A negativity bias for ambiguous facial-expression valence during childhood: converging evidence from behavior and facial corrugator muscle responses

Selective and prolonged attention to emotional scenes in humans and bonobos

Perceiving emotions in others is at the foundation of higher-order social cognition. The importance of emotions is evidenced by the fact that they receive prioritized attention at early stages of processing the environment in humans and some other primates. Nevertheless, we do not fully understand how emotion modulates attention over longer durations in primates, particularly in great apes. Bonobos, one of our closest relatives, stand out in emotion processing and regulation among great apes. This makes them an interesting comparison species and a valuable model for studying the evolution of emotion perception in hominids. We investigated how bonobos and humans spontaneously attend to emotionally valent scenes in a preferential looking task using eye-tracking. With Bayesian mixed modelling, we found that bonobos and humans generally looked longer at emotional scenes, mainly of conspecifics. Moreover, while bonobos did not have a bias toward emotional human scenes, humans sustained their attention toward bonobos playing, grooming and having sex. Furthermore, when exploring an immediate bias for emotions, humans showed a bias toward affiliative human scenes, and bonobos showed a bias away from bonobos-in-distress scenes. These findings suggest that emotions modulate attention at early and later attentional stages in bonobos, similar to humans.

A precision neuroscience approach to estimating reliability of neural responses during emotion processing: Implications for task-fMRI

Recent work demonstrating low test-retest reliability of neural activation during fMRI tasks raises questions about the utility of task-based fMRI for the study of individual variation in brain function. Two possible sources of the instability in task-based BOLD signal over time are noise or measurement error in the instrument, and meaningful variation across time within-individuals in the construct itself-brain activation elicited during fMRI tasks. Examining the contribution of these two sources of test-retest unreliability in task-evoked brain activity has far-reaching implications for cognitive neuroscience. If test-retest reliability largely reflects measurement error, it suggests that task-based fMRI has little utility in the study of either inter- or intra-individual differences. On the other hand, if task-evoked BOLD signal varies meaningfully over time, it would suggest that this tool may yet be well suited to studying intraindividual variation. We parse these sources of variance in BOLD signal in response to emotional cues over time and within-individuals in a longitudinal sample with 10 monthly fMRI scans. Test-retest reliability was low, reflecting a lack of stability in between-person differences across scans. In contrast, within-person, within-session internal consistency of the BOLD signal was higher, and within-person fluctuations across sessions explained almost half the variance in voxel-level neural responses. Additionally, monthly fluctuations in neural response to emotional cues were associated with intraindividual variation in mood, sleep, and exposure to stressors. Rather than reflecting trait-like differences across people, neural responses to emotional cues may be more reflective of intraindividual variation over time. These patterns suggest that task-based fMRI may be able to contribute to the study of individual variation in brain function if more attention is given to within-individual variation approaches, psychometrics-beginning with improving reliability beyond the modest estimates observed here, and the validity of task fMRI beyond the suggestive associations reported here.

Sexual Orientation Affects Neural Responses to Subtle Social Aggression Signals

The current series of studies are the first to examine brain responses to social aggression signals as a function of male and female sexual orientation. For the first set of studies (1a, 1b), axillary sweat had been collected from 17 heterosexual men and 17 heterosexual women aggressively responding to frustrating opponents (aggression condition) and while playing a construction game (control condition). Sweat samples were pooled according to sex and condition, and presented via a constant flow olfactometer to 17 gay and 23 heterosexual men (Study 1a), and 19 lesbian and 25 heterosexual women (Study 1b). Ongoing EEG was recorded from 61 scalp locations, chemosensory event-related potentials (CSERPs; P2, P3-1, P3-2) were analyzed, and neuronal sources calculated (low resolution electromagnetic tomography). Within the second set of studies (2a, 2b), pictures of males' and females' weak angry and neutral facial expressions were presented to 21 gay and 23 heterosexual men (Study 2a), and 19 lesbian and 26 heterosexual women (Study 2b), and ERPs (N170, P3) were analyzed. Gay men showed larger P3-1 amplitudes than heterosexual men upon presentation of male aggression sweat, accompanied by activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, BA 10). Gay men also displayed longer N170 latencies in response to men's compared to women's angry facial expressions, while heterosexual men did not. In women, sexual orientation did not affect the processing of aggression sweat or anger expressions. Gay men showed preferential processing of chemosensory aggression signals (P3-1 amplitudes), indicating fine-tuned socioemotional sensitivity, related to activation of brain areas involved in emotion regulation (IFG). They further process the relative relevance of visual aggression signals (N170 latency). These results were in line with theories proposing a common evolutionary pathway for same-sex attraction and traits easing social integration.

Developmental shift in testosterone influence on prefrontal emotion control

A paradox of testosterone effects is seen in adolescents versus adults in social emotional approach-avoidance behavior. During adolescence, high testosterone levels are associated with increased anterior prefrontal (aPFC) involvement in emotion control, whereas during adulthood this neuro-endocrine relation is reversed. Rodent work shows that, during puberty, testosterone transitions from a neuro-developmental to a social-sexual activating hormone. In this study, we explored whether this functional transition is also present in human adolescents and young adults. Using a prospective longitudinal design, we investigated the role of testosterone on neural control of social emotional behavior during the transitions from middle to late adolescence and into young adulthood. Seventy-one individuals (tested at ages 14, 17, and 20 years) performed an fMRI-adapted approach-avoidance (AA) task involving automatic and controlled actions in response to social emotional stimuli. In line with predictions from animal models, the effect of testosterone on aPFC engagement decreased between middle and late adolescence, and shifted into an activational role by young adulthood-impeding neural control of emotions. This change in testosterone function was accompanied by increased testosterone-modulated amygdala reactivity. These findings qualify the testosterone-dependent maturation of the prefrontal-amygdala circuit supporting emotion control during the transition from middle adolescence into young adulthood.

