowling partners compared to interactions with neutral partners. We discuss how less anticipated pleasure for interactions with smiling social partners may be linked to difficulties in social engagement among people with schizophrenia.

Individuals with substance use disorders (SUD) experience impaired facial emotion recognition. This pilot study explored the efficacy of a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention to improve facial cues interpretation. Twenty-four men with SUD were randomized into an equal-size experimental and control groups and were evaluated by a cognitive-assessment battery at baseline and post-intervention. Post-intervention individuals in the experimental group recognized happy expressions with higher accuracy, and their response times were slower in sadness/disgust/neutral expressions. Interventions focused at improving social cues interpretation may facilitate social interactions and treatment outcomes for SUD population.

Introduction Depressive individuals are impaired in the recognition of emotions in others’. Recent research suggests that the recognition of nonverbal expressions of emotions in other people may depend on the analysis of bodily rather than facial expressions. Therefore, we investigated if an impaired recognition of emotions by depressed individuals is body part specific. Methods Clinically diagnosed depressed and healthy matched controls were instructed to identify nonverbal expressions of positive (happiness), neutral, and negative emotions (sadness) via the face, the body, or the body and face. Results Depressed participants responded significantly less correctly overall when compared to non-depressed individuals. The recognition of nonverbal expressions of happiness by the body negatively predicted the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI-II) score. Discussion The data revealed that the impaired recognition of nonverbal expressions of emotions in others by depressed individuals is not body part specific. Nevertheless, depressive symptoms seem to be related to the recognition of bodily expressions of happiness. Future studies must address whether impairments of depressive individuals are related to nonverbal expressions of the whole body.

Schizophrenia is considered a complex illness with multiple cognitive dysfunctions, including a deficit in visual processing. However, whether the deficiency of visual processing in schizophrenia is general across stimuli or stimulus-specific remains the subject of debate. In the current study, eighteen first-episode schizophrenic patients and eighteen healthy controls participated in three visual search tasks in which they were asked to search a specific target of a triangle, face identity or facial affect. The results showed that, compared to healthy controls, the accuracies for face identity and facial affect searches were significantly lower in schizophrenic patients, while the performance of the triangle search was the same. Furthermore, the accuracy of the facial affect search was negatively correlated to negative symptoms in schizophrenia. These results revealed a face-related deficit in schizophrenia and suggest that visual processing deficits in schizophrenia were stimuli-specific.

Facial affect recognition (FAR) accuracy is impaired in schizophrenia and, to a lesser extent, in individuals at-risk for psychosis. Reduced reaction time and negative bias on FAR tasks are also evident in schizophrenia, though few studies have examined these measures in at-risk samples. Social dysfunction is associated with FAR deficits in schizophrenia and at-risk individuals. We aimed to elucidate the nature of FAR and social functioning among individuals from a non-clinical population reporting a range of schizotypal traits (i.e., risk for psychosis), and to examine whether FAR mediates the relationship between schizotypal traits and social functioning. Participants completed self-report measures assessing schizotypal traits and social functioning, and a computerized FAR task remotely via the Internet. High schizotypy individuals performed significantly worse than low schizotypy individuals on FAR total and neutral accuracy, demonstrated a negative bias, and reported significantly worse social functioning. Schizotypal traits were also negatively correlated with FAR performance and social functioning in the total sample. FAR accuracy did not mediate the direct relationship between schizotypal traits and social functioning. FAR may be an important social-cognitive endophenotype of psychosis risk with implications for understanding etiology of psychotic spectrum disorders, improving ways of identifying at-risk individuals, and developing preventive strategies.

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.

Suicide is a serious public health problem. In this study, we investigated functional brain changes to novel visual stimuli of suicidal means, DNA methylation status, and the relationship between the two markers. 14 suicidal attempt patients (SAs) and 22 healthy controls were included. Pictures of facial expressions and suicidal means were shown to subjects during fMRI scanning. 11 CpG sites within transcription factor binding site of CACNA1C gene were selected. In knives (K) vs. natural landscape (NL) condition, left middle frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area, BA 6 and 46) and left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 9) were shown to be significantly higher brain activation in the SAs than the controls (p

