Children's processing of emotions expressed by peers and adults: An fMRI study

Development of human visual cortical function: A scoping review of task- and naturalistic-fMRI studies through the interactive specialization and maturational frameworks

Overarching theories such as the interactive specialization and maturational frameworks have been proposed to describe human functional brain development. However, these frameworks have not yet been systematically examined across the fMRI literature. Visual processing is one of the most well-studied fields in neuroimaging, and research in this area has recently expanded to include naturalistic paradigms that facilitate study in younger age ranges, allowing for an in-depth critical appraisal of these frameworks across childhood. To this end, we conducted a scoping review of 94 developmental visual fMRI studies, including both traditional experimental task and naturalistic studies, across multiple sub-domains (early visual processing, category-specific higher order processing, naturalistic visual processing). We found that across domains, many studies reported progressive development, but few studies describe regressive or emergent changes necessary to fit the maturational or interactive specialization frameworks. Our findings suggest a need for the expansion of developmental frameworks and clearer reporting of both progressive and regressive changes, along with well-powered, longitudinal studies.

Associations Between Parenting Behavior and Neural Processing of Adolescent Faces in Mothers With and Without Depression

BACKGROUND

This study first examined how mothers with and without depression differ in neural activation in response to adolescents' affective faces. Second, it examined the extent to which these neural activation patterns are related to observed positive and aggressive parenting behavior.

METHODS

Mothers with and without depression (based on self-reported symptoms and treatment history; n = 77 and n = 64, respectively; meanage = 40 years) from low-income families completed an interaction task with their adolescents (meanage = 12.8 years), which was coded for parents' aggressive and positive affective behavior. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, mothers viewed blurry, happy, sad, and angry faces of unfamiliar adolescents, with an instruction to either label the emotion or determine the clarity of the image.

RESULTS

The depression group showed less activation in the posterior midcingulate than the control subject group while labeling happy faces. Higher activation in the insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) was related to less positive parenting behavior. Ventrolateral PFC activation was most pronounced when labeling negative emotions, but stronger ventrolateral PFC response to happy faces was associated with more aggressive parenting behavior.

CONCLUSIONS

This demonstrates the association between parents' neural responses to adolescent faces and their behavior during interactions with their own adolescents, with relatively low insula and dorsomedial PFC activation supporting positive parenting and affect-dependent response in the ventrolateral PFC as being important to limit aggressive behavior.

Matters of development and experience: Evaluation of dog and human emotional expressions by children and adults

Emotional facial expressions are an important part of across species social communication, yet the factors affecting human recognition of dog emotions have received limited attention. Here, we characterize the recognition and evaluation of dog and human emotional facial expressions by 4-and 6-year-old children and adult participants, as well as the effect of dog experience in emotion recognition. Participants rated the happiness, anger, valence, and arousal from happy, aggressive, and neutral facial images of dogs and humans. Both respondent age and experience influenced the dog emotion recognition and ratings. Aggressive dog faces were rated more often correctly by adults than 4-year-olds regardless of dog experience, whereas the 6-year-olds' and adults' performances did not differ. Happy human and dog expressions were recognized equally by all groups. Children rated aggressive dogs as more positive and lower in arousal than adults, and participants without dog experience rated aggressive dogs as more positive than those with dog experience. Children also rated aggressive dogs as more positive and lower in arousal than aggressive humans. The results confirm that recognition of dog emotions, especially aggression, increases with age, which can be related to general dog experience and brain structure maturation involved in facial emotion recognition.

Large-scale encoding of emotion concepts becomes increasingly similar between individuals from childhood to adolescence

Humans require a shared conceptualization of others' emotions for adaptive social functioning. A concept is a mental blueprint that gives our brains parameters for predicting what will happen next. Emotion concepts undergo refinement with development, but it is not known whether their neural representations change in parallel. Here, in a sample of 5-15-year-old children (n = 823), we show that the brain represents different emotion concepts distinctly throughout the cortex, cerebellum and caudate. Patterns of activation to each emotion changed little across development. Using a model-free approach, we show that activation patterns were more similar between older children than between younger children. Moreover, scenes that required inferring negative emotional states elicited higher default mode network activation similarity in older children than younger children. These results suggest that representations of emotion concepts are relatively stable by mid to late childhood and synchronize between individuals during adolescence.