Category Flexibility in Emotion Learning

Learners flexibly update category boundaries to adjust to the range of experiences they encounter. However, little is known about whether the degree of flexibility is consistent across domains. We examined whether categorization of social input, specifically emotions, is afforded more flexibility as compared to other biological input. To address this question, children (6-12 years; 32 female, 37 male; 7 Hispanic or Latino, 62 not Hispanic or Latino; 8 Black or African American, 14 multiracial, 46 White, 1 selected "other") categorized faces morphed from calm to upset and animals morphed from a horse to a cow across task phases that differed in the distribution of stimuli presented. Learners flexibly adjusted both emotion and animal category boundaries according to distributional information, yet children showed more flexibility when updating their category boundaries for emotions. These results provide support for the idea that children-who must adjust to the vast and varied emotional signals of their social partners-respond to social signals dynamically in order to make predictions about the internal states and future behaviors of others.

Facial emotion recognition in children and youth with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and irritability

The ability to recognize emotions evident in people's faces contributes to social functioning and might be affected by ADHD and irritability. Given their high co-occurrence, we examined the relative contribution of ADHD and irritability to facial emotion recognition (FER). We hypothesized that irritability but not ADHD traits would predict increased likelihood of misrecognizing emotions as negative, and that FER performance would explain the association of ADHD and irritability traits with social skills. FER was measured using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) in children (6-14 years old) referred for ADHD assessment (n = 304) and healthy controls (n = 128). ADHD, irritability and social skills were measured using parent ratings. We used repeated measure logistics regression, comparing the effects across emotion valence of images (i.e., neutral/positive/negative). High irritability but not ADHD diagnosis predicted lower RMET accuracy. ADHD traits predicted lower RMET accuracy in younger but not older participants, whereas irritability predicted poorer accuracy at all ages. ADHD traits predicted lower RMET accuracy across all emotion valences, whereas irritability predicted increased probability of misrecognizing neutral and positive but not negative emotions. Irritability did not increase the probability for erroneously recognizing emotions as negative. ADHD and irritability traits fully explained the association between RMET and social skills. ADHD and irritability traits might impact the ability to identify emotions portrayed in faces. However, irritability traits appear to selectively impair recognition of neutral and positive but not negative emotions. ADHD and irritability are important when examining the link between FER and social difficulties.

The influence of selective attention to specific emotions on the processing of faces as revealed by event-related brain potentials

Event-related potential studies using affective words have indicated that selective attention to valence can increase affective discrimination at early perceptual stages. This effect most likely relies on neural associations between perceptual features of a stimulus and its affective value. Similar to words, emotional expressions in human faces are linked to specific visual elements. Therefore, selectively attending to a given emotion should allow for the preactivation of neural networks coding for the emotion and associated first-order visual elements, leading to enhanced early processing of faces expressing the attended emotion. To investigate this, we employed an expression detection task (N = 65). Fearful, happy, and neutral faces were randomly presented in three blocks while participants were instructed to respond only to one predefined target level of expression in each block. Reaction times were the fastest for happy target faces, which was accompanied by an increased occipital P1 for happy compared with fearful faces. The N170 yielded an arousal effect (emotional > neutral) while both components were not modulated by target status. In contrast, the early posterior negativity (EPN) arousal effect tended to be larger for target compared with nontarget faces. The late positive potential (LPP) revealed large effects of status and expression as well as an interaction driven by an increased LPP specifically for nontarget fearful faces. These findings tentatively indicate that selective attention to facial affect may enhance early emotional processing (EPN) even though further research is needed. Moreover, late controlled processing of facial emotions appears to involve a negativity bias.

Children across cultures respond emotionally to the acoustic environment

Among human and non-human animals, the ability to respond rapidly to biologically significant events in the environment is essential for survival and development. Research has confirmed that human adult listeners respond emotionally to environmental sounds by relying on the same acoustic cues that signal emotionality in speech prosody and music. However, it is unknown whether young children also respond emotionally to environmental sounds. Here, we report that changes in pitch, rate (i.e. playback speed), and intensity (i.e. amplitude) of environmental sounds trigger emotional responses in 3- to 6-year-old American and Chinese children, including four sound types: sounds of human actions, animal calls, machinery, and natural phenomena such as wind and waves. Children's responses did not differ across the four types of sounds used but developed with age - a finding observed in both American and Chinese children. Thus, the ability to respond emotionally to non-linguistic, non-music environmental sounds is evident at three years of age - an age when the ability to decode emotional prosody in language and music emerges. We argue that general mechanisms that support emotional prosody decoding are engaged by all sounds, as reflected in emotional responses to non-linguistic acoustic input such as music and environmental sounds.

Self-reported eye contact sensitivity and face processing in chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome

INTRODUCTION

22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22qDS) has been associated with varying levels of social impairments, and with atypical visual scanning of faces. The present study explored whether self-reported sensitivity to eye contact might be related to these phenomena.

METHOD

Individuals with confirmed 22qDS were interviewed about their experience and possible discomfort with eye contact. In cases where individuals expresesed discomfort, they were subsequently asked about coping mechanisms used to deal with this discomfort. In addition to self-reported eye contact discomfort, gaze to emotional faces was examined using eye tracking.

RESULTS

In the subgroup of individuals who reported discomfort during eye contact, eye tracking results revealed a lower amount of gaze in the eyes of neutral faces, as well as the absence of the typical left visual field (LVF) bias, indicative of alterations in hemispheric lateralization. This subgroup also scored lower on a measure of everyday functioning.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results show that, by simply asking individuals with this social and communicative disorder about eye gaze discomfort, we may better understand the specific challenges that they experience. Moreover, information gained from such first-person reports together with eye-tracking measures further informs about the integrity of their face processing system, as well as about the nature and degree of impairment in this population.

Research Review: The neuroscience of emerging adulthood - reward, ambiguity, and social support as building blocks of mental health

BACKGROUND

The interval between adolescence and adulthood, 'emerging adulthood' (EA), lays the foundation for lifelong health and well-being. To date, there exist little empirical data - particularly in the neurobiological domain - to establish markers of risk and resilience during the transition to adulthood. This gap in the literature is concerning given the numerous forms of psychiatric illness that emerge or worsen during this period.

METHODS

In this review, we focus on two strands of research with distinct importance for EA: reward sensitivity, and tolerance of ambiguity. We begin by placing these domains in a framework that considers the unique developmental goals of EA and then synthesize emerging neurobiological research on how these domains develop during EA. We then consider their role in common mental health problems that occur during this interval as well as how social support may moderate outcomes. Finally, we offer recommendations for advancing research to understand developmental process and outcomes in EA.

FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS

Few longitudinal studies specifically address emerging adult development and the milestones that characterize this interval. Data on neurobiological development are similarly sparse. Understanding neurobiological development during this window and its links to key adjustment outcomes is crucial for optimizing outcomes.

Childhood trauma, earlier pubertal timing, and psychopathology in adolescence: The role of corticolimbic development

Earlier pubertal development appears to be one pathway through which childhood trauma contributes to psychopathology in adolescence. Puberty-related changes in neural networks involved in emotion processing, namely the amygdala-medial prefrontal (mPFC) circuit, may be a potential mechanism linking trauma and adolescent psychopathology. Our participants were 227 youth between 10 and 13 years of age who completed assessments of threat and deprivation-related experiences of adversity, pubertal stage, and internalizing and externalizing symptoms. A subset (n = 149) also underwent a functional MRI scan while passively viewing fearful and calm faces. Potential mechanisms linking childhood trauma with psychopathology, encompassing earlier pubertal timing and neural response to aversive stimuli were explored. Earlier pubertal development was associated with childhood trauma as well as increased externalizing symptoms in boys only. Earlier pubertal timing in males and females was negatively associated with activation in bilateral amygdala, hippocampal, and fusiform regions when comparing fearful and calm faces. However, amygdala-mPFC connectivity showed no association with pubertal timing or psychopathology symptoms. These findings do not support accelerated amygdala-mPFC development as a mechanism linking childhood trauma and psychopathology, but instead provide support for the role of pubertal development in normative decreases in limbic activation across development.

Fear modulates parental orienting during childhood and adolescence

Adults quickly orient toward sources of danger and deploy fight-or-flight tactics to manage threatening situations. In contrast, infants who cannot implement the safety strategies available to adults and depend heavily on caregivers for survival are more likely to turn toward familiar adults, such as their parents, to help them navigate threatening circumstances. However, work has yet to investigate how readily children and adolescents orient toward their parents in threatening or fearful contexts. The current work addressed this question using a visual search paradigm that included arrays of parents' and strangers' faces as target and distractor stimuli, preceded by a fear or neutral emotional priming procedure. Linear mixed-effects models showed that children and adolescents (N = 88, age range = 4-17 years; 42M/46F) were faster to search for the face of their parent than of a stranger. However, fear priming attenuated this effect of the parent on search times, such that children and adolescents were significantly slower to orient toward their parent in an array of strangers' faces if they were first primed with fear as opposed to a neutral video. This work indicates that fear priming may phasically interfere with parental orienting during childhood and adolescence, possibly because fear reallocates attention away from parents and toward (potentially threatening) unfamiliar people in the environment to facilitate the development of independent threat learning and coping systems.

Experimental evidence for a child-to-adolescent switch in human amygdala-prefrontal cortex communication: A cross-sectional pilot study

Interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are fundamental to human emotion. Despite the central role of frontoamygdala communication in adult emotional learning and regulation, little is known about how top-down control emerges during human development. In the present cross-sectional pilot study, we experimentally manipulated prefrontal engagement to test its effects on the amygdala during development. Inducing dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activation resulted in developmentally-opposite effects on amygdala reactivity during childhood versus adolescence, such that dACC activation was followed by increased amygdala reactivity in childhood but reduced amygdala reactivity in adolescence. Bayesian network analyses revealed an age-related switch between childhood and adolescence in the nature of amygdala connectivity with the dACC and ventromedial PFC (vmPFC). Whereas adolescence was marked by information flow from dACC and vmPFC to amygdala (consistent with that observed in adults), the reverse information flow, from the amygdala to dACC and vmPFC, was dominant in childhood. The age-related switch in information flow suggests a potential shift from bottom-up co-excitatory to top-down regulatory frontoamygdala connectivity and may indicate a profound change in the circuitry supporting maturation of emotional behavior. These findings provide novel insight into the developmental construction of amygdala-cortical connections and implications for the ways in which childhood experiences may influence subsequent prefrontal function.

Weaker inhibition after happy faces: evidence from an attentional blink task with emotional and neutral faces

In two experiments using a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) we investigated how emotional and neutral faces (T1) modulate temporal attention for a following neutral face (T2). Typically, performance for T2 is spared when T2 immediately follows T1 (lag 1 sparing) but it is impaired when T2 is presented within 500 ms from T1 (Attentional Blink). Experiment 1 shows a shorter attentional blink following happy faces, relative to neutral and sad faces, which did not differ. Experiment 2 shows a lag 1 sparing only after happy T1s, but not after angry or neutral T1s, and a greater attentional blink following happy and angry T1-faces, compared to neutral T1-faces. Results indicate that happy faces exert different effects on temporal attention than negative (angry or sad) faces. Findings are discussed in terms of an interplay of resource depletion, due to emotional salience, and emotion-specific inhibitory mechanisms.

Facial emotion processing and language during early-to-middle childhood development: An event related potential study

Facial emotion processing (FEP) is critical to social cognitive ability. Developmentally, FEP rapidly improves in early childhood and continues to be fine-tuned throughout middle childhood and into adolescence. Previous research has suggested that language plays a role in the development of social cognitive skills, including non-verbal emotion recognition tasks. Here we investigated whether language is associated with specific neurophysiological indicators of FEP. One hundred and fourteen children (4-12 years) completed a language assessment and a FEP task including stimuli depicting anger, happiness, fear, and neutrality. EEG was used to record key event related potentials (ERPs; P100, N170, LPP at occipital and parietal sites separately) previously shown to be sensitive to faces and facial emotion. While there were no main effects of language, the P100 latency to negative expressions appeared to increase with language, while LPP amplitude increased with language for negative and neutral expressions. These findings suggest that language is linked to some early physiological indicators of FEP, but this is dependent on the facial expression. Future studies should explore the role of language in later stages of neural processing, with a focus on processes localised to ventromedial prefrontal regions.