Studies have examined social maladjustment among individuals with Internet addiction, but little is known about their deficits in specific social skills and the underlying psychological mechanisms. The present study filled these gaps by (a) establishing a relationship between deficits in facial expression recognition and Internet addiction, and (b) examining the mediating role of perceived stress that explains this hypothesized relationship. Ninety-seven participants completed validated questionnaires that assessed their levels of Internet addiction and perceived stress, and performed a computer-based task that measured their facial expression recognition. The results revealed a positive relationship between deficits in recognizing disgust facial expression and Internet addiction, and this relationship was mediated by perceived stress. However, the same findings did not apply to other facial expressions. Ad hoc analyses showed that recognizing disgust was more difficult than recognizing other facial expressions, reflecting that the former task assesses a social skill that requires cognitive astuteness. The present findings contribute to the literature by identifying a specific social skill deficit related to Internet addiction and by unveiling a psychological mechanism that explains this relationship, thus providing more concrete guidelines for practitioners to strengthen specific social skills that mitigate both perceived stress and Internet addiction.

Research has recurrently shown that individuals with schizophrenia have impairments in emotional facial recognition and this deficit has been associated with aberrant visual scanning of the face. Because human beings have the ability to control the expression of emotion, the communication process becomes more complex. The goal of the current study was to conduct a systematic examination of the response pattern and perceptual-attentional processing in distinguishing smiles with the presence and absence of the Duchenne marker and symmetry and asymmetry of the activation in individuals with schizophrenia. Sixteen individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and 16 control individuals were asked to judge whether the smiles were really happy or not. Individuals with schizophrenia produced fewer expected responses than controls in judging the symmetric non-Duchenne smile as not really happy. In addition, like their healthy counterparts, individuals with schizophrenia showed difficulty with the judgement of asymmetric Duchenne smiles. In addition to not being as sensitive to the cues, individuals with schizophrenia show differences in their viewing patterns. While the current study does not provide clear links between these viewing patterns and judgment responses, future research should explore other explanations, such as explicit knowledge, for the differences in results.

We evaluated the psychometric properties of NimStim taking into account the effects of chronological age on the ability of typically developing young children (aged 2-6 years old) to recognize basic facial expressions (i.e., happy, sad, angry, and fearful). We also examined the psychometric sufficiency of NimStim under race-matched and -mismatched facial emotion stimuli. In the current study, race-matched stimuli referred to when children with African American backgrounds received African American faces to rate their emotions and vice versa for race-mismatched stimuli. Results of the current study represent the first psychometric analysis of reliability and validity for using NimStim pictures depicting happy, sad, angry, and fearful with typically developing children aged 2-6 years old as well as examining race-matched versus -mismatched stimuli. Analyses revealed the psychometric sufficiency of a subset of pictures depicting happy, sad, angry, and fearful from NimStim among young children across race matched and mismatched stimuli.

Alterations in general intellectual ability and social cognition in schizophrenia are core features of the disorder, evident at the illness’ onset and persistent throughout its course. However, previous studies examining cognitive alterations in siblings discordant for schizophrenia yielded inconsistent results. Present study aimed to investigate the nature of the association between facial emotion recognition and general IQ by applying genetically sensitive cross-trait cross-sibling design. Participants (total n=158; patients, unaffected siblings, controls) were assessed using the Benton Facial Recognition Test, the Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task (DFAR) and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III. Patients had lower IQ and altered facial emotion recognition in comparison to other groups. Healthy siblings and controls did not significantly differ in IQ and DFAR performance, but siblings exhibited intermediate angry facial expression recognition. Cross-trait within-subject analyses showed significant associations between overall DFAR performance and IQ in all participants. Within-trait cross-sibling analyses found significant associations between patients’ and siblings’ IQ and overall DFAR performance, suggesting their familial clustering. Finally, cross-trait cross-sibling analyses revealed familial covariation of facial emotion recognition and IQ in siblings discordant for schizophrenia, further indicating their familial etiology. Both traits are important phenotypes for genetic studies and potential early clinical markers of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