Food as a key disgust elicitor in infancy and childhood: Previous research and opportunities for future study

Disliked foods may have important value in the study of the development of disgust. The current review draws from literature across disciplines, including theories of disgust and studies of the development of eating behavior and food preferences, to highlight food as an important category of disgust responses across a wide age range, including children as young as 3 years old and adults. Children's disgust responses to certain types of food are considered to be both innate and culturally constrained behaviors, and their perceptions of other people's food choices indicate potential links between foods and cultural groups. We end by discussing several ongoing and future research areas, including connections between disgust responses and food rejection in infancy and children's food rejection behaviors across cultures.

Effects of Cognitive Reappraisal on Subjective and Neural Reactivity to Angry Faces in Children with Social Anxiety Disorder, Clinical Controls with Mixed Anxiety Disorders and Healthy Children

Cognitive models of social anxiety suggest that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by both enhanced emotional reactivity and deficits in emotion regulation. Emotional reactivity to socially threatening children's faces and their modulation through reappraisal were measured via subjective ratings and electrocortical responses in children (age 10-13) with SAD (n = 28), clinical controls with mixed anxiety disorders (n = 28), and healthy controls (n = 29). Children with SAD showed higher subjective reactivity to the images of angry children's faces while all children reported reduced reactivity in their subjective ratings following reappraisal. Reduced electrocortical reactivity after reappraisal was only evident in older children and boys and was unrelated to anxiety. The present study indicates that cognitive reappraisal may be beneficial in reducing subjective reactivity in children with anxiety disorders, while neural effects of reappraisal may emerge at older ages.

Elucidating the neural correlates of emotion recognition in children with sub-clinical anxiety

BACKGROUND

The pervasiveness of subclinical anxiety in children, highlights the need to identify its neurobiological underpinnings to better inform interventions. Given the now well-established link between aberrant emotion processing and anxiety disorders and yet limited neurobiologically-informed research in this area, this study examined the neural correlates of emotion recognition (ER) in children with sub-clinical anxiety.

METHOD

Ninety children (aged 9-11 years) with sub-clinical anxiety, completed an emotion recognition task whilst undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The ER task required participants to match shapes and match emotional faces in the context of shape distractors. Participants also completed the Spence Children's Anxiety Scale (SCAS).

RESULTS

Greater blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) changes associated with ER were observed in the lateral occipital cortex, middle frontal gyrus, superior middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, superior parietal lobule, inferior parietal lobule, superior temporal gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus symmetrically. The clusters also included posterior cingulate cortex, insula, hippocampus, amygdala and cerebellum during matching emotions than those matching shapes. Females showed greater BOLD changes associated with ER than males in the right middle frontal gyrus. The BOLD changes associated with ER in the right middle frontal gyrus and right insula were greater in children with SCAS subscale (physical injury fear) scores in the normal range than those with elevated scores.

DISCUSSION

The findings in this study implicate the right middle frontal gyrus and insula as key regions in the neurobiological underpinnings of sub-clinical anxiety as they relate to attention impairments in anxious children.

CONCLUSION

The results of this study indicate there are gender differences in young participants during emotion processing and provides a neurobiological target for attention impairments in anxious children.

Baseline brain function in the preadolescents of the ABCD Study

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® is a 10-year longitudinal study of children recruited at ages 9 and 10. A battery of neuroimaging tasks are administered biennially to track neurodevelopment and identify individual differences in brain function. This study reports activation patterns from functional MRI (fMRI) tasks completed at baseline, which were designed to measure cognitive impulse control with a stop signal task (SST; N = 5,547), reward anticipation and receipt with a monetary incentive delay (MID) task (N = 6,657) and working memory and emotion reactivity with an emotional N-back (EN-back) task (N = 6,009). Further, we report the spatial reproducibility of activation patterns by assessing between-group vertex/voxelwise correlations of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activation. Analyses reveal robust brain activations that are consistent with the published literature, vary across fMRI tasks/contrasts and slightly correlate with individual behavioral performance on the tasks. These results establish the preadolescent brain function baseline, guide interpretation of cross-sectional analyses and will enable the investigation of longitudinal changes during adolescent development.

