Impaired recognition of fear in a Chinese man with bilateral cingulate and unilateral amygdala damage

Benefits of Grandparental Caregiving in Chinese Older Adults: Reduced Lonely Dissatisfaction as a Mediator

Objective

The purpose of the present study is twofold: (1) to investigate the differences in terms of physical and mental health between those who provide grandparental care and those who do not and (2) to explore the mechanism that connects grandparental caregiving and health-related outcomes.

Methods

Two studies (a cross-sectional and a short-term longitudinal follow-up) were conducted. The cross-sectional study (Study 1) examined 148 older adults who provided grandparental care and another 150 older adults who did not. A small longitudinal follow-up study (Study 2) was conducted among 102 older adults randomly selected from Study 1, of which 52 were older adults who provided grandparental care, and another 50 older adults were those who did not. Health status (measured by SF-36), lonely dissatisfaction (measured by Lonely Dissatisfaction Subscale of PGC-MS), and cognitive functions (measured by subscales of WAIS) as well as demographics were measured in both studies.

Results

Results of both the cross-sectional and longitudinal studies showed that, compared with older adults who did not provide grandparental care, those providing grandparental care had significantly better physical and mental health as well as reduced lonely dissatisfaction. Further path analysis showed that lonely dissatisfaction mediated the association between providing grandparental care and enhancement in functions such that providing grandparental care could reduce lonely dissatisfaction, which, in turn, could improve their physical and mental health even after controlling for their cognitive functions.

Discussion

These results suggest that providing grandparental care can improve older adults’ physical and mental health through reduced lonely dissatisfaction.

Emotion Recognition in Patients With Parkinson Disease

BACKGROUND

Individuals with Parkinson disease (PD) display cognitive dysfunction. However, few studies have investigated how facial and musical emotion recognition are affected in individuals with PD.

OBJECTIVE

To explore the relationship between facial and musical emotion recognition and executive functions in Chinese individuals with PD.

METHODS

We showed 40 Chinese individuals with PD and 40 Chinese healthy controls 24 black-and-white portraits and 24 musical excerpts that were designed to express happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Then, we used four tests to assess the participants' executive functions, including the Trail Making Test (TMT), Clock Drawing Test (CDT), semantic Verbal Fluency Test (VFT), and Digit Span Test (DST).

RESULTS

The PD group showed significant impairment in recognizing anger from facial expressions, although their emotion recognition from musical excerpts was similar to that of the control group. Recognition of an angry face was significantly correlated to scores on the TMT and DST. Recognition of happy music was significantly correlated to the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression score, whereas recognition of angry music was significantly correlated to musical knowledge background. Recognition of happy, sad, or angry music was significantly correlated to tests of executive function, whereas recognition of fearful music was not.

CONCLUSIONS

The PD group showed impaired recognition of angry faces, which may be related to executive dysfunction. However, the PD group did not show any difficulties in recognizing emotions in music. This dissociation indicates that the mechanisms underlying the recognition of emotions in faces and music are partly independent.

Form Follows Function: An Investigation Into the Categorical Boundary of Surprise

The concept of basic emotions has been widely accepted in explaining human behavior. Yet, there is still no consensus on the distinctiveness of surprise. This study tried to compare the discreteness of surprise with that of other basic emotions in terms of their categorical distinctiveness. For this study, 27 undergraduates were recruited, and a new set of morphing sequences of different emotional expressions from two young Chinese posers was created. The results show that surprise is over-generalized to the perception of fear and that the categorical boundary is less discrete than for other emotional expression pairs. This blending is perhaps due to their confusion on both the perceptual and production levels. Additionally, a choice between external and internal validity when picking emotional expression stimuli is also discussed.