Recent studies suggest that the recollection deficit observed in schizophrenia may not be a unitary phenomenon but could depend on the information to retrieve. Here we investigated whether the nature of the perceptual information affects recollection and familiarity in schizophrenia. ERP old/new effects were explored in 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls during unfamiliar face exclusion tasks, with either intrinsic (expression) or extrinsic (background) information either changing or remaining the same between study and test. Schizophrenia patients rejected old faces as distractors in a greater extent than healthy controls. The FN400 old/new effect (300-500ms) was found in both groups. It was sensitive to facial expression change for healthy controls but not schizophrenia patients. In addition, the parietal old/new effect was lower for correctly excluded faces for patients, but not for controls. This points to the conclusion that schizophrenia patients discriminate between target and non-target faces on the basis of the memory strength signal corresponding to the study-test mismatch rather than the recollection of the critical information, as observed in healthy controls. This functioning can be useful when study-test perceptual mismatch must be detected but, in return, can lead to the over-exclusion of old stimuli.

Past research indicates that spontaneous mimicry facilitates the decoding of others' emotions, leading to enhanced social perception and interpersonal rapport. Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) show consistent deficits in emotion recognition and expression associated with poor social functioning. Given the prominence of blunted affect in schizophrenia, it is possible that spontaneous facial mimicry may also be impaired. However, studies assessing automatic facial mimicry in schizophrenia have yielded mixed results. It is therefore unknown whether emotion recognition deficits and impaired automatic facial mimicry are related in schizophrenia. SZ and demographically matched controls (CO) participated in a dynamic emotion recognition task. Electromyographic activity in muscles responsible for producing facial expressions was recorded during the task to assess spontaneous facial mimicry. SZ showed deficits in emotion identification compared to CO, but there was no group difference in the predictive power of spontaneous facial mimicry for avatar's expressed emotion. In CO, facial mimicry supported accurate emotion recognition, but it was decoupled in SZ. The finding of intact facial mimicry in SZ bears important clinical implications. For instance, clinicians might be able to improve the social functioning of patients by teaching them to pair specific patterns of facial muscle activation with distinct emotion words.

Studies have reported that emotional facial expression recognition (EFER) may be altered in individuals with depression. This study examined EFER in adolescent girls with and without depression and further examined associations between relevant clinical features of depression and EFER. Fifty adolescent girls aged 12 to 19 years old meeting criteria for depression or subthreshold levels of symptomatology and 55 adolescent girls with no psychiatric diagnosis completed EFER tasks. Reaction time and accuracy for recognising expressions at high and low intensities, and sensitivity in recognising happiness, sadness, anger and fear were assessed. Data were analysed using linear mixed models. Adolescents with depression were marginally faster than those in the comparison group to recognize sadness, although this trend disappeared once covarying for age and antidepressant use. Amongst adolescents with depression, clinical features were associated with poorer EFER performance. In contrast, anxiety symptoms were linked to better accuracy and heightened sensitivity towards happiness. A better understanding of EFER in adolescent girls with and without depression, and how clinical features might be associated with altered patterns of EFER could help to explain clinical heterogeneity observed in such studies of adolescents with depression. Knowledge of socio-cognitive alterations associated with depression will help to better develop and tailor interventions.

In social environments the smile can be driven by different motives and convey different emotions. This makes a smiling face ambiguous and amenable to alternative interpretations. We investigated how social anxiety is related to trustworthiness evaluation of morphed dynamic smiling faces depending on changes in the eye expression. Socially anxious and non-anxious participants judged the un/trustworthiness of people with different smiles. Social anxiety was related to reduced trustworthiness of (a) faces with a neutral mouth unfolding to a smile when the eyes were neutral at the beginning or end of the dynamic sequence, and (b) faces with a smiling mouth when happy eyes slightly changed towards neutrality, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, or anger. In contrast, social anxiety was not related to trustworthiness judgments for non-ambiguous expressions unfolding from neutral (eyes and mouth) to happy (eyes and mouth) or from happy to neutral. Socially anxious individuals are characterized by an interpretation bias towards mistrusting any ambiguous smile due to the presence of non-happy eyes.

Biased emotion processing in depression might be a trait characteristic independent of mood improvement and a vulnerable factor to develop further depressive episodes. This phenomenon of among older adults with depression has not been adequately examined. In a 2-year cross-sectional study, 59 older patients with either active or remitted major depression, or never-depressed, completed a facial emotion recognition task (FERT) to probe perceptual bias of happiness. The results showed that depressed patients, compared with never depressed subjects, had a significant lower sensitivity to identify happiness particularly at moderate intensity of facial stimuli. Patients in remission from a previous major depressive episode but with none or minimal symptoms had similar sensitivity rate to identify happy facial expressions as compared to patients with an active depressive episode. Further studies would be necessary to confirm whether recognition of happy expression reflects a persistent perceptual bias of major depression in older adults.