Altered Functional Connectivity During Face Processing in Children Born Very Low Birth Weight

Structural brain alterations have been reported in key emotional face processing regions following preterm birth; however, few studies have investigated the functional networks underlying these processes in children born with very low birth weight (VLBW). Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we examined the functional networks related to the implicit processing of happy and angry faces in 5-year-old VLBW (n = 28) and full-term (FT; n = 24) children. We found that VLBW children showed atypical recruitment of emotional face processing networks in theta (4–7 Hz) compared to FT children. VLBW children showed reduced theta connectivity during processing of angry faces only. This hypo-connected theta-band network was anchored in the left orbitofrontal and parietal regions, involved in the higher level processing of faces and emotion regulation. At the behavioural level, despite VLBW children performing within the normal range, FT children had significantly higher affect recognition scores. Our MEG results suggest a selective impairment in processing angry faces, which would negatively impact social functioning in VLBW children. In FT children, greater recruitment of this theta-band network was positively associated with improved affect recognition scores. Thus, our findings suggest an important role of theta oscillations in early face processing, deficits which may contribute to broader socio-emotional impairments in VLBW children.

Emotions or attention – what are predictors for the development of childhood psychopathology? A longitudinal study with pre- and elementary school children

Current debate has identified the factors emotion knowledge (EK) and attention as specific trajectories longitudinally influencing psychopathological development in childhood. The “Emotion Knowledge Hypothesis” assumes that children with great emotion skills have high self-regulating abilities that result in lower cognitive load and stronger attention capacities. Attention problems are thus perceived as a consequence of reduced EK. According to the competing “Attention Effect Hypothesis”, attention problems and EK deficits are associated because of impaired learning capacities due to attention problems. According to this hypothesis, attention problems are predictive of impaired EK. If those specific trajectories are disrupted, this might attenuate the development of later behavior problems. The present study tests those competing hypotheses replicating previous studies in this field to shed light on potential psychopathology trajectories. A total of 136 pre- and elementary school children as well as their teachers participated in this study. Children’s symptoms of inattention as well as their emotional competences were assessed 3 times over a 12-month period. We applied multilevel structural equation modelling and cross-lagged panel models for data analysis. Overall, we noted a drop in inattention scores and rise in emotional competences over the one-year course, indicating maturation effects. There was a significant but very small effect for attention scores predicting emotional competences. With respect to the question whether interventions should focus on the “Emotion Knowledge” or “Attention Effect” hypothesis, our findings imply that none of them has superiority over the other. Therefore, both emotion knowledge and attention are crucial for development, and that children with deficits in either domain should receive targeted interventions in order to disrupt potentially harmful developmental pathways.

"Finding an Emotional Face" Revisited: Differences in Own-Age Bias and the Happiness Superiority Effect in Children and Young Adults

People seem to differ in their visual search performance involving emotionally expressive faces when these expressions are seen on faces of others close to their age (peers) compared to faces of non-peers, known as the own-age bias (OAB). This study sought to compare search advantages in angry and happy faces detected on faces of adults and children on a pool of children (N = 77, mean age = 5.57) and adults (N = 68, mean age = 21.48). The goals of this study were to (1) examine the developmental trajectory of expression recognition and (2) examine the development of an OAB. Participants were asked to find a target face displaying an emotional expression among eight neutral faces. Results showed that children and adults found happy faces significantly faster than angry and fearful faces regardless of it being present on the faces of peers or non-peers. Adults responded faster to the faces of peers regardless of the expression. Furthermore, while children detected angry faces significantly faster compared to fearful ones, we found no such difference in adults. In contrast, adults detected all expressions significantly faster when they appeared on the faces of other adults compared to the faces of children. In sum, we found evidence for development in detecting facial expressions and also an age-dependent increase in OAB. We suggest that the happy face could have an advantage in visual processing due to its importance in social situations and its overall higher frequency compared to other emotional expressions. Although we only found some evidence on the OAB, using peer or non-peer faces should be a theoretical consideration of future research because the same emotion displayed on non-peers' compared to peers' faces may have different implications and meanings to the perceiver.

The Qingdao Preschooler Facial Expression Set: Acquisition and Validation of Chinese Children's Facial Emotion Stimuli

Traditional research on emotion-face processing has primarily focused on the expression of basic emotions using adult emotional face stimuli. Stimulus sets featuring child faces or emotions other than basic emotions are rare. The current study describes the acquisition and evaluation of the Qingdao Preschooler Facial Expression (QPFE) set, a facial stimulus set with images featuring 54 Chinese preschoolers' emotion expressions. The set includes 712 standardized color photographs of six basic emotions (joy, fear, anger, sadness, surprise, and disgust), five discrete positive emotions (interest, contentment, relief, pride, and amusement), and a neutral expression. The validity of the pictures was examined based on 43 adult raters' online evaluation, including agreement between designated emotions and raters' labels, as well as intensity and representativeness scores. Overall, these data should contribute to the developmental and cross-cultural research on children's emotion expressions and provide insights for future research on positive emotions.