Toddler Word Learning is Robust to Changes in Emotional Context

Word learning is a crucial aspect of early social and cognitive development, and previous research indicates that children's word learning is influenced by the context in which the word is spoken. However, the role of emotions as contextual cues to word learning remains less clear. The present study investigated word learning among 2.5-year-old children in angry, happy, sad, and variable emotional contexts. Fifty-six children (30 female; Mean age=2.49 years) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which children observed an experimenter labeling objects in either a consistently angry, consistently happy, consistently sad, or variable (one exemplar per emotion) context. Children were then asked to identify the label-object association. Results revealed that children's performance was above chance levels for all four conditions (all t's>3.68, all p's<.01), but performance did not significantly differ by condition (F(3,52)=0.51, p=.677). These results provide valuable information regarding potential boundaries for when contextual information may versus may not influence children's word learning.

Pupil responses to dynamic negative facial expressions of emotion in infants and parents

Observing others’ emotions triggers physiological arousal in infants as well as in adults, reflected in dilated pupil sizes. This study is the first to examine parents’ and infants’ pupil responses to dynamic negative emotional facial expressions. Moreover, the links between pupil responses and negative emotional dispositions were explored among infants and parents. Infants’ and one of their parent's pupil responses to negative versus neutral faces were measured via eye tracking in 222 infants (5‐ to 7‐month‐olds, n = 77, 11‐ to 13‐month‐olds, n = 78, and 17‐ to 19‐month‐olds, n = 67) and 229 parents. One parent contributed to the pupil data, whereas both parents were invited to fill in questionnaires on their own and their infant's negative emotional dispositions. Infants did not differentially respond to negative expressions, while parents showed stronger pupil responses to negative versus neutral expressions. There was a positive association between infants' and their parent's mean pupil responses and significant links between mothers’ and fathers’ stress levels and their infants’ pupil responses. We conclude that a direct association between pupil responses in parents and offspring is observable already in infancy in typical development. Stress in parents is related to their infants’ pupillary arousal to negative emotions.

Parenting under pressure: A mixed-methods investigation of the impact of COVID-19 on family life

Background

development and implementation of effective family-based psychosocial intervention and treatment strategies during COVID-19 will require a detailed understanding of how the virus has impacted the lives of families.

Methods

written reports on the life impacts of COVID-19 for parents (n = 56) and their children (n = 43), and a questionnaire assessing parent positive and negative affect, were collected between April and May 2020. An inductive approach was used to identify themes in written reports, followed by statistical analysis to explore associations between themes and changes in parent positive and negative affect pre- and post-writing.

Results

parents and children reported both positive and negative psychosocial impacts of the virus, though parents expressed a greater diversity of positive themes than children. Common themes reported by parents included concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on their children, health concerns for others, and the stressful balancing act of parenting, assisting with children's school work, and working from home. Many parents reported gratitude, and reflected on the upsides of the pandemic for family relationships and parent-child bonding. Parents who expressed gratitude reported a decrease in negative affect pre- to post-writing. Common child-reported themes included yearning to return to school, pandemic-related fears, and longing for social connection.

Limitations

the sample included a cross-section of mostly White (non-Hispanic), dual income, well-educated mothers, primarily from the United States.

Conclusions

both parents and children reported reduced wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future research should focus on identifying how to fulfill children's social needs and lessen caregivers’ burdens during this time.

Developmental differences in the visual processing of emotionally ambiguous neutral faces based on perceived valence

The aim of the present research was to assess age-related differences in how children and adults interpret and visually process emotionally ambiguous neutral faces. Children and adults provided neutral child faces with valence and arousal ratings while eye movements were recorded. Consistent with previous research, children and adults both interpreted the neutral faces as negatively valenced. Both age groups showed fewer fixations to the eye region when they rated the faces as positive. However, adults fixated more on the eye region when they rated the faces as negative whereas children fixated more on the eye region when they rated the faces as neutral. This finding may suggest that children strategically allocate attentional resources to the eye region when processing emotionally ambiguous faces to gather critical affective information. These findings have implications for the utilization of neutral faces as an experimental control condition and serve as the foundation for future research on the development of mechanisms that underlie the interpretation of emotionally ambiguous faces.

Corporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children

Spanking remains common around the world, despite evidence linking corporal punishment to detrimental child outcomes. This study tested whether children (Mage  = 11.60) who were spanked (N = 40) exhibited altered neural function in response to stimuli that suggest the presence of an environmental threat compared to children who were not spanked (N = 107). Children who were spanked exhibited greater activation in multiple regions of the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial PFC, bilateral frontal pole, and left middle frontal gyrus in response to fearful relative to neutral faces compared to children who were not spanked. These findings suggest that spanking may alter neural responses to environmental threats in a manner similar to more severe forms of maltreatment.

Experiential and Strategic Emotional Intelligence Are Implicated When Inhibiting Affective and Non-Affective Distractors: Findings from Three Emotional Flanker N-Back Tasks

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to a set of competencies to process, understand, and reason with affective information. Recent studies suggest ability measures of experiential and strategic EI differentially predict performance on non-emotional and emotionally laden tasks. To explore cognitive processes underlying these abilities further, we varied the affective context of a traditional letter-based n-back working-memory task. In study 1, participants completed 0-, 2-, and 3-back tasks with flanking distractors that were either emotional (fearful or happy faces) or non-emotional (shapes or letters stimuli). Strategic EI, but not experiential EI, significantly influenced participants’ accuracy across all n-back levels, irrespective of flanker type. In Study 2, participants completed 1-, 2-, and 3-back levels. Experiential EI was positively associated with response times for emotional flankers at the 1-back level but not other levels or flanker types, suggesting those higher in experiential EI reacted slower on low-load trials with affective context. In Study 3, flankers were asynchronously presented either 300 ms or 1000 ms before probes. Results mirrored Study 1 for accuracy rates and Study 2 for response times. Our findings (a) provide experimental evidence for the distinctness of experiential and strategic EI and (b) suggest that each are related to different aspects of cognitive processes underlying working memory.