In day-to-day social interaction, emotions are usually expressed by verbal (e.g. spoken words) and nonverbal signals (e.g. facial expressions, prosody). In case of conflicting signals nonverbal signals are perceived as being the more reliable source of information. Deficits in interpreting nonverbal signals - as described for patients with schizophrenic disorders - might interfere with the ability to integrate verbal and nonverbal social cues into a meaningful whole. The aim of this study was to examine how schizophrenic disorders influence the integration of verbal and nonverbal signals. For this purpose short video sequences were presented to 21 patients with schizophrenia and 21 healthy controls. Each sequence showed an actor speaking a short sentence with independently varying emotional connotations at the verbal and the nonverbal level. The participants rated the valence of the speaker's emotional state on a four-point scale (from very negative to very positive). The relative impact of nonverbal cues as compared to verbal cues on these ratings was evaluated. Both groups base their decisions primarily on nonverbal information. However, this effect is significantly less prominent in the patient group. Patients tend to base their decisions less on nonverbal signals and more on verbal information than healthy controls.

In patients with depression, negative biases have been reported in various cognitive domains, but few studies have examined whether even detection is affected, i.e. are depressed patients more likely to detect the presence of negative stimuli? This study compared detection of sad and happy faces in patients (n=17) and healthy participants (n=18) using an attentional blink task. Patients with depression detected significantly fewer happy faces than matched healthy participants, but for sad faces the group difference was non-significant. The results suggest that depression may affect the detection of positive stimuli.

This study investigated the differential effects of two attention bias modification (ABM) with different stimulus durations. Seventy-two undergraduates with subclinical social anxiety were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: an ABM condition with either a 100-ms or a 500-ms stimulus duration (ABM-100/ ABM-500) or an attention placebo (AP) condition with either a 100-ms or a 500-ms stimulus duration (AP-100/ AP-500). Participants completed the pre-assessments, eight attentional training sessions, and post-assessments. A modified Posner paradigm was used to assess changes in attentional processing. After completion of attentional training, the ABM-100 group significantly speeded up their responses to 100-ms invalid trials, regardless of the word type. The ABM-100 group also exhibited significant reduced latencies to 500-ms invalid social threat trials and a marginally significant reduced latencies to 500-ms invalid neutral trials. The ABM-500 group showed significant reduced latencies to 500-ms invalid social threat trials. Both ABMs significantly reduced participants' fear of negative evaluations and interactional anxiousness relative to their comparative AP. The effects on social anxiety did not differ between the two ABMs. This study suggests that although both ABMs using short and long stimulus durations reduce some aspects of social anxiety, they influence participants' attentional disengagement in different ways.

Studies have shown that persons with schizophrenia have lower accuracy in emotion recognition compared to persons without schizophrenia. However, the impact of the complexity level of the stimuli or the modality of presentation has not been extensively addressed. Forty three persons with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and 43 healthy controls, matched for age and gender, were administered tests assessing emotion recognition from stimuli with low and high levels of complexity presented via visual, auditory and semantic channels. For both groups, recognition rates were higher for high-complexity stimuli compared to low-complexity stimuli. Additionally, both groups obtained higher recognition rates for visual and semantic stimuli than for auditory stimuli, but persons with schizophrenia obtained lower accuracy than persons in the control group for all presentation modalities. Persons diagnosed with schizophrenia did not present a level of complexity specific deficit or modality-specific deficit compared to healthy controls. Results suggest that emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia are beyond level of complexity of stimuli and modality, and present a global difficulty in cognitive functioning.