Emotional reactivity and regulation in 5- to 8-year-old children: An ERP study of own-age face processing

The school-age years is a period of increasing social interaction with peers and development of emotion regulation in facilitating that interaction. This study was an investigation of the neural correlates of emotional reactivity and reappraisal in typically developing school-age children elicited by threatening facial expressions of same-aged peers. This experimental paradigm is novel in eliciting event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to social stimuli that are ecologically valid to the everyday life of children. ERPs of 5- to 8-year-old children (N = 41, 18 females) were elicited by threatening (i.e., angry and fearful) and neutral child facial expressions, which were preceded by audio contextual cues. Three conditions differed in audio-image pairing: neutral context-neutral expression (neutral condition), negative context-threatening expression (threat condition), and reappraisal context-threatening expression (reappraisal condition). In addition, parental reporting of childhood temperament was collected to determine if elicited ERP morphologies were associated with temperamental dimensions of negative affect, extraversion, and effortful control. Elicitation of the P100 and N170 did not largely differ between conditions; however, amplitude of the late positive potential (LPP), a marker of heightened emotional reactivity and attention, was greater for threatening faces relative to neutral faces. During the reappraisal condition, no differences in ERP activity was observed compared to the threat condition. Neural substrates of emotional reactivity to social threat from peers were evident; however, the lack of ERP modulation facilitating reappraisal and the lack of strong associations between ERP morphology and temperamental dimensions is indicative of heterogeneity in LPP elicitation underlying emotion regulation in children.

Emotion modulation of the body-selective areas in the developing brain

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Passive viewing fMRI task using dynamic emotional bodies and non-human objects.

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Adults showed increased activation in the body-selective areas compared with children.

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Adults also showed more activation than adolescents, but only in the right hemisphere.

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Crucially, we found no age differences in the emotion modulation of these areas.

Emotions are strongly conveyed by the human body and the ability to recognize emotions from body posture or movement is still developing through childhood and adolescence. To date, very few studies have explored how these behavioural observations are paralleled by functional brain development. Furthermore, currently no studies have explored the development of emotion modulation in these areas. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the brain activity of 25 children (age 6–11), 18 adolescents (age 12–17) and 26 adults while they passively viewed short videos of angry, happy or neutral body movements. We observed that when viewing dynamic bodies generally, adults showed higher activity than children bilaterally in the body-selective areas; namely the extra-striate body area (EBA), fusiform body area (FBA), posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), as well as the amygdala (AMY). Adults also showed higher activity than adolescents, but only in the right hemisphere. Crucially, however, we found that there were no age differences in the emotion modulation of activity in these areas. These results indicate, for the first time, that despite activity selective to body perception increasing across childhood and adolescence, emotion modulation of these areas in adult-like from 7 years of age.

Emotion-related brain organization and behavioral responses to socioemotional stimuli in pediatric cancer survivors with posttraumatic stress symptoms

BACKGROUND

Pediatric cancer is a life-changing, stressful experience for children and their families. Although most children adjust well, psychologically, a significant subset report posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), with nearly 75% reexperiencing traumatic parts of cancer and/or its treatment. However, little research has examined the effects of pediatric cancer and related PTSS on emotional processing, and on functional properties of key emotional centers in the brain (e.g., amygdala).

PROCEDURE

We examined cancer-related PTSS, behavioral responses during an emotion-processing task, and resting-state functional connectivity of the amygdala in 17 pediatric cancer survivors (ages 6-11) and 17 age- and sex-matched controls.

RESULTS

Cancer survivors, relative to controls, were more likely to rate ambiguous (i.e., neutral) faces as negative (i.e., "negativity bias"). Higher reexperiencing PTSS was associated with faster responses to neutral faces. Although there were no group differences in amygdala centrality, within survivors, both higher reexperiencing PTSS and faster reaction times were associated with increased centrality of the amygdala-a functional property associated with hubs of information processing in the brain. In an exploratory mediation analysis, we found that amygdala centrality mediated the link between reaction time and PTSS, suggesting that changes in the brain may be a proximal marker of the expression of emotion-related symptomology.

CONCLUSIONS

Negativity bias in cancer survivors may reflect their stressful experiences with cancer and/or its treatment. This negativity bias may represent a susceptibility to changes in emotion-related brain functioning, which may, in turn, lead to PTSS.