Social connectedness and negative affect uniquely explain individual differences in response to emotional ambiguity

Negativity bias is not only central to mood and anxiety disorders, but can powerfully impact our decision-making across domains (e.g., financial, medical, social). This project builds on previous work examining negativity bias using dual-valence ambiguity. Specifically, although some facial expressions have a relatively clear negative (angry) or positive valence (happy), surprised expressions are interpreted negatively by some and positively by others, providing insight into one's valence bias. Here, we examine putative sources of variability that distinguish individuals with a more negative versus positive valence bias using structural equation modeling. Our model reveals that one's propensity toward negativity (operationalized as temperamental negative affect and internalizing symptomology) predicts valence bias particularly in older adulthood when a more positive bias is generally expected. Further, variability in social connectedness (a propensity to seek out social connections, use those connections to regulate one's own emotions, and be empathic) emerges as a notable and unique predictor of valence bias, likely because these traits help to override an initial, default negativity. We argue that this task represents an important approach to examining variability in affective bias, and can be specifically useful across the lifespan and in populations with internalizing disorders or even subclinical symptomology.

Exploring valence bias as a metric for frontoamygdalar connectivity and depressive symptoms in childhood

Negativity bias is a core feature of depression that is associated with dysfunctional frontoamygdalar connectivity; this pathway is associated with emotion regulation and sensitive to neurobiological change during puberty. We used a valence bias task (ratings of emotional ambiguity) as a potential early indicator of depression risk and differences in frontoamygdalar connectivity. Previous work using this task demonstrated that children normatively have a negative bias that attenuates with maturation. Here, we test the hypothesis that persistence of this negativity bias as maturation ensues may reveal differences in emotion regulation development, and may be associated with increased risk for depression. In children aged 6-13 years, we tested the moderating role of puberty on relationships between valence bias, depressive symptoms, and frontoamygdalar connectivity. A negative bias was associated with increased depressive symptoms for those at more advanced pubertal stages (within this sample) and less regulatory frontoamygdalar connectivity, whereas a more positive bias was associated with more regulatory connectivity patterns. These data suggest that with maturation, individual differences in positivity biases and associated emotion regulation circuitry confer a differential risk for depression. Longitudinal work is necessary to determine the directionality of these effects and explore the influence of early life events.

Using Positive Emotion Training With Maltreated Youths to Reduce Anger Bias and Physical Aggression

Maltreated youths often overinterpret anger in others' emotional expressions, particularly expressions that are ambiguous, and this "anger bias" is associated with aggressive behavior. In the current experiment, we tested the effect of an emotion-training intervention on anger bias and subsequent aggression. Eighty-four youths, ages 8 to 17, who had been removed from home because of maltreatment and had screened positive for aggressive tendencies, served as participants. Over 4 days, youths completed positive emotion training, a computerized program in which youths classify emotional expressions. Youths in the treatment condition received feedback to encourage their recognition of happiness over anger in ambiguous expressions. Physical aggression up to 1 week posttraining was assessed on the basis of self- and staff reports. The intervention was effective in reducing youths' anger bias and somewhat so in reducing aggression-the latter of-which occurred infrequently, limiting power. Results offer direction for developmental research and cost-effective interventions for maltreated youths at risk for aggression and future justice-system involvement.

Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions

The ability to recognize how another is feeling is a critical skill, with profound implications for social adaptation. Training programs designed to improve social functioning typically attempt to direct attention toward or away from certain facial configurations, or to improve discrimination between emotions by categorizing faces. However, emotion recognition involves processes in addition to attentional orienting or categorical labeling. The intensity with which someone is experiencing an emotion is also influential; knowing whether someone is annoyed or enraged will guide an observer's response. Here, we systematically examined a novel paradigm designed to improve ratings of facial information communicating emotion intensity in a sample of 492 participants across a series of 8 studies. In Study 1, participants improved precision in recognizing the intensity of facial cues through personalized corrective feedback. These initial findings were replicated in a randomized-control trial comparing training with feedback to viewing and rating faces without feedback. Studies 2 and 3 revealed that these effects generalize to identities and facial configurations not included in the training. Study 4 indicated that the effects were sustained beyond the training session. These findings suggest that individualized, corrective feedback is effective for reducing error in rating the intensity of facial cues. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The development and consequences of moral essentialism

Children report that many natural kinds, social groups, and psychological characteristics arise from an innate, internal "essence" that is rooted in biology and remains stable over time. These perceptions persist into adulthood, albeit often in weakened form. This chapter argues that in addition to the domains previously examined in the essentialism literature, children-and to some extent adults-also view moral characteristics in essentialist terms. This form of essentialism has important social consequences, including in the area of prosocial behavior and in the legal domain. The body of evidence reviewed here suggests that children's and adults' moral judgments depend not just on what people do but also on perceptions of who those people are, i.e., whether they are people of good or bad moral character.

Do Animals Engage Greater Social Attention in Autism? An Eye Tracking Analysis

BACKGROUND

Visual atypicalities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are a well documented phenomenon, beginning as early as 2-6 months of age and manifesting in a significantly decreased attention to the eyes, direct gaze and socially salient information. Early emerging neurobiological deficits in perceiving social stimuli as rewarding or its active avoidance due to the anxiety it entails have been widely purported as potential reasons for this atypicality. Parallel research evidence also points to the significant benefits of animal presence for reducing social anxiety and enhancing social interaction in children with autism. While atypicality in social attention in ASD has been widely substantiated, whether this atypicality persists equally across species types or is confined to humans has not been a key focus of research insofar.

METHODS

We attempted a comprehensive examination of the differences in visual attention to static images of human and animal faces (40 images; 20 human faces and 20 animal faces) among children with ASD using an eye tracking paradigm. 44 children (ASD n = 21; TD n = 23) participated in the study (10,362 valid observations) across five regions of interest (left eye, right eye, eye region, face and screen).

RESULTS

Results obtained revealed significantly greater social attention across human and animal stimuli in typical controls when compared to children with ASD. However in children with ASD, a significantly greater attention allocation was seen to animal faces and eye region and lesser attention to the animal mouth when compared to human faces, indicative of a clear attentional preference to socially salient regions of animal stimuli. The positive attentional bias toward animals was also seen in terms of a significantly greater visual attention to direct gaze in animal images.

CONCLUSION

Our results suggest the possibility that atypicalities in social attention in ASD may not be uniform across species. It adds to the current neural and biomarker evidence base of the potentially greater social reward processing and lesser social anxiety underlying animal stimuli as compared to human stimuli in children with ASD.