This study aimed to investigate emotion expression in a large group of children, adolescents and adults with Anorexia Nervosa (AN), and investigate the associated clinical correlates. One hundred and forty-one participants (AN=66, HC= 75) were recruited and positive and negative film clips were used to elicit emotion expressions. The Facial Activation Coding system (FACES) was used to code emotion expression. Subjective ratings of emotion were collected. Individuals with AN displayed less positive emotions during the positive film clip compared to healthy controls (HC). There was no significant difference between the groups on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). The AN group displayed emotional incongruence (reporting a different emotion to what would be expected given the stimuli, with limited facial affect to signal the emotion experienced), whereby they reported feeling significantly higher rates of negative emotion during the positive clip. There were no differences in emotion expression between the groups during the negative film clip. Despite this individuals with AN reported feeling significantly higher levels of negative emotions during the negative clip. Diminished positive emotion expression was associated with more severe clinical symptoms, which could suggest that these individuals represent a group with serious social difficulties, which may require specific attention in treatment.

Depression is associated with attentional biases for emotional information that are proposed to reflect stable vulnerability factors for the development and recurrence of depression. A key question for researchers is whether those who have recovered from depression also exhibit attentional biases, and if so, how similar these biases are to those who are currently depressed. To address this question, the present study examined attention to emotional faces in remitted depressed (N=26), currently depressed (N=16), and never depressed (N=33) individuals. Participants viewed sets of four face images (happy, sad, threatening, and neutral) while their eye movements were tracked throughout an 8-s presentation. Like currently depressed participants, remitted depressed participants attended to sad faces significantly more than never depressed participants and attended to happy faces significantly less. Analyzing temporal changes in attention revealed that currently and remitted depressed participants did not reduce their attention to sad faces over the 8-s presentation, unlike never depressed participants. In contrast, remitted depressed participants attended to happy faces similarly to never depressed participants, increasing their attention to happy faces over the 8-s presentation. The implications for cognitive theories of depression and depression vulnerability are discussed.

With the widespread use of the internet today, many studies have been conducted regarding the use of social networking sites (SNS). Despite the growing literature on the effects of SNS on human life, there are limited successful therapeutic interventions for SNS addiction. Our study aimed to elucidate the potential role of emotion recognition in the development of SNS addiction and to propose novel strategies for alleviating problems emerging from SNS addiction. A total of 337 individuals participated in the study. A sociodemographic data form, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), and the Social Media Addiction Scale (SMAS) were administered. The results revealed the presence of emotion recognition deficits among individuals with SNS addiction, relative to non-addicts. RMET positive and negative scores were associated with SNS addiction in a negative direction. Additionally, RMET negative scores predicted SNS addiction. Our findings indicate a possible link between SNS addiction and emotion recognition, which might serve as a crucial target in novel treatment strategies.

The lateral prefrontal cortex, a region with both structural and functional connectivity to the amygdala, has been consistently implicated in the downregulation of subcortical-generated emotional responses. Although previous work has demonstrated that the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) is important to emotion processing, no study has interrupted vlPFC function in order to test is role in emotion perception. In the current study, we acutely disrupted vlPFC function in twenty healthy adult participants by administering sham stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), in randomized order, during performance of an emotional perception task. During sham stimulation, participants demonstrated increased perceptual sensitivity for happy faces compared to angry faces. Disruption of the vlPFC eliminated this difference: in this condition, perceptual sensitivity did not differ between happy and angry faces. Reaction times and response bias did not differ between emotions or TMS conditions. This pattern of perceptual bias is consistent with effects observed in a wide range of affective disorders, in which vlPFC dysfunction has also been reported. This study provides insight into a possible mechanism through which the vlPFC may contribute to emotion perception.

Recent emotion recognition studies in schizophrenia have reported misattribution of emotional content to emotionally neutral faces. While in these studies faces are presented in the absence of any contextual reference, in daily life facial expressions are typically perceived within a specific situational context. However, there is no evidence on the possible modulatory role of contextual aids on emotion attribution to neutral faces. We address this issue in the present study. Thirty schizophrenia patients and thirty paired controls performed an emotion categorization task (by choosing one among six labels of emotions) with neutral target faces that were superimposed on affectively positive, negative or neutral scenes. In presence of positive contexts, patients categorized neutral faces as happy and fearful more frequently than controls. When negative contexts were present, patients also categorized neutral faces as fearful more frequently than controls. However, in the presence of neutral contexts patients and controls did not differ in their categorization pattern. These results suggest that explicit presence of a neutral context seems to compensate for the bias showed by patients. With the purpose of correcting emotion misattribution in schizophrenia, emotionally neutral contexts might be incorporated to treatments aimed at improving social cognition performance in this patient population.