Neurodevelopmental changes across adolescence in viewing and labeling dynamic peer emotions

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Dynamic peer facial stimuli recruit key regions involved in emotion processing.

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LPFC shows a nonlinear age trend across adolescence to labeling dynamic peer faces.

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MOFC/vMPFC shows a linear decrease with age to viewing dynamic peer faces.

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No significant age trends were observed in amygdala during viewing or labeling dynamic peer faces.

Adolescence is a sensitive period of social-affective development, characterized by biological, neurological, and social changes. The field currently conceptualizes these changes in terms of an imbalance between systems supporting reactivity and regulation, specifically nonlinear changes in reactivity networks and linear changes in regulatory networks. Previous research suggests that the labeling or reappraisal of emotion increases activity in lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), and decreases activity in amygdala relative to passive viewing of affective stimuli. However, past work in this area has relied heavily on paradigms using static, adult faces, as well as explicit regulation. In the current study, we assessed cross-sectional trends in neural responses to viewing and labeling dynamic peer emotional expressions in adolescent girls 10–23 years old. Our dynamic adolescent stimuli set reliably and robustly recruited key brain regions involved in emotion reactivity (medial orbital frontal cortex/ventral medial prefrontal cortex; MOFC/vMPFC, bilateral amygdala) and regulation (bilateral dorsal and ventral LPFC). However, contrary to the age-trends predicted by the dominant models in studies of risk/reward, the LPFC showed a nonlinear age trend across adolescence to labeling dynamic peer faces, whereas the MOFC/vMPFC showed a linear decrease with age to viewing dynamic peer faces. There were no significant age trends observed in the amygdala.

Convergent behavioral and corticolimbic connectivity evidence of a negativity bias in children and adolescents

Individuals differ in their tendency to perceive negativity in ambiguous situations or facial expressions. Prior research demonstrates that this so-called “negativity bias” is exaggerated in children; for instance, when they rate the emotional content of neutral facial expressions. However, neutral faces are frequently used as a baseline condition in pediatric emotion processing studies, as they are thought to be emotionally neutral. Here, we present data that challenge that notion. We demonstrate that children and adolescents rate neutral faces, particularly of adults, as negative, similar to ratings elicited by angry faces. In addition, we found a lack of age-related decrease in reaction time for neutral adult faces, suggesting that these stimuli remain salient across development. Demonstrating the relevance of individual differences, higher negativity bias was associated with lower self-reported reward sensitivity and increased functional connectivity of the amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that neutral faces are not perceived as emotionally neutral in children, thus discouraging their use as baseline condition in pediatric research. These data also offer a potential neurobiological substrate of the negativity bias in children. The link to corticolimbic emotion-processing circuitry and affective experience implies that exaggerations in these biases may be relevant for the development of emotional psychopathology.

Adolescents' Socio-Motivational Relationships With Teachers, Amygdala Response to Teacher's Negative Facial Expressions, and Test Anxiety

The amygdala is essential for processing emotions, including the processing of aversive faces. The aim of this multimethodological study was to relate the amygdala reactivity of students (N = 88) toward teachers' fearful and angry faces, to students' relationship with their teachers. Furthermore, students' neural responses during the perception of teachers' faces were tested as predictors of test anxiety (controlling for neuroticism as a potential trait anxiety effect). Multiple regression analysis revealed that students reporting high-quality teacher-student relationships showed stronger amygdala activity toward fearful faces, which was related to worry. Furthermore, students with high levels of neuroticism tended to perceive their teachers as motivators and showed higher amygdala activity toward angry faces, which was related to the measures of emotionality.

Pruning or tuning? Maturational profiles of face specialization during typical development

INTRODUCTION

Face processing undergoes significant developmental change with age. Two kinds of developmental changes in face specialization were examined in this study: specialized maturation, or the continued tuning of a region to faces but little change in the tuning to other categories; and competitive interactions, or the continued tuning to faces accompanied by decreased tuning to nonfaces (i.e., pruning).

METHODS

Using fMRI, in regions where adults showed a face preference, a face- and object-specialization index were computed for younger children (5-8 years), older children (9-12 years) and adults (18-45 years). The specialization index was scaled to each subject's maximum activation magnitude in each region to control for overall age differences in the activation level.