Infants' Gaze Patterns for Same-Race and Other-Race Faces, and the Other-Race Effect

The other-race effect (ORE) can be described as difficulties in discriminating between faces of ethnicities other than one's own, and can already be observed at approximately 9 months of age. Recent studies also showed that infants visually explore same-and other-race faces differently. However, it is still unclear whether infants' looking behavior for same- and other-race faces is related to their face discrimination abilities. To investigate this question we conducted a habituation-dishabituation experiment to examine Caucasian 9-month-old infants' gaze behavior, and their discrimination of same- and other-race faces, using eye-tracking measurements. We found that infants looked longer at the eyes of same-race faces over the course of habituation, as compared to other-race faces. After habituation, infants demonstrated a clear other-race effect by successfully discriminating between same-race faces, but not other-race faces. Importantly, the infants' ability to discriminate between same-race faces significantly correlated with their fixation time towards the eyes of same-race faces during habituation. Thus, our findings suggest that for infants old enough to begin exhibiting the ORE, gaze behavior during habituation is related to their ability to differentiate among same-race faces, compared to other-race faces.

Early Adversity and the Neotenous Human Brain

Human brain development is optimized to learn from environmental cues. The protracted development of the cortex and its connections with subcortical targets has been argued to permit more opportunity for acquiring complex behaviors. This review uses the example of amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex circuitry development to illustrate a principle of human development-namely, that the extension of the brain's developmental timeline allows for the (species-expected) collaboration between child and parent in co-construction of the human brain. The neurobiology underlying affective learning capitalizes on this protracted timeline to develop a rich affective repertoire in adulthood. Humans are afforded this luxuriously slow development in part by the extended period of caregiving provided by parents, and parents aid in scaffolding the process of maturation during childhood. Just as adequate caregiving is a potent effector of brain development, so is adverse caregiving, which is the largest environmental risk factor for adult mental illness. There are large individual differences in neurobiological outcomes following caregiving adversity, indicating that these pathways are probabilistic, rather than deterministic, and prolonged plasticity in human brain development may also allow for subsequent amelioration by positive experiences. The extant research indicates that the development of mental health cannot be considered without consideration of children in the context of their families.

Investigating the Effects of Embodiment on Emotional Categorization of Faces and Words in Children and Adults

The facial feedback hypothesis (FFH) indicates that besides being involved in the production of facial expressions, the musculature of the face also influences one's perception of emotional stimuli. Recently, this effect has been the focus of increased scrutiny as efforts to replicate a key study with adult participants supporting this hypothesis, using the so-called "pen-in-the-mouth" task, have not been successful at several labs. Our series of experiments attempted to investigate whether the assumed embodiment effect can be reproduced in a simplified emotional categorization task for emotional faces and words. We also wanted to test whether the embodiment effect can be detected in children because it is assumed that their bodily processes are especially closely linked with their sensory and cognitive processes. Our experiments involved child and adult participants categorizing faces and words as positive or negative as quickly as possible, while inducing a positive or negative facial or bodily state (holding a straw in the mouth such that a smile or a frown was generated, or creating a positive or negative body posture). The positive or negative facial and bodily states could therefore be either congruent or incongruent with the valence of the target face and word stimuli. Our results did not show any significant differences between the congruent and incongruent conditions in either children or adults. This suggests that embodiment effects either do not significantly impact valence-based categorization or are not strong enough to be detected by our approach considering the sample size in the present study.

The negativity bias, revisited: Evidence from neuroscience measures and an individual differences approach

Past research has provided support for the existence of a negativity bias, the tendency for negativity to have a stronger impact than positivity. Theoretically, the negativity bias provides an evolutionary advantage, as it is more critical for survival to avoid a harmful stimulus than to pursue a potentially helpful one. The current paper reviews the theoretical grounding of the negativity bias in the Evaluative Space Model, and presents recent findings using a multilevel approach that further elucidate the mechanisms underlying the negativity bias and underscore the importance of the negativity bias for human functioning.

Look out captain, I hear an ambiguous alien! A study of interpretation bias and anxiety in young children

There is convincing evidence that anxious children and adolescents are biased to interpret ambiguity in a negative way (Stuijfzand, Creswell, Field, Pearcey, & Dodd, 2017). However, little research examines interpretation bias in children under eight years. This is due to existing measures of interpretation bias being inappropriate for young children. Consequently, we aimed to develop a new interpretation bias task for young children using tones. Children learnt to associate high tones with a 'happy alien' and low tones with an 'angry alien'. They were then asked to classify tones from the middle of the frequency range (ambiguous tones) as 'happy' or 'angry'. Corrugator muscle activity was recorded alongside behavioural responses. A community sample of 110 children aged 4-8 years, split into high and low anxious groups, completed the task. High anxious children were more likely to interpret the ambiguous tones as negative but this effect was small and only apparent after controlling for developmental factors. Corrugator activity aligned with behavioural responses for trained but not ambiguous tones. This is the first study to assess interpretation bias in young children using behavioural and physiological measures. Results indicate the task is developmentally appropriate and has potential utility for future research.

Emotion first: children prioritize emotional faces in gaze-cued attentional orienting

Children shift their attention based on the gaze direction of another person but it is unclear whether they prioritize only the gaze of fearful faces over neutral ones or more generally, the gaze of emotional faces. School children performed a gaze-cueing task, in which central, non-predictive happy, angry, and neutral face-cues were briefly presented with averted gaze. Findings for 9-10-year-old children showed that the magnitude of gaze-cueing effects for happy and angry face-cues was similar and it was particularly larger with angry compared to neutral face-cues. In contrast, 6-7-year-old children showed gaze-cueing effects only with happy face-cues. The present findings clearly indicate that older children show emotion-enhanced gaze-cueing effects. In contrast, younger children did not show gaze-cueing effects with neutral and angry faces but they did with happy faces. The implications of age differences in the ability to prioritize emotional faces when shifting attention based on the observed gaze direction of a non-predictive face-cue are discussed in the context of the extant literature.

