Sex differences in attention to disgust facial expressions

Reading language of the eyes in female depression

Aberrations in non-verbal social cognition have been reported to coincide with major depressive disorder. Yet little is known about the role of the eyes. To fill this gap, the present study explores whether and, if so, how reading language of the eyes is altered in depression. For this purpose, patients and person-by-person matched typically developing individuals were administered the Emotions in Masked Faces task and Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, modified, both of which contained a comparable amount of visual information available. For achieving group homogeneity, we set a focus on females as major depressive disorder displays a gender-specific profile. The findings show that facial masks selectively affect inferring emotions: recognition of sadness and anger are more heavily compromised in major depressive disorder as compared with typically developing controls, whereas the recognition of fear, happiness, and neutral expressions remains unhindered. Disgust, the forgotten emotion of psychiatry, is the least recognizable emotion in both groups. On the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test patients exhibit lower accuracy on positive expressions than their typically developing peers, but do not differ on negative items. In both depressive and typically developing individuals, the ability to recognize emotions behind a mask and performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test are linked to each other in processing speed, but not recognition accuracy. The outcome provides a blueprint for understanding the complexities of reading language of the eyes within and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emotions behind a mask: the value of disgust

The impact of face masks on social cognition and interaction became a popular topic due to the long-lasting COVID-19 pandemic. This theme persists in the focus of attention beyond the pandemic, since face covering not only reduces the overall amount of face information available but also introduces biases and prejudices affecting social perception at large. Many questions are still open. One of them is whether gender of beholders affects inferring of emotions covered by face masks. Reading covered faces may be particularly challenging for individuals with mental disorders, most of which are gender-specific. Previous findings are not only sparse, but inconclusive because most research had been conducted online with resulting samples heavily dominated by females. Here in a face-to-face study, females and males were presented with a randomized set of faces covered by masks. In a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm, participants had to indicate facial emotions displayed by posers. In general, the outcome dovetails with earlier findings that face masks affect emotion recognition in a dissimilar way: Inferring some emotions suffers more severely than others, with the most pronounced influence of mask wearing on disgust and close to ceiling recognition of fear and neutral expressions. Contrary to our expectations, however, males were on overall more proficient in emotion recognition. In particular, males substantially excelled in inferring disgust. The findings help to understand gender differences in recognition of disgust, the forgotten emotion of psychiatry, that is of substantial value for a wide range of mental disorders including schizophrenia. Watch Prof. Marina Pavlova discussing this her work and this article: https://vimeo.com/860126397/5966610f49?share=copy .

Opposite effects of estradiol and progesterone on woman's disgust processing

Background

Ovarian hormones play a critical role in emotion processing, which may be a major reason for the high rates of major depressive disorders in women. However, the exact roles of estradiol and progesterone in emotional processing remain unclear. To this end, we performed behavioral and rs-fMRI studies on the effects ovarian hormones on disgust emotion.

Methods

In Experiment 1, 95 Chinese female undergraduates completed the single category implicit association test (SC-IAT) and explicit measures of disgust intensity task, 32 in the menstrual phase, 30 in the follicular phase, and 33 in the luteal phase. In Experiment 2, A total of 25 healthy female undergraduates completed three sessions of the rs-fMRI. The menstrual group was scanned during cycle days 2-5, the follicular group during cycle during days 10-13, and the luteal group was scanned 3-7 days before the next menstruation.

Results

The behavioral results showed that women during the luteal phase had higher D scores and shorter response times (RTs) to disgust stimuli compared to the menses and follicular phases. In contrast, women during the follicular phase had fewer feelings of disgust and longer RTs to pathogen stimuli compared with that during the menses and luteal phases, but this effect was moderated by the intensity of the stimuli. rs-fMRI studies showed that women during the luteal phase have higher functional connectivity in the salience network than those in the follicular phase. Compared with the menstrual phase, women have lower functional connectivity in the amygdala during the follicular phase.

Conclusion

In summary, a more negative attitude to disgust stimuli and the enhanced functional connectivity of the salience network during the luteal phase may be associated with high progesterone levels, whereas lower disgust feelings and reduced functional connectivity of the amygdala during the follicular phase may be associated with high estradiol levels.

