Facial Affect Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
On the basis of a review of the extant literature describing emotion– cognition interactions, the authors propose 4 methodological desiderata for studying how task-irrelevant affect modulates cognition and present data from an experiment... more
On the basis of a review of the extant literature describing emotion– cognition interactions, the authors propose 4 methodological desiderata for studying how task-irrelevant affect modulates cognition and present data from an experiment satisfying them. Consistent with accounts of the hemispheric asymmetries characterizing withdrawal-related negative affect and visuospatial working memory (WM) in prefrontal and parietal cortices, threat-induced anxiety selectively disrupted accuracy of spatial but not verbal WM performance. Furthermore, individual differences in physiological measures of anxiety statistically mediated the degree of disruption. A second experiment revealed that individuals characterized by high levels of behavioral inhibition exhibited more intense anxiety and relatively worse spatial WM performance in the absence of threat, solidifying the authors’ inference that anxiety causally mediates disruption. These observations suggest a revision of extant models of how anxiety sculpts cognition and underscore the utility of the desiderata. Keywords: anxiety, working memory prefrontal cortex (PFC), hemispheric asymmetries, facial electromyography (EMG)
El reconocimiento facial de la expresión emocional es la capacidad de todos los individuos de reconocer formas básicas de expresión afectiva, la cual aparece en los rostros de las personas. Investigaciones previas sugieren que existen... more
El reconocimiento facial de la expresión emocional es la capacidad de todos los individuos de reconocer formas básicas de expresión afectiva, la cual aparece en los rostros de las personas. Investigaciones previas sugieren que existen diferencias en el reconocimiento facial de la expresión emocional entre carreras universitarias, sin embargo, hay pocos estudios en México, y es por ello que el objetivo del presente estudio fue determinar estas diferencias en estudiantes universitarios. Se utilizaron 70 imágenes del Facial Expressions of Emotion-Stimuli and Test. Para determinar las diferencias por carrera se llevó a cabo un análisis de varianza simple con pruebas post hoc de Tukey, obteniendo diferencias estadísticamente significativas en el reconocimiento facial de la tristeza, el asco y el enojo. Abstract Facial affect recognition is the capacity of every person to recognize basic forms of affective expression, which appears at human faces. Previous research suggests that facial affect recognition differences between university careers exist. There are few studies at Mexico that assess these. The purpose of this study was to determine career differences among university studies. To assess the variable 70 images from the Facial Expression of Emotion-Stimuli and Test were used. To determine career differences a single factor analysis of variance with Tukey post hoc test was made, obtaining statistically significant differences at facial affect recognition of sadness, disgust and angry emotions.
Stress is a universal experience that can fundamentally alter neural responses to incoming information. Recent research has begun to clarify the substrates of stress-induced modulations of neural processing. Based on this work, it has... more
Stress is a universal experience that can fundamentally alter neural responses to incoming information. Recent research has begun to clarify the substrates of stress-induced modulations of neural processing. Based on this work, it has been hypothesized that stress and anxiety shift the balance of attention away from a task-directed mode, governed by prefrontal cortex (PFC), to a sensory-vigilance mode, governed by the amygdala and other threat-sensitive regions. A key untested prediction of this framework is that stress exerts dissociable effects on different stages of information processing. Here, we exploited the temporal resolution afforded by event-related potentials (ERPs) to disentangle the impact of stress on sensory-vigilance, indexed by early perceptual activity, from its impact on task-directed cognition, indexed by later postperceptual activity. Results indicated that threat-of-shock produced sustained increases in both the experience and expression of stress, measured using retrospective ratings and concurrent facial electromyography (EMG). During this same period, stress double dissociated the early sensory-specific and later task-directed (postperceptual) processing of emotionally-neutral stimuli. In particular, stress amplified N1 (184-236 ms) and attenuated P3 (316-488 ms) visually-evoked activity. These observations provide compelling new evidence that stress can exert fundamentally different consequences across successive stages of information processing. Consistent with recent suggestions, stress amplified earlier extrastriate activity in a manner consistent with vigilance for threat, but disrupted later activity associated with the evaluation of task-relevant information. These results provide a novel basis for understanding how stress can modulate information processing in everyday life and disorders characterized by hypersensitivity to threat.
The functional catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT Val108/158Met) polymorphism has been shown to have an impact on tasks of executive function, memory and attention and recently, tasks with an affective component. As oestrogen reduces COMT... more
The functional catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT Val108/158Met) polymorphism has been shown to have an impact on tasks of executive function, memory and attention and recently, tasks with an affective component. As oestrogen reduces COMT activity, we focused on the interaction between gender and COMT genotype on brain activations during an affective processing task. We used functional MRI (fMRI) to record brain activations from 74 healthy subjects who engaged in a facial affect recognition task; subjects viewed and identified fearful compared to neutral faces. There was no main effect of the COMT polymorphism, gender or genotypexgender interaction on task performance. We found a significant effect of gender on brain activations in the left amygdala and right temporal pole, where females demonstrated increased activations over males. Within these regions, Val/Val carriers showed greater signal magnitude compared to Met/Met carriers, particularly in females. The COMT Val108/158Met polymorphism impacts on gender-related patterns of activation in limbic and paralimbic regions but the functional significance of any oestrogen-related COMT inhibition appears modest.
The functional catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT Val108/158Met) polymorphism has been shown to have an impact on tasks of executive function, memory and attention and recently, tasks with an affective component. As oestrogen reduces COMT... more
The functional catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT Val108/158Met) polymorphism has been shown to have an impact on tasks of executive function, memory and attention and recently, tasks with an affective component. As oestrogen reduces COMT activity, we focused on the interaction between gender and COMT genotype on brain activations during an affective processing task. We used functional MRI (fMRI) to record brain activations from 74 healthy subjects who engaged in a facial affect recognition task; subjects viewed and identified fearful compared to neutral faces. There was no main effect of the COMT polymorphism, gender or genotypexgender interaction on task performance. We found a significant effect of gender on brain activations in the left amygdala and right temporal pole, where females demonstrated increased activations over males. Within these regions, Val/Val carriers showed greater signal magnitude compared to Met/Met carriers, particularly in females. The COMT Val108/158Met polymorphism impacts on gender-related patterns of activation in limbic and paralimbic regions but the functional significance of any oestrogen-related COMT inhibition appears modest.