Social evaluations under conflict: negative judgments of conflicting information are easier than positive judgments

In the current study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how the brain facilitates social judgments despite evaluatively conflicting information. Participants learned consistent (positive or negative) and ambivalent (positive and negative) person information and were then asked to provide binary judgments of these targets in situations that either resolved conflict by prioritizing a subset of information or not. Self-report, decision time and brain data confirm that integrating contextual information into our evaluations of objects or people allows for nuanced (social) evaluations. The same mixed trait information elicited or failed to elicit evaluative conflict dependent on the situation. Crucially, we provide data suggesting that negative judgments are easier and may be considered the ‘default’ action when experiencing evaluative conflict: weaker activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during trials of evaluative conflict was related to a greater likelihood of unfavorable judgments, and greater activation was related to more favorable judgments. Since negative outcome consequences are arguably more detrimental and salient, this finding supports the idea that additional regulation and a more active selection process are necessary to override an initial negative response to evaluatively conflicting information.

The Role of Emotional Valence for the Processing of Facial and Verbal Stimuli-Positivity or Negativity Bias?

Emotional valence is predominately conveyed in social interactions by words and facial expressions. The existence of broad biases which favor more efficient processing of positive or negative emotions is still a controversial matter. While so far this question has been investigated separately for each modality, in this narrative review of the literature we focus on valence effects in processing both words and facial expressions. In order to identify the factors underlying positivity and negativity effects, and to uncover whether these effects depend on modality and age, we present and analyze three representative overviews of the literature concerning valence effects in word processing, face processing, and combinations of word and face processing. Our analysis of word processing studies points to a positivity bias or a balanced processing of positive and negative words, whereas the analysis of face processing studies showed the existence of separate positivity and negativity biases depending on the experimental paradigm. The mixed results seem to be a product of the different methods and types of stimuli being used. Interestingly, we found that children exhibit a clear positivity advantage for both word and face processing, indicating similar processing biases in both modalities. Over the course of development, the initial positivity advantage gradually disappears, and in some face processing studies even reverses into a negativity bias. We therefore conclude that there is a need for future research that systematically analyses the impact of age and modality on the emergence of these valence effects. Finally, we discuss possible explanations for the presence of the early positivity advantage and its subsequent decrease.

The effect of emotional and self-referential contexts on ERP responses towards surprised faces

The perception of surprised faces is demonstrably modulated by emotional context. However, the influence of self-relevance and its interaction with emotional context have not been explored. The present study investigated the effects of contextual valence and self-reference on the perception of surprised faces. Our results revealed that faces in a negative context elicited a larger N170 than those in a neutral context. The EPN was affected by the interaction between contextual valence and self-reference, with larger amplitudes for faces in self-related positive contexts and sender-related negative contexts. Additionally, LPP amplitudes were enhanced for faces in negative contexts relative to neutral and positive contexts, as well as for self-related contexts in comparison to sender-related contexts. Together, these findings help to elucidate the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying the effects of emotional and self-referential contexts on the perception of surprised faces, which are characterized by distinctive ERPs.

Early and late cortical reactivity to passively viewed emotional faces in pediatric bipolar disorder

BACKGROUND

We studied emotional information processing in youth with pediatric bipolar disorder (pBD) using the late positive potential (LPP), assessing automatic allocation of attentional resources to emotionally salient stimuli, and the occipital P1, assessing early sensory processing.

METHODS

Participants were 20 youth with pBD and 26 healthy controls (HC). Participants passively viewed faces with a fearful, neutral or happy expressions. Group differences were tested with general linear models. P1 was included to examine modulating effects on LPP. We calculated Bayes factor (BF) values to express strength of evidence for choosing one hypothesis over another.

RESULTS

A significant emotion by group interaction for LPP amplitude was associated with a larger amplitude for happy faces for pBD than HC (F[1,40] = 6.04, p = .018); this was not modulated by P1 amplitude or latency. P1 amplitude did not differ between groups, although P1 peaked earlier for HC (F[1,40] = 5.45, p = .025). BF for LPP was 2.93, suggesting moderate evidence favoring H₁. BF for P1 latency of 14.58 suggests strong evidence favoring H₁.

LIMITATIONS

Inclusion of children and adolescents prohibited careful control for neurodevelopmental effects.

CONCLUSIONS

Larger LPP amplitude for happy faces without change in P1 suggests enhanced automatic allocation of attentional resources to positive information in pBD. Delayed P1 latency in pBD suggests slower early processing of emotional information.

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.

Through the eyes of the beholder: Simulated eye-movement experience ("SEE") modulates valence bias in response to emotional ambiguity

Although some facial expressions provide clear information about people's emotions and intentions (happy, angry), others (surprise) are ambiguous because they can signal both positive (e.g., surprise party) and negative outcomes (e.g., witnessing an accident). Without a clarifying context, surprise is interpreted as positive by some and negative by others, and this valence bias is stable across time. When compared to fearful expressions, which are consistently rated as negative, surprise and fear share similar morphological features (e.g., widened eyes) primarily in the upper part of the face. Recently, we demonstrated that the valence bias was associated with a specific pattern of eye movements (positive bias associated with faster fixation to the lower part of the face). In this follow-up, we identified two participants from our previous study who had the most positive and most negative valence bias. We used their eye movements to create a moving window such that new participants viewed faces through the eyes of one our previous participants (subjects saw only the areas of the face that were directly fixated by the original participants in the exact order they were fixated; i.e., Simulated Eye-movement Experience). The input provided by these windows modulated the valence ratings of surprise, but not fear faces. These findings suggest there are meaningful individual differences in how people process faces, and that these differences impact our emotional perceptions. Furthermore, this study is unique in its approach to examining individual differences in emotion by creating a new methodology adapted from those used primarily in the vision/attention domain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Decoding the neural representation of self and person knowledge with multivariate pattern analysis and data-driven approaches

Multivariate pattern analysis and data-driven approaches to understand how the human brain encodes sensory information and higher level conceptual knowledge have become increasingly dominant in visual and cognitive neuroscience; however, it is only in recent years that these methods have been applied to the domain of social information processing. This review examines recent research in the field of social cognitive neuroscience focusing on how multivariate pattern analysis (e.g., pattern classification, representational similarity analysis) and data-driven methods (e.g., reverse correlation, intersubject correlation) have been used to decode and characterize high-level information about the self, other persons, and social groups. We begin with a review of what is known about how self-referential processing and person perception are represented in the medial prefrontal cortex based on conventional activation-based neuroimaging approaches. This is followed by a nontechnical overview of current multivariate pattern-based and data-driven neuroimaging methods designed to characterize and/or decode neural representations. The remainder of the review focuses on examining how these methods have been applied to the topic of self, person perception, and the perception of social groups. In this review, we highlight recent trends (e.g., analysis of social networks, decoding race and social groups, and the use of naturalistic stimuli) and discuss several theoretical challenges that arise from the application of these new methods to the question of how the brain represents knowledge about the self and others. This article is categorized under: Neuroscience > Cognition.

