Quantifying abnormal emotion processing: A novel computational assessment method and application in schizophrenia

Abnormal emotion processing is a core feature of schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) that encompasses multiple operations. While deficits in some areas have been well-characterized, we understand less about abnormalities in the emotion processing that happens through language, which is highly relevant for social life. Here, we introduce a novel method using deep learning to estimate emotion processing rapidly from spoken language, testing this approach in male-identified patients with SSDs (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 51). Using free responses to evocative stimuli, we derived a measure of appropriateness, or "emotional alignment" (EA). We examined psychometric characteristics of EA and its sensitivity to a single-dose challenge of oxytocin, a neuropeptide shown to enhance the salience of socioemotional information in SSDs. Patients showed impaired EA relative to controls, and impairment correlated with poorer social cognitive skill and more severe motivation and pleasure deficits. Adding EA to a logistic regression model with language-based measures of formal thought disorder (FTD) improved classification of patients versus controls. Lastly, oxytocin administration improved EA but not FTD among patients. While additional validation work is needed, these initial results suggest that an automated assay using spoken language may be a promising approach to assess emotion processing in SSDs.

A robust multivariate structure of interindividual covariation between psychosocial characteristics and arousal responses to visual narratives

People experience the same event but do not feel the same way. Such individual differences in emotion response are believed to be far greater than those in any other mental functions. Thus, to understand what makes people individuals, it is important to identify the systematic structures of individual differences in emotion response and elucidate how such structures relate to what aspects of psychological characteristics. Reflecting this importance, many studies have attempted to relate emotions to psychological characteristics such as personality traits, psychosocial states, and pathological symptoms across individuals. However, systematic and global structures that govern the across-individual covariation between the domain of emotion responses and that of psychological characteristics have been rarely explored previously, which limits our understanding of the relationship between individual differences in emotion response and psychological characteristics. To overcome this limitation, we acquired high-dimensional data sets in both emotion-response (8 measures) and psychological-characteristic (68 measures) domains from the same pool of individuals (86 undergraduate or graduate students) and carried out the canonical correlation analysis in conjunction with the principal component analysis on those data sets. For each participant, the emotion-response measures were quantified by regressing affective-rating responses to visual narrative stimuli onto the across-participant average responses to those stimuli, while the psychological-characteristic measures were acquired from 19 different psychometric questionnaires grounded in personality, psychosocial-factor, and clinical-problem taxonomies. We found a single robust mode of population covariation, particularly between the ’accuracy’ and ’sensitivity’ measures of arousal responses in the emotion domain and many ‘psychosocial’ measures in the psychological-characteristics domain. This mode of covariation suggests that individuals characterized with positive social assets tend to show polarized arousal responses to life events.

Paranoia Symptoms Moderate the Impact of Emotional Context Processing on Community Functioning of Individuals with Schizophrenia

This study examined whether better emotional context processing is associated with better community functioning among persons with schizophrenia, and whether the relationship between the two variables is moderated by level of paranoid symptoms. The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale-Expanded Version, Emotional Context Processing Scale, and Multnomah Community Ability Scale were administered to 39 community-dwelling participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Emotional context processing had a small-to-moderate association with community functioning. However, the association between emotional context processing and community functioning was moderated by level of paranoid symptoms. Emotional context processing in participants with mild paranoid symptoms was strongly associated with better community functioning, whereas emotional context processing in those with severe paranoid symptoms was not. Emotional context processing and the degree of paranoia should be considered in treatment plans designed to enhance the community functioning of individuals with schizophrenia to help them improve their understanding of social situations.

Parsing positivity in the bipolar spectrum: The effect of context on social decision-making

INTRODUCTION

People with bipolar disorder often show more approach-related behavior and positive appraisals of others during social interactions. This may be due to an increased sensitivity to positive contexts or to tendencies toward positive affectivity. In this study, we investigated the influence of reward versus prosocial positive contexts on social decision-making in people at high (n = 21) and low (n = 111) risk for bipolar disorder.

METHODS

Participants completed a computerized task consisting of two blocks. In the No Context block, participants were presented with a face and asked to make decisions related to approach, appraisal, and trust behavior toward that person. In the Context block, designed to assess the influence of contextual information on decision-making, each face was preceded by a written statement describing a positive or neutral context.

RESULTS

Compared to the low risk group, the high-risk group made significantly higher approach and appraisal ratings, regardless of the context condition. Effects were sustained controlling for positive affect. We did not find any effect of bipolar risk on trust ratings.

LIMITATIONS

The study was conducted in an analogue sample.

DISCUSSION

Taken together, these results suggest risk for bipolar disorder is associated with greater positive social approach and appraisal tendencies, and that these effects are not secondary to social context or positive affect. Implications for understanding social decision-making in the bipolar spectrum are discussed.

Females Are More Sensitive to Opponent's Emotional Feedback: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

It is widely believed that females outperformed males in emotional information processing. The present study tested whether the female superiority in emotional information processing exists in a naturalistic social-emotional context, if so, what the temporal dynamics underlies. The behavioral and electrophysiological responses were recorded while participants were performing an interpersonal gambling game with opponents' facial emotions given as feedback. The results yielded that emotional cues modulated the influence of monetary feedback on outcome valuation. Critically, this modulation was more conspicuous in females: opponents' angry expressions increased females' risky tendency and decreased the amplitude of reward positivity (RewP) and feedback P300. These findings indicate that females are more sensitive to emotional expressions in real interpersonal interactions, which is manifested in both early motivational salience detection and late conscious cognitive appraisal stages of feedback processing.