Dynamic emotional messages differentially affect 6-month-old infants' attention to eyes and gaze cues

Infants often experience interactions in which caregivers use dynamic messages to convey their affective and communicative intent. These dynamic emotional messages may shape the development of emotion discrimination skills and shared attention by influencing infants' attention to internal facial features and their responses to eye gaze cues. However, past research examining infants' responses to emotional faces has predominantly focused on classic, stereotyped expressions (e.g., happy, sad, angry) that may not reflect the variability that infants experience in their daily interactions. The present study therefore examined forty-two 6-month-old infants' attention to eyes vs. mouth and gaze cueing responses across multiple dynamic emotional messages that are common to infant-directed interactions. Overall, infants looked more to the eyes during messages with negative affect, but this increased attention to the eyes during these message conditions did not directly facilitate gaze cueing. Infants instead showed reliable gaze cueing only after messages with positive and neutral affect. We additionally observed gender differences in infants' attention to internal face features and subsequent gaze cueing responses. Female infants spent more time looking at the eyes during the dynamic emotional messages and showed increased initial orienting and longer looking to gaze-cued objects following positive messages, whereas male infants showed these gaze cueing effects following neutral messages. These results suggest that variability in caregivers' communication can shape infants' attention to and processing of emotion and gaze information.

The role of excessive reassurance seeking: An eye tracking study of the indirect effect of social anxiety symptoms on attention bias

High social anxiety is associated with increased attentional bias, and difficulties disengaging from relevant threat information, though social anxiety may also be associated with avoidance of threat. Few mechanisms of this relationship have been empirically evaluated, whereas theories and treatment manuals implicate avoidance and/or safety behaviors as significant agents of negative reinforcement for anxiety symptoms and search for threat. The current study sought to investigate one safety behavior, excessive reassurance seeking, as a mediator of the relationship between social anxiety and attention bias to disgust facial stimuli. Support was found for our hypotheses, such that social anxiety symptoms had an indirect effect on attention bias to disgust faces through increased reassurance seeking. These results suggest that reassurance seeking may result in disengagement of attention to threat stimuli. Specifically, social anxiety may result in a decreased threshold for negative social cues and therefore seek out reassurance feedback and avoid threatening stimuli. Future studies should test these directly and utilize a prospective design. The current study suggests that reassurance seeking may be involved in the attention bias process, providing additional data for current cognitive theories of social anxiety and additional support for reinforcement patterns of anxiety symptoms.

Emotional real-world scenes impact visual search

Research shows that emotional stimuli can capture attention, and this can benefit or impair performance, depending on the characteristics of a task. Additionally, whilst some findings show that attention expands under positive conditions, others show that emotion has no influence on the broadening of attention. The current study investigated whether emotional real-world scenes influence attention in a visual search task. Participants were asked to identify a target letter embedded in the centre or periphery of emotional images. Identification accuracy was lower in positive images compared to neutral images, and response times were slower in negative images. This suggests that real-world emotional stimuli have a distracting effect on visual attention and search. There was no evidence that emotional images influenced the spatial spread of attention. Instead, it is suggested that findings may provide support for the argument that positive emotion encourages a global processing style and negative emotion promotes local processing.

Cognitive mechanisms of disgust in the development and maintenance of psychopathology: A qualitative review and synthesis

A growing body of research has implicated disgust in various psychopathologies, especially anxiety-related disorders. Although the observed role of disgust in many disorders is robust, the mechanisms that may explain this role are unclear. Cutting-edge research in cognitive science has the potential to elucidate such mechanisms and consequently improve our understanding of how disgust contributes to the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology. In this qualitative review, we systematically assess cognitive bias mechanisms that have been linked to disgust and its disorders. This review suggests that disgust-related biases may be observed in memory, interpretation, judgment of expectancies, and attention, as well as at implicit levels. Of these cognitive domains, the most robust bias appears to be observed at the level of attention. However, reliable moderators of attentional biases for disgust have not yet been identified, and this bias has not been systematically linked to other levels of analysis. Despite these limitations, the available research indicates that attentional avoidance rather than orienting or maintenance may be the most characteristic of disgust. Attentional avoidance of disgust may have important implications for etiological and treatment models of disorders characterized by excessive disgust reactions. The implications for advancing such models are discussed in the context of a combined cognitive bias hypothesis.