Processing the socially relevant parts of faces

Empathic Accuracy in Adolescent Girls with Turner Syndrome

To examine the potential mechanisms underlying social deficits in Turner Syndrome, we administered the empathic accuracy task (EAT) -a naturalistic social cognition task- and a (control) visual-motor line-tracking task to 14 girls with TS was compared to 12 age-matched typically developing girls (TD; ages 12 to 17). Empathic accuracy was compared across positive and negative emotionally valanced videos. We found that TS differs from TD on empathic accuracy ratings for negative videos; no differences were detected for the positive videos or for the control line tracking task. Thus, our findings suggest impaired detection of negatively valanced empathic interactions in TS and may help inform the future development of social-cognition treatment strategies for girls with TS.

The Role of Attachment in Poly-Drug Use Disorder: An Overview of the Literature, Recent Findings and Clinical Implications

Background: Substance use disorders (SUDs) represent a worldwide epidemic with extensive costs to the individual and to society. Occasionally described as an attachment disorder, they have been linked to various impairments in self-regulation and social functioning. However, while there have been significant advances in the development and validation of treatment strategies for SUD in recent years, the components of these treatment approaches have yet to be fully explored. The characteristics of polydrug use disorder (PUD) especially need to be addressed in more detail, as this diagnosis is highly common in individuals seeking treatment, while simultaneously being associated with poor treatment success. Aim and Scope: This review aims at further exploring the relevance of attachment in PUD and its treatment. To this end, this review provides a concise summary of relevant theories on the development and treatment of SUD in general, including related parameters of attachment, emotion regulation, and neuroscience. Furthermore, several studies focused specifically on PUD are described in more detail. These studies explored the connections between attachment, personality structure, primary and higher emotions (including spirituality), as well as structural and functional neural parameters in inpatients with PUD as well as in healthy controls. Most notably, the described studies highlight that insecure attachment and impairments in personality structure are present in inpatients with PUD. In addition, these characteristics are paralleled by extensive impairments in white matter integrity, especially in tracts connected to facets of emotion regulation. Conclusions: Based on our findings, we emphasize conceptualization of PUD as an Attachment Disorder, on a behavioral as well as on a neural level. Furthermore, we point out the importance of an integrated bio-psycho-social approach in this research area. Consequently, future studies might more closely focus on the influence of attachment-based interventions on emotion regulation abilities as well as a potentially related neuroplasticity. Neuroplastic changes, which are still rather unexplored, might represent important parameters for the assessment of treatment outcomes especially in long-term SUD treatment.

Inversion produces opposite size illusions for faces and bodies

Faces are complex, multidimensional, and meaningful visual stimuli. Recently, Araragi, Aotani, & Kitaoka (2012) demonstrated an intriguing face size illusion whereby an inverted face is perceived as larger than a physically identical upright face. Like the face, the human body is a highly familiar and important stimulus in our lives. Here, we investigated the specificity of the size underestimation of upright faces illusion, testing whether similar effects also hold for bodies, hands, and everyday objects. Experiments 1a and 1b replicated the face-size illusion. No size illusion was observed for hands or objects. Unexpectedly, a reverse size illusion was observed for bodies, so that upright bodies were perceived as larger than their inverted counterparts. Experiment 2 showed that the face illusion was maintained even when the photographic contrast polarity of the stimuli was reversed, indicating that the visual system driving the illusion relies on geometric featural information rather than image contrast. In Experiment 2, the reverse size illusion for bodies failed to reach significance. Our findings show that size illusions caused by inversion show a high level of category specificity, with opposite illusions for faces and bodies.