RESULTS

Although no regions showed significant face specialization in the younger age group, regions strongly associated with social cognition (e.g., right posterior superior temporal sulcus, right inferior orbital cortex) showed specialized maturation, in which tuning to faces increased with age but there was no pruning of nonface responses. Conversely, regions that are associated with more basic perceptual processing or motor mirroring (right middle temporal cortex, right inferior occipital cortex, right inferior frontal opercular cortex) showed competitive interactions in which tuning to faces was accompanied by pruning of object responses with age.

CONCLUSIONS

The overall findings suggest that cortical maturation for face processing is regional-specific and involves both increased tuning to faces and diminished response to nonfaces. Regions that show competitive interactions likely support a more generalized function that is co-opted for face processing with development, whereas regions that show specialized maturation increase their tuning to faces, potentially in an activity-dependent, experience-driven manner.

Typical and atypical neurodevelopment for face specialization: an FMRI study

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their relatives process faces differently from typically developed (TD) individuals. In an fMRI face-viewing task, TD and undiagnosed sibling (SIB) children (5-18 years) showed face specialization in the right amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with left fusiform and right amygdala face specialization increasing with age in TD subjects. SIBs showed extensive antero-medial temporal lobe activation for faces that was not present in any other group, suggesting a potential compensatory mechanism. In ASD, face specialization was minimal but increased with age in the right fusiform and decreased with age in the left amygdala, suggesting atypical development of a frontal-amygdala-fusiform system which is strongly linked to detecting salience and processing facial information.

Validation of the NIMH-ChEFS adolescent face stimulus set in an adolescent, parent, and health professional sample

Attention to faces is a fundamental psychological process in humans, with atypical attention to faces noted across several clinical disorders. Although many clinical disorders onset in adolescence, there is a lack of well-validated stimulus sets containing adolescent faces available for experimental use. Further, the images comprising most available sets are not controlled for high- and low-level visual properties. Here, we present a cross-site validation of the National Institute of Mental Health Child Emotional Faces Picture Set (NIMH-ChEFS), comprised of 257 photographs of adolescent faces displaying angry, fearful, happy, sad, and neutral expressions. All of the direct facial images from the NIMH-ChEFS set were adjusted in terms of location of facial features and standardized for luminance, size, and smoothness. Although overall agreement between raters in this study and the original development-site raters was high (89.52%), this differed by group such that agreement was lower for adolescents relative to mental health professionals in the current study. These results suggest that future research using this face set or others of adolescent/child faces should base comparisons on similarly-aged validation data. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Early neural activation during facial affect processing in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Impaired social interaction is one of the hallmarks of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Emotional faces are arguably the most critical visual social stimuli and the ability to perceive, recognize, and interpret emotions is central to social interaction and communication, and subsequently healthy social development. However, our understanding of the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying emotional face processing in adolescents with ASD is limited. We recruited 48 adolescents, 24 with high functioning ASD and 24 typically developing controls. Participants completed an implicit emotional face processing task in the MEG. We examined spatiotemporal differences in neural activation between the groups during implicit angry and happy face processing. While there were no differences in response latencies between groups across emotions, adolescents with ASD had lower accuracy on the implicit emotional face processing task when the trials included angry faces. MEG data showed atypical neural activity in adolescents with ASD during angry and happy face processing, which included atypical activity in the insula, anterior and posterior cingulate and temporal and orbitofrontal regions. Our findings demonstrate differences in neural activity during happy and angry face processing between adolescents with and without ASD. These differences in activation in social cognitive regions may index the difficulties in face processing and in comprehension of social reward and punishment in the ASD group. Thus, our results suggest that atypical neural activation contributes to impaired affect processing, and thus social cognition, in adolescents with ASD.

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The ability to recognize and interpret emotions is central to social interaction.

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Deficits in social interactions are hallmarks of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

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Adolescents with and without ASD completed an emotional face task in MEG.

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MEG data showed atypical neural activity in ASD to both angry and happy faces.

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Insula, cingulate, temporal and orbitofrontal activities were particularly affected in the ASD group.