Facial emotion recognition and alexithymia in Chinese male patients with deficit schizophrenia

Deficit schizophrenia (DS) has been proposed as a pathophysiologically distinct schizophrenia subtype. This study investigated facial emotion recognition deficits and alexithymia in DS and non-deficit schizophrenia patients (NDS) and their relationships with other clinical variables. The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), and Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) were employed to evaluate the psychiatric symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. Facial emotion recognition deficits and Alexithymia were assessed in DS, NDS, and control groups by The Chinese Facial Emotion Test (CFET) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20). Compared with control group, both DS and NDS patients exhibited more severe facial emotion recognition impairments, with the exception of "happy faces" in NDS patients, as well as higher alexithymia scores. In DS patients, correct frequency for fear recognition and total CFET score were negatively correlated with TAS-20 Factor 3 subscore for "externally oriented thinking". Total TAS-20 score was positively correlated with BPRS negative symptom and SANS score in DS patients. In contrast, there were no correlations between TAS-20 scores/subscores and psychiatric symptoms in NDS patients. These findings indicated distinct facial emotion recognition impairments in DS and NDS patients. Alexithymia might be specifically related to the negative symptom in DS patients, suggesting DS as a unique schizophrenic subtype.

Perception of Six Basic Emotional Facial Expressions by the Chinese

Thirty morphed emotional faces were developed along a happiness-surprise-fear-sadness-disgust-anger-happiness continuum, and 71 Chinese participants were asked to label each of them in a forced-choice task. The frequency curves for correctly labeling each emotion across the morphed photographs showed six discrete peaks. The labeling results are consistent with categorical perception of basic emotions, although morphed photographs were used, and with the hypothesis of universal facial expressions of emotions, although disgust is not included in the Chinese idiom of seven emotions.

Effects of sad mood on facial emotion recognition in Chinese people

This study examined the influence of sad mood on the judgment of ambiguous facial emotion expressions among 47 healthy volunteers who had been induced to feel sad (n=13), neutral (n=15), or happy (n=19) emotions by watching video clips. The findings suggest that when the targets were ambiguous, participants who were in a sad mood tended to classify them in the negative emotional categories rather than the positive emotional categories. Also, this observation indicates that emotion-specific negative bias in the judgment of facial expressions is associated with a sad mood. The finding argues against a general impairment in decoding facial expressions. Furthermore, the observed mood-congruent negative bias was best predicted by spatial perception. The findings of this study provide insights into the cognitive processes underlying the interpersonal difficulties experienced by people in a sad mood, which may be predisposing factors in the development of clinical depression.

Emotion recognition from dynamic emotional displays following anterior cingulotomy and anterior capsulotomy for chronic depression

Four patients that had received an anterior cingulotomy (ACING) and five patients that had received both an ACING and an anterior capsulotomy (ACAPS) as an intervention for chronic, treatment refractory depression were presented with a series of dynamic emotional stimuli and invited to identify the emotion portrayed. Their performance was compared with that of a group of non-surgically treated patients with major depression (n=17) and with a group of matched, never-depressed controls (n=22). At the time of testing, four of the nine neurosurgery patients had recovered from their depressive episode, whereas five remained depressed. Analysis of emotion recognition accuracy revealed no significant differences between depressed and non-depressed neurosurgically treated patients. Similarly, no significant differences were observed between the patients treated with ACING alone and those treated with both ACING and ACAPS. Comparison of the emotion recognition accuracy of the neurosurgically treated patients and the depressed and healthy control groups revealed that the surgically treated patients exhibited a general impairment in their recognition accuracy compared to healthy controls. Regression analysis revealed that participants' emotion recognition accuracy was predicted by the number of errors they made on the Stroop colour-naming task. It is plausible that the observed deficit in emotion recognition accuracy was a consequence of impaired attentional control, which may have been a result of the surgical lesions to the anterior cingulate cortex.

Selective impairment of attentional networks of orienting and executive control in schizophrenia

BACKGROUND

Difficulty attending is a common deficit of schizophrenic patients. However, it is not known whether this is a global attentional deficit or relates to a specific attentional network.

METHOD

This study used the attention network test to compare schizophrenic patients (N=77) with controls (N=53) on the efficiency of three anatomically defined attentional networks: alerting, orienting, and executive control.

RESULTS

Schizophrenic patients showed a large and highly significant deficit in the executive network and a smaller but significant deficit in the orienting network as well as in overall RT and accuracy. There was no deficit in the alerting network.

CONCLUSION

These results suggest some specificity in the attentional networks influenced by the disorder. The executive attention network has been shown in normal subjects to activate the anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal areas. Previous data using neuroimaging with schizophrenic patients has shown abnormal control by the anterior cingulate. Our findings support this previous research by indicating that the major attentional deficit in schizophrenic patients is in a network that includes the anterior cingulate.