Individual differences in valence bias: fMRI evidence of the initial negativity hypothesis

Facial expressions offer an ecologically valid model for examining individual differences in affective decision-making. They convey an emotional signal from a social agent and provide important predictive information about one's environment (presence of potential rewards or threats). Although some expressions provide clear predictive information (angry, happy), others (surprised) are ambiguous in that they predict both positive and negative outcomes. Thus, surprised faces can delineate an individual's valence bias, or the tendency to interpret ambiguity as positive or negative. Our initial negativity hypothesis suggests that the initial response to ambiguity is negative, and that positivity relies on emotion regulation. We tested this hypothesis by comparing brain activity during explicit emotion regulation (reappraisal) and while freely viewing facial expressions, and measuring the relationship between brain activity and valence bias. Brain regions recruited during reappraisal showed greater activity for surprise in individuals with an increasingly positive valence bias. Additionally, we linked amygdala activity with an initial negativity, revealing a pattern similarity in individuals with negative bias between viewing surprised faces and maintaining negativity. Finally, these individuals failed to show normal habituation to clear negativity. These results support the initial negativity hypothesis, and are consistent with emotion research in both children and adult populations.

Developmental changes in the categorical processing of positive and negative facial expressions

Categorical biases in the processing of emotional facial expression have been the subject of much debate in the literature. Opposing views on this topic claim either that positive or negative facial expressions enjoy improved processing in the human brain. The developmental changes in the processing advantages of positive and negative facial expressions are also disputed, with studies using varying paradigms showing seemingly contradictory results. Therefore, to further investigate the development of categorical processing and extraction of emotional information from faces, we tested 6-, 9-, and 12-year-old children, as well as adults, on their ability to categorize various facial expressions as positive or negative as quickly as possible. This was a simplified paradigm designed to explicitly contrast the processing efficiency of positive and negative facial expressions on the broader level of those emotional valence categories, rather than specific single emotional expressions. Our results show an early age processing advantage for positive facial expressions, which disappears in adults who show no such differences in the case of response time measures. In the case of accuracy measures, the early advantage for positive facial expressions gradually disappears and is reversed into a negativity advantage in adults. These findings demonstrate that category-based positive and negative processing advantages are strongly modulated by age over the course of development, and can exhibit opposite effects depending on the developmental stage of the participant.

Role of Surprise in the Discrimination of the Facial Expression of Fear

The facilitating role of the facial expression of surprise in the discrimination of the facial expression of fear was analyzed. The sample consisted of 202 subjects that undertook a forced-choice test in which they had to decide as quickly as possible whether the facial expression displayed on-screen was one of fear, anger or happiness. Variations were made to the prime expression (neutral expression, or one of surprise); the target expression (facial expression of fear, anger or happiness), and the prime duration (50 ms, 150 ms or 250 ms). The results revealed shorter reaction times in the response to the expression of fear when the prime expression was one of surprise, with a prime duration of 50 ms (p = .009) and 150 ms (p = .001), compared to when the prime expression was a neutral one. By contrast, the reaction times were longer in the discrimination of an expression of fear when the prime expression was one of surprise with a prime duration of 250 ms (p < .0001), compared to when the prime expression was a neutral one. This pattern of results was obtained solely in the discrimination of the expression of fear. The discussion focuses on these findings and the possible functional continuity between surprise and fear.

Cortisol responses enhance negative valence perception for ambiguous facial expressions

Stress exposure elicits a prolonged neuroendocrine response, marked by cortisol release, which can influence important forms of affective decision-making. Identifying how stress reactivity shapes subjective biases in decisions about emotional ambiguity (i.e., valence bias) provides insight into the role stress plays in basic affective processing for healthy and clinical populations alike. Here, we sought to examine how stress reactivity affects valence decisions about emotional ambiguity. Given that stress prioritizes automatic emotional processing which, in the context of valence bias, is associated with increased negativity, we tested how individual differences in acute stress responses influence valence bias and how this decision process evolves over time. Participants provided baseline ratings of clear (happy, angry) and ambiguous (surprised) facial expressions, then re-rated similar stimuli after undergoing an acute stress or control manipulation a week later; salivary cortisol was measured throughout to assay stress reactivity. Elevations in cortisol were associated with more negative ratings of surprised faces, and with more direct response trajectories toward negative ratings (i.e., less response competition). These effects were selectively driven by the stress group, evidencing that increased stress reactivity is associated with a stronger negativity bias during ambiguous affective decision-making.

Hyperactivation in Cognitive Control and Visual Attention Brain Regions During Emotional Interference in Adolescent Depression

BACKGROUND

Individuals with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) are characterized by biases in attention to negative emotional material. While there is evidence that anomalous functioning in frontocingulate regions may underlie these biases, we know little about the neural correlates of negative emotional biases in depressed adolescents.

METHODS

Eighteen adolescents diagnosed with MDD and 21 matched healthy control (CTL) adolescents underwent fMRI while performing an emotional distractor task. On each trial participants were presented with task-relevant house pairs and task-irrelevant face pairs. Participants indicated whether the house pairs were identical while ignoring the face pairs, which were either fearful, sad, or neutral.

RESULTS

Despite equivalent behavioral performance (response time and accuracy) between groups, adolescents with MDD exhibited greater activation in frontocingulate regions, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and inferior frontal gyrus/middle frontal gyrus (IFG/MFG), and occipitoparietal regions, including lateral occipital cortex and superior parietal lobule when ignoring fearful versus neutral faces. Response times to these trial conditions also correlated negatively with activation in IFG/MFG and lateral occipital cortex suggesting these regions are recruited in order to effectively ignore emotional distractors. Groups did not differ when ignoring sad versus neutral faces or fearful versus sad faces.

CONCLUSIONS

Adolescents with MDD recruit both cognitive control and visual attention regions to a greater degree than do CTL adolescents, reflecting greater cognitive demand when downregulating threat-related stimuli.