Despite recent research acknowledging social cognition as an important feature of interpersonal functioning in schizophrenia, little work has evaluated the role of social cognition in suicidal ideation and behavior in psychosis. In a short-term longitudinal study, we evaluated the association between concurrent and near term suicidal ideation with social cognition, including emotion recognition and related biases (ER-40; BLERT), attribution biases (AIHQ), and evaluations of trustworthiness (trustworthiness task) in a sample of 179 outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Adjusting for severity of positive and general mental health symptoms, greater reactivity to extreme stimuli (trustworthiness measure), BLERT negative affect accuracy, and AIHQ Blame Scores were associated with suicidal ideation at baseline. AIHQ Blame Scores also longitudinally predicted the presence of ideation 2 weeks later and were highest among participants with ideation across the two time points. The present findings provide support that biased interpretations, and, concurrently with ideation, reactivity and selective accuracy to negative stimuli, are associated with suicidal ideation in schizophrenia. Further understanding the role of social cognitive ability and biases on suicidal ideation could contribute to the understanding of social cognition as a treatment target in prevention of suicidal behavior in schizophrenia.

The processing of social stimuli generated by one's own voluntary behavior is an element of social adaptation. It is known that self-generated stimuli induce attenuated sensory experiences compared with externally generated stimuli. The present study aimed to examine this self-specific attenuation effect on early stimulus processing in the case of others’ facial expressions during interpersonal interactions. In addition, this study explored the possibility that the self-specific attenuation effect on social cognition is modulated by antisocial personality traits such as Machiavellianism. We analyzed early components of the event-related brain potential in participants elicited by happy and sad facial expressions of others when the participant's decision was responsible for the others’ emotions and when the others’ facial expressions were independent of the participant's decision. Compared to the non-responsible condition, the responsible condition showed an attenuated amplitude of the N170 component in response to sad faces. Moreover, Machiavellianism explained individual differences in the self-specific attenuation effect depending on the affective valence of social signals. The present findings support the possibility that the self-specific attenuation effect extends to interpersonal interactions and imply that distorted cognition of others’ emotions caused by one's own behavior is associated with personality disorders that promote antisocial behaviors.

Many patients with bipolar disorder (BD) have difficulties in facial emotion recognition, which may also be impaired in maltreated children and in subjects who have a positive history of childhood traumatic experiences. Childhood trauma is reported with a high prevalence in BD and it is considered a risk factor for the disorder. As the relationship between facial emotion recognition and childhood trauma in BD has not yet been directly investigated, in this study we examined whether the presence of a childhood trauma in affectively stable BD patients was associated with poorer performance in emotion recognition. Seventy-five BD I and II participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire retrospectively assessing five types of childhood trauma (emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and emotional and physical neglect) and the Emotion Recognition Task evaluating the ability to correctly identify six basic facial emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise). Our results suggest that the presence of childhood trauma in participants with BD is associated with a more severe clinical presentation (earlier onset, longer duration of illness, and higher depressive symptom ratings) and that BD patients with a positive childhood history of emotional neglect perform worse than those without such a history in recognizing anger.

Adolescents with nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) have been described as having considerable impairment in social interactions, and social difficulties are often a trigger for NSSI. However, little is known about how adolescents with NSSI disorder process facial expressions of emotion. We investigated the recognition of facial expressions of emotion in 47 adolescents with NSSI disorder, 28 clinical controls without NSSI, and 51 nonclinical controls. Following a neutral or a sad mood induction, participants were presented with a dynamic facial expression that slowly changed from neutral to full-intensity happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear or neutral (closed/open mouth). Recognition of facial expressions was measured by the intensity of the expression at which participants could accurately identify the facial expression. No group differences in the recognition of facial expressions were found. All groups required comparable stages of emotional expressivity to correctly recognize emotions, and there were no significant differences in accuracy. Results indicate no mood effect on recognition or accuracy. Valence and arousal ratings of stimuli indicated that compared to the nonclinical control group but not to clinical controls, the adolescents with NSSI disorder rated the stimuli as significantly more unpleasant and arousing.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a debilitating mental illness which is thought to be maintained in part by the aberrant attentional processing of socially relevant information. Critically however, research has not assessed whether such aberrant attentional processing occurs during social-evaluative contexts characteristically feared in SAD. The current study presents a novel approach for the assessment of the visuocognitive biases operating in SAD during a social-evaluative stressor. For this task, clinically socially anxious participants and controls were required to give a brief impromptu speech in front of a pre-recorded audience who intermittently displayed socially positive or threatening gestures. Participant gaze at the audience display was recorded throughout the speech. Socially anxious participants exhibited a significantly longer visual scanpath, relative to controls. In addition, socially anxious participants spent relatively longer time fixating at the non-social regions in between and around the confederates. The findings of the present study suggest that SAD is associated with hyperscanning and the attentional avoidance of social stimuli.