Influence of task instructions and stimuli on the neural network of face processing: An ALE meta-analysis

Many neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural correlates of face processing. However, the location of face-preferential regions differs considerably between studies, possibly due to the use of different stimuli or tasks. By using Activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses, we aimed to a) delineate regions consistently involved in face processing and b) to assess the influence of stimuli and task on convergence of activation patterns. In total, we included 77 neuroimaging experiments in healthy subjects comparing face processing to a control condition. Results revealed a core face-processing network encompassing bilateral fusiform gyrus (FFG), inferior occipital (IOG) gyrus, superior temporal sulcus/middle temporal gyrus (STS/MTG), amygdala, inferior frontal junction (IFJ) and gyrus (IFG), left anterior insula as well as pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). Furthermore, separate meta-analyses showed, that while significant convergence across all task and stimuli conditions was found in bilateral amygdala, right IOG, right mid-FFG, and right IFG, convergence in IFJ, STS/MTG, right posterior FFG, left FFG and pre-SMA differed between conditions. Thus, our results point to an occipito-frontal-amygdalae system that is involved regardless of stimulus and attention, whereas the remaining regions of the face-processing network are influenced by the task-dependent focus on specific facial characteristics as well as the type of stimuli processed.

Social content and emotional valence modulate gaze fixations in dynamic scenes

Previous research has shown that low-level visual features (i.e., low-level visual saliency) as well as socially relevant information predict gaze allocation in free viewing conditions. However, these studies mainly used static and highly controlled stimulus material, thus revealing little about the robustness of attentional processes across diverging situations. Secondly, the influence of affective stimulus characteristics on visual exploration patterns remains poorly understood. Participants in the present study freely viewed a set of naturalistic, contextually rich video clips from a variety of settings that were capable of eliciting different moods. Using recordings of eye movements, we quantified to what degree social information, emotional valence and low-level visual features influenced gaze allocation using generalized linear mixed models. We found substantial and similarly large regression weights for low-level saliency and social information, affirming the importance of both predictor classes under ecologically more valid dynamic stimulation conditions. Differences in predictor strength between individuals were large and highly stable across videos. Additionally, low-level saliency was less important for fixation selection in videos containing persons than in videos not containing persons, and less important for videos perceived as negative. We discuss the generalizability of these findings and the feasibility of applying this research paradigm to patient groups.

Do fearful eyes activate empathy-related brain regions in individuals with callous traits?

Psychopathy, a developmental disorder characterized by profound social disturbance, is associated with impaired recognition of distress cues. Since distress processing and moral socialization are closely linked, uncovering techniques to improve distress recognition could have positive treatment implications for developmental disorders that feature empathy impairments. Previous studies demonstrate that fear-recognition deficits can be remedied by redirecting attention to critical cues (the eyes for fearful faces). However, it remains unclear whether this manipulation increases activity in empathy-related brain regions, or has an alternate compensatory effect that may not promote prosocial behaviours. In this fMRI study, a community sample of individuals with high vs low callous traits completed an emotion recognition task that varied whether the most or least socially meaningful facial features were visible (the eyes were isolated or occluded). For fearful faces, individuals with high callous traits showed significantly less amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex activity than those with low callous traits when the eyes were occluded, but not when they were isolated. Consistent with recent models of the amygdala that emphasize orientation to disambiguate stimuli rather than represent distress, individuals with low trait empathy showed greater amygdala activity to the least vs most socially meaningful features of fearful faces.

Brain Activity in ADHD Patients Performing the Counting Stroop Task: A Social Neuroscience Approach

Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms are manifested in social dynamics. In this study, the brain activity of eight child and adolescent patients diagnosed with ADHD was examined while they performed the Counting Stroop task and results were interpreted using social neuroscience premises. Brain activity was identified in frontal, parietal, and temporal regions related to the orienting system of attention and with linguistic, facial recognition, and mnemonic processes. Consistent with previous reports, these patients showed no activation in prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices related to the executive system of attention. Also, they manifested activation in the insular cortex involving interoceptive processes that may be associated with impulsiveness. Global brain activity involves a network formed during early development and includes experiential components such as learning of rules, reward systems, empathy, and decision making. An integrative assessment of ADHD should consider psychosocial and neurobiological causes integrated into an individual's own experiences assembled throughout life.