Context Effects on Facial Affect Recognition in Schizophrenia and Autism: Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Evidence

Although Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) share impairments in emotion recognition, the mechanisms underlying these impairments may differ. The current study used the novel "Emotions in Context" task to examine how the interpretation and visual inspection of facial affect is modulated by congruent and incongruent emotional contexts in SCZ and ASD. Both adults with SCZ (n= 44) and those with ASD (n= 21) exhibited reduced affect recognition relative to typically-developing (TD) controls (n= 39) when faces were integrated within broader emotional scenes but not when they were presented in isolation, underscoring the importance of using stimuli that better approximate real-world contexts. Additionally, viewing faces within congruent emotional scenes improved accuracy and visual attention to the face for controls more so than the clinical groups, suggesting that individuals with SCZ and ASD may not benefit from the presence of complementary emotional information as readily as controls. Despite these similarities, important distinctions between SCZ and ASD were found. In every condition, IQ was related to emotion-recognition accuracy for the SCZ group but not for the ASD or TD groups. Further, only the ASD group failed to increase their visual attention to faces in incongruent emotional scenes, suggesting a lower reliance on facial information within ambiguous emotional contexts relative to congruent ones. Collectively, these findings highlight both shared and distinct social cognitive processes in SCZ and ASD that may contribute to their characteristic social disabilities.

Unseen Affective Faces Influence Person Perception Judgments in Schizophrenia

To demonstrate the influence of unconscious affective processing on consciously processed information among people with and without schizophrenia, we used a continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm to examine whether early and rapid processing of affective information influences first impressions of structurally neutral faces. People with and without schizophrenia rated visible neutral faces as more or less trustworthy, warm, and competent when paired with unseen smiling or scowling faces compared to when paired with unseen neutral faces. Yet, people with schizophrenia also exhibited a deficit in explicit affect perception. These findings indicate that early processing of affective information is intact in schizophrenia but the integration of this information with semantic contexts is problematic. Furthermore, people with schizophrenia who were more influenced by smiling faces presented outside awareness reported experiencing more anticipatory pleasure, suggesting that the ability to rapidly process affective information is important for anticipation of future pleasurable events.

Facial emotion perception abnormality in patients with early schizophrenia

BACKGROUND

Deficit in facial emotion perception is an important social cognitive impairment in schizophrenic patients, and it is one of the key determinants of functional outcome in schizophrenia. However, the moderating effect of social context and the boundary of perceptual categories of facial emotion perception remain unclear.

METHOD

A total of 36 schizophrenic outpatients in their early stage of illness and 43 healthy controls were recruited for evaluation of social and clinical characteristics, neurocognitive profiles, and facial emotion categorization (FEC) performance. FEC was assessed by a computer-based program with 120 trials, in which social context was presented in the form of a preceding question, in order to simulate the conditions of being praised (positive), blamed (negative), or inquiry (neutral), while the participants were asked to judge a photograph derived from one of the five facial images in a happy-angry emotion continuum. The FEC data was inserted into a logistic function model with subsequent analysis by repeated measures ANOVA and the shift point and slope as outcome measures.

RESULTS

Schizophrenic patients were significantly more likely to perceive ambiguous and subtle facial expressions as happy, rather than angry, in all three social contexts. However, the interaction effects between group and context for FEC performance was not significant.

CONCLUSIONS

Schizophrenic patients, even in their early stage of illness, appear to have abnormal perceptions of facial emotion categories, which may explain some of their abnormal social interactions and disabilities. This study provides additional information in understanding social cognitive deficits among schizophrenic patients.

From social experience to illness experience: reviewing the psychological mechanisms linking psychosis with social context

This review was undertaken to describe the psychological processes that are associated with the social experiences and behaviours of people with psychosis. A systematic search was conducted using MEDLINE and PsycINFO search engines. In each of the major topic domains, the search was comprised of review articles published from 2004 to present, and individual article searches for papers published from 2010 to present. The key psychological mechanisms in this context are social cognition, self-concept, emotion, and communication. While diverse in content, there were several cross-cutting themes in these literatures. These include evidence of the presence of social processing difficulties in high-risk and psychosis populations that have both state and trait characteristics, are related to, but not fully accounted for by, neurocognition and symptomatology, and have significant implications for social functioning. There are numerous established and promising treatments linked to our understanding of social cognition. Limitations cutting across these literatures include a substantial reliance on cross-sectional studies that use control groups comprised of people who have not experienced significant psychological or social adversity. There is also limited inquiry into how psychological mechanisms may differ owing to sex, ethnicity, and race. Despite these issues, this line of inquiry is very promising as part of the larger movement toward an integrative model of psychosis that is able to account for the complex interactions of social, biological, and psychological risks.

Emotion deficits in people with schizophrenia

Translational research on emotion in schizophrenia has revealed deficits in emotion perception and expression, as well as intact areas, including emotional experience and brain activation in the presence of emotionally evocative material. Yet, a closer look at emotional experience reveals that all is not well in the experience domain. People with schizophrenia have difficulty anticipating emotional events and maintaining or savoring their emotional experiences, as evidenced in behavioral, psychophysiological, and brain imaging studies. Furthermore, people with schizophrenia have difficulty integrating emotion perception with context and reporting on feelings that are differently valenced than presented emotional stimuli. Differences in brain activation are typically observed in areas tightly coupled with cognitive control, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and thus the latest research on emotion in schizophrenia explicitly integrates emotion and cognition. Translational research holds promise to identify when in the course of the disorder emotion deficits emerge and to develop more effective interventions for schizophrenia.