Social competence in children with brain disorders: a meta-analytic review

Social competence, i.e. appropriate or effective social functioning, is an important determinant of quality of life. Social competence consists of social skills, social performance and social adjustment. The current paper reviews social skills, in particular emotion recognition performance and its relationship with social adjustment in children with brain disorders. In this review, normal development and the neuro-anatomical correlates of emotion recognition in both healthy children and adults and in various groups of children with brain disorders, will be discussed. A systematic literature search conducted on PubMed, yielded nine papers. Emotion recognition tasks were categorized on the basis of task design and emotional categories to ensure optimal comparison across studies before an explorative meta-analysis was conducted. This meta-analytic review suggests that children with brain disorders show impaired emotion recognition, with the recognition of sad and fearful expressions being most impaired. Performance did not seem to be related to derivative measures of social adjustment. Despite the limited number of studies on a variety of brain disorders and control groups, outcomes were quite consistent across analyses and corresponded largely with the existing literature on development of emotion recognition in typically developing children. More longitudinal prospective studies on emotion recognition are needed to gain insight into recovery and subsequent development of children with distinct brain disorders. This will aid development, selection and implementation of interventions for improvement of social competence and quality of life in children with a brain disorder.

Neural correlates of cognitive and affective processing in maltreated youth with posttraumatic stress symptoms: does gender matter?

We investigated the relationship of gender to cognitive and affective processing in maltreated youth with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Maltreated (N = 29, 13 females, 16 males) and nonmaltreated participants (N = 45, 26 females, 19 males) performed an emotional oddball task that involved detection of targets with fear or scrambled face distractors. Results were moderated by gender. During the executive component of this task, left precuneus/posterior middle cingulate hypoactivation to fear versus calm or scrambled face targets were seen in maltreated versus control males and may represent dysfunction and less resilience in attentional networks. Maltreated males also showed decreased activation in the inferior frontal gyrus compared to control males. No differences were found in females. Posterior cingulate activations positively correlated with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. While viewing fear faces, maltreated females exhibited decreased activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and cerebellum I-VI, whereas maltreated males exhibited increased activity in the left hippocampus, fusiform cortex, right cerebellar crus I, and visual cortex compared to their same-gender controls. Gender by maltreatment effects were not attributable to demographic, clinical, or maltreatment parameters. Maltreated girls and boys exhibited distinct patterns of neural activations during executive and affective processing, a new finding in the maltreatment literature.

The stimuli drive the response: an fMRI study of youth processing adult or child emotional face stimuli

Effective navigation of the social world relies on the correct interpretation of facial emotions. This may be particularly important in formative years. Critically, literature examining the emergence of face processing in youth (children and adolescents) has focused on the neural and behavioral correlates of processing adult faces, which are relationally different from youth participants, and whose facial expressions may convey different meaning than faces of their peers. During a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan, we compared concurrent neural and behavioral responses as youth (N=25) viewed validated, emotionally varied (i.e., anger, fear, happy, and neutral) adult and child face stimuli. We observed that participants made fewer errors when matching adult, compared to child, face stimuli, and that while similar brain regions were involved in processing both adult and child faces, activation in the face processing neural network was greater for adult than child faces. This was true across emotions, and also when comparing neutral adult versus neutral child faces. Additionally, a valence by stimuli-type effect was observed within the amygdala. That is, within adult face stimuli, negative and neutral face stimuli elicited the largest effects, whereas within child face stimuli, happy face stimuli elicited the largest amygdala effects. Thus, heightened engagement of the amygdala was observed for happy child and angry adult faces, which may reflect age-specific salience of select emotions in early life. This study provides evidence that the relational age of the perceived face influences neural processing in youth.

Disrupted amygdala reactivity in depressed 4- to 6-year-old children

OBJECTIVE

Disrupted amygdala activity in depressed adolescents and adults while viewing facial expressions of emotion has been reported. However, few data are available to inform the developmental nature of this phenomenon, an issue that studies of the earliest known forms of depression might elucidate. The current study addressed this question by examining functional brain activity and its relationships to emotion regulation in depressed 4- to 6-year-old children and their healthy peers.

METHOD

A total of 54 medication-naive 4- to 6-year-olds (23 depressed and 31 healthy) participated in a case-control study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Imaging data were used to compare functional brain activity in children with and without depression during emotion face processing.

RESULTS

A right-lateralized pattern of elevated amygdala, thalamus, inferior frontal gyrus, and angular gyrus activity during face processing was found in depressed 4- to 6-year-olds. In addition, relationships between increased amygdala activity during face processing and disruptions in parent-reported emotion regulation and negative affect were found. No between-group differences specific to emotion face type were identified.

CONCLUSION

To our knowledge, this is the earliest evidence of alterations in functional brain activity in depression using fMRI. Results suggest that, similar to findings in older depressed groups, depression at this age is associated with disrupted amygdala functioning during face processing. The findings also raise the intriguing possibility that disrupted amygdala function is a depression-related biomarker that spans development. Additional studies will be needed to clarify whether the current findings are a precursor to or a consequence of very early childhood depression.