Diagnostic features of emotional expressions are processed preferentially

Diagnostic features of emotional expressions are differentially distributed across the face. The current study examined whether these diagnostic features are preferentially attended to even when they are irrelevant for the task at hand or when faces appear at different locations in the visual field. To this aim, fearful, happy and neutral faces were presented to healthy individuals in two experiments while measuring eye movements. In Experiment 1, participants had to accomplish an emotion classification, a gender discrimination or a passive viewing task. To differentiate fast, potentially reflexive, eye movements from a more elaborate scanning of faces, stimuli were either presented for 150 or 2000 ms. In Experiment 2, similar faces were presented at different spatial positions to rule out the possibility that eye movements only reflect a general bias for certain visual field locations. In both experiments, participants fixated the eye region much longer than any other region in the face. Furthermore, the eye region was attended to more pronouncedly when fearful or neutral faces were shown whereas more attention was directed toward the mouth of happy facial expressions. Since these results were similar across the other experimental manipulations, they indicate that diagnostic features of emotional expressions are preferentially processed irrespective of task demands and spatial locations. Saliency analyses revealed that a computational model of bottom-up visual attention could not explain these results. Furthermore, as these gaze preferences were evident very early after stimulus onset and occurred even when saccades did not allow for extracting further information from these stimuli, they may reflect a preattentive mechanism that automatically detects relevant facial features in the visual field and facilitates the orientation of attention towards them. This mechanism might crucially depend on amygdala functioning and it is potentially impaired in a number of clinical conditions such as autism or social anxiety disorders.

Fear and happiness in the eyes: an intra-cerebral event-related potential study from the human amygdala

We present the response pattern of intracranial event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded from depth-electrodes in the human amygdala (four patients) to faces or face parts encoding fearful, happy or neutral expressions. The amygdala showed increased amplitude ERPs (from 200 to 400 ms post-stimulus) in response to the eye region of the face compared to whole faces and to the mouth region. In particular, a strong emotional valence effect was observed, both at group and at single-subject level, with a preferential response to fearful eyes respect to every other stimulus category from 200 to 400 ms after stimulus presentation. A preferential response to smiling eyes compared to happy faces and smiling mouths was also observed at group level from 300 to 400 ms post-stimulus presentation. A complementary time-frequency analysis was performed showing that an increase in the theta frequency band (4-7 Hz) accounted for the main event-related band power (ERBP) change during the 200-500 ms post stimulus interval. The analysis of the ERBPs changes according to their emotional valence showed a strong increase in theta ERBP to fearful eyes, which was higher respect to any other facial stimulus. Moreover, theta ERBP increase to "smiling eyes" was larger respect with that evoked by smiling mouths and whole happy faces. Minimal post-stimulus ERBPs changes were evoked by neutral stimuli. These data are consistent with a special role of the amygdala in processing facial signals, both with negative and positive valence, conveyed by the eye region of the face.

Activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis revisited

A widely used technique for coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data is activation likelihood estimation (ALE), which determines the convergence of foci reported from different experiments. ALE analysis involves modelling these foci as probability distributions whose width is based on empirical estimates of the spatial uncertainty due to the between-subject and between-template variability of neuroimaging data. ALE results are assessed against a null-distribution of random spatial association between experiments, resulting in random-effects inference. In the present revision of this algorithm, we address two remaining drawbacks of the previous algorithm. First, the assessment of spatial association between experiments was based on a highly time-consuming permutation test, which nevertheless entailed the danger of underestimating the right tail of the null-distribution. In this report, we outline how this previous approach may be replaced by a faster and more precise analytical method. Second, the previously applied correction procedure, i.e. controlling the false discovery rate (FDR), is supplemented by new approaches for correcting the family-wise error rate and the cluster-level significance. The different alternatives for drawing inference on meta-analytic results are evaluated on an exemplary dataset on face perception as well as discussed with respect to their methodological limitations and advantages. In summary, we thus replaced the previous permutation algorithm with a faster and more rigorous analytical solution for the null-distribution and comprehensively address the issue of multiple-comparison corrections. The proposed revision of the ALE-algorithm should provide an improved tool for conducting coordinate-based meta-analyses on functional imaging data.