Many psychological disorders are characterised by insensitivities or biases in the processing of subtle facial expressions of emotion. Training using expression morph sequences which vary the intensity of expressions may be able to address such deficits. In the current study participants were shown expressions from either happy or fearful intensity morph sequences, and trained to detect the target emotion (e.g., happy in the happy sequence) as being present in low intensity expressions. Training transfer was tested using a six alternative forced choice emotion labelling task with varying intensity expressions, which participants completed before and after training. Training increased false alarms for the target emotion in the transfer task. Hit rate for the target emotion did not increase once adjustment was made for the increase in false alarms. This suggests that training causes a bias for detecting the target emotion which generalises outside of the training task. However it does not increase accuracy for detecting the target emotion. The results are discussed in terms of the training’s utility in addressing different types of emotion processing deficits in psychological disorders., Highlights • Participants were trained to detect happiness or fear in low intensity expressions. • Training lead to a bias for recognizing happiness or fear on faces in a novel task. • However, participants did not become more accurate at recognizing happiness or fear. • This training may be effective in altering specific biases in emotion recognition.

We investigated the relationship between a change in sleep quality and facial emotion recognition accuracy in a group of mentally-disordered inpatients at a secure forensic psychiatric unit. Patients whose sleep improved over time also showed improved facial emotion recognition while patients who showed no sleep improvement showed no change in emotion recognition.

Currently there is a very limited understanding of how mental wellbeing versus anxiety and depression symptoms are associated with emotion processing behaviour. For the first time, we examined these associations using a behavioural emotion task of positive and negative facial expressions in 1668 healthy adult twins. Linear mixed model results suggested faster reaction times to happy facial expressions was associated with higher wellbeing scores, and slower reaction times with higher depression and anxiety scores. Multivariate twin modelling identified a significant genetic correlation between depression and anxiety symptoms and reaction time to happy facial expressions, in the absence of any significant correlations with wellbeing. We also found a significant negative phenotypic relationship between depression and anxiety symptoms and accuracy for identifying neutral emotions, although the genetic or environment correlations were not significant in the multivariate model. Overall, the phenotypic relationships between speed of identifying happy facial expressions and wellbeing on the one hand, versus depression and anxiety symptoms on the other, were in opposing directions. Twin modelling revealed a small common genetic correlation between response to happy faces and depression and anxiety symptoms alone, suggesting that wellbeing and depression and anxiety symptoms show largely independent relationships with emotion processing at the behavioral level.

Abnormal processing of emotional information and regulation are core trait-related features of bipolar disorder (BD) but evidence from behavioural studies is conflicting. This study aimed to investigate trait-related abnormalities in emotional reactivity and regulation in BD using novel sensitive behavioural measures including facial expressions and eye movements. Fifteen patients with BD in full or partial remission and 16 healthy controls (HCs) were given a computerised task in which they were instructed to 'react to' unpleasant and neutral pictures or 'dampen' their emotional response to aversive pictures. Participants rated their emotional response after each picture block, and eye-movements and facial expressions were recorded. Patients generally gazed less at unpleasant and neutral pictures during emotion processing and regulation. During emotional reactivity, patients exhibited stronger facial expressions to neutral pictures, a lack of facial expressions to unpleasant pictures, and more surprised facial expressions to both neutral and unpleasant pictures compared to HCs. The results point to subtle abnormalities in visual gaze patterns and facial displays of emotion between patients with BD during emotion processing and regulation. Aberrant eye-movements and facial displays could provide a more sensitive measure of emotional reactivity in BD than traditional behavioural measures, which could aid future diagnostic accuracy.

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.