Facial emotion recognition in adolescents with psychotic-like experiences: a school-based sample from the general population

BACKGROUND

Psychotic symptoms, also termed psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) in the absence of psychotic disorder, are common in adolescents and are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia-spectrum illness in adulthood. At the same time, schizophrenia is associated with deficits in social cognition, with deficits particularly documented in facial emotion recognition (FER). However, little is known about the relationship between PLEs and FER abilities, with only one previous prospective study examining the association between these abilities in childhood and reported PLEs in adolescence. The current study was a cross-sectional investigation of the association between PLEs and FER in a sample of Irish adolescents.

METHOD

The Adolescent Psychotic-Like Symptom Screener (APSS), a self-report measure of PLEs, and the Penn Emotion Recognition-40 Test (Penn ER-40), a measure of facial emotion recognition, were completed by 793 children aged 10-13 years.

RESULTS

Children who reported PLEs performed significantly more poorly on FER (β=-0.03, p=0.035). Recognition of sad faces was the major driver of effects, with children performing particularly poorly when identifying this expression (β=-0.08, p=0.032).

CONCLUSIONS

The current findings show that PLEs are associated with poorer FER. Further work is needed to elucidate causal relationships with implications for the design of future interventions for those at risk of developing psychosis.

Geschlechts- und Altersunterschiede in der Emotionserkennung von Kindern und Jugendlichen

In dieser Arbeit werden zwei Studien präsentiert, welche Alters- und Geschlechtsunterschiede beim Erkennen von Emotionen im Gesichtsausdruck von Kindern und Jugendlichen untersuchten. Dabei kam eine neu entwickelte Bilderserie zum Einsatz. Die Bilder zeichnen sich dadurch aus, dass die mimischen Affektausdrücke in authentischen, interaktiven Situationen gefilmt wurden und die Auswahl der Einzelbilder auf der Basis objektiver Kodierungen mit den Facial Action Coding System (FACS) getroffen wurde. In der ersten Studie schätzten 275 Kinder und Jugendliche im Alter von 8 bis 14 Jahren (M = 10.46, SD = 1.45) 24 Bilder ein, auf welchen die Basisemotionen Freude, Ärger, Trauer, Überraschung, Angst und Ekel in jeweils vier Varianten abgebildet waren. 55.4 % der Bilder wurden dabei richtig erkannt, wobei Mädchen signifikant bessere Leistungen zeigten als Jungen. Am besten erkannt wurde Freude vor Ekel, gefolgt von Überraschung, Trauer, Ärger und Angst. Altersunterschiede waren nicht feststellbar. Die zweite Studie untersuchte die Emotionserkennungsfähigkeit bei Kindergartenkindern. Dazu wurden 62 Kindern zwischen 3 und 6 Jahren (M = 4.84, SD = 0.93) jeweils zwei Bilder pro Basisemotion vorgelegt. Die Erkennungsleistung lag hier bei 41.4 %, wobei Freude, wie auch bereits in der ersten Studie, am besten erkannt wurde, gefolgt von Trauer, Überraschung und Ärger sowie von Ekel und Angst. In Studie 2 zeigten sich Altersunterschiede dahingehend, dass ältere Kinder (5 – 6 Jahre) Emotionen insgesamt besser erkannten als die jüngeren Kinder (3 – 4 Jahre), insbesondere Überraschung und Trauer. Geschlechtsunterschiede wurden keine gefunden.

Is social categorization based on relational ingroup/outgroup opposition? A meta-analysis

Social categorization is known to be an important part of social cognition. The categorizations we use, despite their multitude, frequently take the form of the general ingroup/outgroup distinction. A meta-analysis of 33 fMRI studies, reporting selective activations to various social groups, was used to identify common neural structures responsible for relational representation of social structure. Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analysis revealed areas in bilateral amygdala, cingulate gyrus, fusiform gyrus, right TPJ and right insula as implementing various aspects of social categorization. Activation of amygdala can be associated with modulation of behavioral response to subjectively significant stimuli. A more ventral part of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) can be associated with self-referential reasoning about ingroup members while a more dorsal part of ACC is involved in the regulation of emotions toward outgroup members. Right insula can be engaged in the modulation of outgroup avoidance behavior. Fusiform gyrus (FG) appears to be directly involved in social categorization process via top-down modulation of social perception. Yet it is difficult to associate any of the revealed clusters with the relational ingroup/outgroup structure.