Brain regions involved in human movement perception: a quantitative voxel-based meta-analysis

Face, hands, and body movements are powerful signals essential for social interactions. In the last 2 decades, a large number of brain imaging studies have explored the neural correlates of the perception of these signals. Formal synthesis is crucially needed, however, to extract the key circuits involved in human motion perception across the variety of paradigms and stimuli that have been used. Here, we used the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis approach with random effect analysis. We performed meta-analyses on three classes of biological motion: movement of the whole body, hands, and face. Additional analyses of studies of static faces or body stimuli and sub-analyses grouping experiments as a function of their control stimuli or task employed allowed us to identify main effects of movements and forms perception, as well as effects of task demand. In addition to specific features, all conditions showed convergence in occipito-temporal and fronto-parietal regions, but with different peak location and extent. The conjunction of the three ALE maps revealed convergence in all categories in a region of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus as well as in a bilateral region at the junction between middle temporal and lateral occipital gyri. Activation in these regions was not a function of attentional demand and was significant also when controlling for non-specific motion perception. This quantitative synthesis points towards a special role for posterior superior temporal sulcus for integrating human movement percept, and supports a specific representation for body parts in middle temporal, fusiform, precentral, and parietal areas.

Effects of modafinil on emotional processing in first episode psychosis

BACKGROUND

Emotional impairments are important determinants of functional outcome in psychosis, and current treatments are not particularly effective. Modafinil is a wake-promoting drug that has been shown to improve emotion discrimination in healthy individuals and attention and executive function in schizophrenia. We aimed to establish whether modafinil might have a role in the adjuvant treatment of emotional impairments in the first episode of psychosis, when therapeutic endeavor is arguably most vital.

METHODS

Forty patients with a first episode of psychosis participated in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design study testing the effects of a single dose of 200 mg modafinil on neuropsychological performance. Emotional functions were evaluated with the emotional face recognition test, the affective go-no go task, and the reward and punishment learning test. Visual analogue scales were used throughout the study to assess subjective mood changes.

RESULTS

Modafinil significantly improved the recognition of sad facial expressions (z = 2.98, p = .003). In contrast, there was no effect of modafinil on subjective mood ratings, on tasks measuring emotional sensitivity to reward or punishment, or on interference of emotional valence on cognitive function, as measured by the affective go-no go task.

CONCLUSIONS

Modafinil improves the analysis of emotional face expressions. This might enhance social function in people with a first episode of psychosis.

Is Social Phobia a "Mis-Communication" Disorder? Brain Functional Connectivity during Face Perception Differs between Patients with Social Phobia and Healthy Control Subjects

Recently, a differential recruitment of brain areas throughout the distributed neural system for face perception has been found in social phobic patients as compared to healthy control subjects. These functional abnormalities in social phobic patients extend beyond emotion-related brain areas, such as the amygdala, to include cortical networks that modulate attention and process other facial features, and they are also associated with an alteration of the task-related activation/deactivation trade-off. Functional connectivity is becoming a powerful tool to examine how components of large-scale distributed neural systems are coupled together while performing a specific function. This study was designed to determine whether functional connectivity networks among brain regions within the distributed system for face perception also would differ between social phobic patients and healthy controls. Data were obtained from eight social phobic patients and seven healthy controls by using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Our findings indicated that social phobic patients and healthy controls have different patterns of functional connectivity across brain regions within both the core and the extended systems for face perception and the default mode network. To our knowledge, this is the first study that shows that functional connectivity during brain response to socially relevant stimuli differs between social phobic patients and healthy controls. These results expand our previous findings and indicate that brain functional changes in social phobic patients are not restricted to a single specific brain structure, but rather involve a mis-communication among different sensory and emotional processing brain areas.

Asymmetries of the human social brain in the visual, auditory and chemical modalities

Structural and functional asymmetries are present in many regions of the human brain responsible for motor control, sensory and cognitive functions and communication. Here, we focus on hemispheric asymmetries underlying the domain of social perception, broadly conceived as the analysis of information about other individuals based on acoustic, visual and chemical signals. By means of these cues the brain establishes the border between 'self' and 'other', and interprets the surrounding social world in terms of the physical and behavioural characteristics of conspecifics essential for impression formation and for creating bonds and relationships. We show that, considered from the standpoint of single- and multi-modal sensory analysis, the neural substrates of the perception of voices, faces, gestures, smells and pheromones, as evidenced by modern neuroimaging techniques, are characterized by a general pattern of right-hemispheric functional asymmetry that might benefit from other aspects of hemispheric lateralization rather than constituting a true specialization for social information.

Differential modulation of neural activity throughout the distributed neural system for face perception in patients with Social Phobia and healthy subjects

Social Phobia (SP) is a marked and persistent fear of social or performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others. Faces of others are perceived as threatening by social phobic patients (SPP). To investigate how face processing is altered in the distributed neural system for face perception in Social Phobia, we designed an event-related fMRI study in which Healthy Controls (HC) and SPP were presented with angry, fearful, disgusted, happy and neutral faces and scrambled pictures (visual baseline). As compared to HC, SPP showed increased neural activity not only in regions involved in emotional processing including left amygdala and insula, as expected from previous reports, but also in the bilateral superior temporal sulcus (STS), a part of the core system for face perception that is involved in the evaluation of expression and personal traits. In addition SPP showed a significantly weaker activation in the left fusiform gyrus, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and bilateral intraparietal sulcus as compared to HC. These effects were found not only in response to emotional faces but also to neutral faces as compared to scrambled pictures. Thus, SPP showed enhanced activity in brain areas related to processing of information about emotional expression and personality traits. In contrast, brain activity was decreased in areas for attention and for processing other information from the face, perhaps as a result of a feeling of wariness. These results indicate a differential modulation of neural activity throughout the different parts of the distributed neural system for face perception in SPP as compared to HC.

The facial expression musculature in primates and its evolutionary significance

Facial expression is a mode of close-proximity non-vocal communication used by primates and is produced by mimetic/facial musculature. Arguably, primates make the most-intricate facial displays and have some of the most-complex facial musculature of all mammals. Most of the earlier ideas of primate mimetic musculature, involving its function in facial displays and its evolution, were essentially linear "scala natural" models of increasing complexity. More-recent work has challenged these ideas, suggesting that ecological factors and social systems have played a much larger role in explaining the diversity of structures than previously believed. The present review synthesizes the evidence from gross muscular, microanatomical, behavioral and neurobiological studies in order to provide a preliminary analysis of the factors responsible for the evolution of primate facial musculature with comparisons to general mammals. In addition, the unique structure, function and evolution of human mimetic musculature are discussed, along with the potential influential roles of human speech and eye gaze.

Mechanisms of Identity and Gender Decisions to Faces: Who Rocked in 1986?

Two experiments are reported in which participants made familiarity decisions (Is this face familiar or not?) or gender decisions (Is this face male or female?) to the same sets of faces presented as whole faces or as internal features only. The experimental items on which the analysis was performed were famous and unfamiliar male faces that differed on rated masculinity. The famous faces also differed on age of acquisition (AoA). The experimental male faces were combined with an equal number of famous and unfamiliar female faces for presentation to participants. In experiment 1 we found faster and more accurate familiarity decisions to whole male faces than to internal features; also an interaction between AoA and masculinity such that familiarity decisions were both faster and more accurate to high-than to low-masculinity faces when those faces were late-acquired, but not when they were early-acquired. In experiment 2 we found the same benefit for whole faces over internal features and the same interaction between AoA and masculinity in gender decisions. The similarity between the effects of AoA and masculinity in familiarity and gender decisions is more readily accounted for by models of face processing which posit a close relationship between gender and identity processing than by models which maintain that those aspects of face perception are dealt with by quite separate processing streams. We propose that gender decisions, like familiarity decisions, are semantic judgments (rather than judgments based on the analysis of the surface features of faces), and that the shared basis of the two forms of decision explains why they show similar influences of AoA and masculinity.