Gaze Dynamics in the Recognition of Facial Expressions of Emotion

In the eyes of the beholder: investigating the effect of visual probing on accuracy and gaze fixations when attending to facial expressions among primary and secondary callous-unemotional variants

Individuals with callous-unemotional (CU) traits show deficits in facial emotion recognition. According to preliminary research, this impairment may be due to attentional neglect to peoples' eyes when evaluating emotionally expressive faces. However, it is unknown whether this atypical processing pattern is unique to established variants of CU traits or modifiable with intervention. This study examined facial affect recognition and gaze patterns among individuals (N = 80; M age = 19.95, SD = 1.01 years; 50% female) with primary vs secondary CU variants. These groups were identified based on repeated measurements of conduct problems, CU traits, and anxiety assessed in adolescence and adulthood. Accuracy and number of fixations on areas of interest (forehead, eyes, and mouth) while viewing six dynamic emotions were assessed. A visual probe was used to direct attention to various parts of the face. Individuals with primary and secondary CU traits were less accurate than controls in recognizing facial expressions across all emotions. Those identified in the low-anxious primary-CU group showed reduced overall fixations to fearful and painful facial expressions compared to those in the high-anxious secondary-CU group. This difference was not specific to a region of the face (i.e. eyes or mouth). Findings point to the importance of investigating both accuracy and eye gaze fixations, since individuals in the primary and secondary groups were only differentiated in the way they attended to specific facial expression. These findings have implications for differentiated interventions focused on improving facial emotion recognition with regard to attending and correctly identifying emotions.

Revealing Unconscious Consumer Reactions to Advertisements That Include Visual Metaphors. A Neurophysiological Experiment

The main challenge of advertising is to catch consumers' attention and evoke in them positive attitudes to consequently achieve product preference and higher purchase intentions. In modern advertising, visual metaphors are widely used due to their effects such as improving advertising recall, enhancing persuasiveness, and generating consumers' positive attitudes. Previous research has pointed out the existence of an "inverted U-curve" that describes a positive relationship between the conceptual complexity of metaphors and consumers' positive reactions to them, which ends where complexity outweighs comprehension. Despite the dominance of visual metaphors in modern advertising, academic research on this topic has been relatively sparse. The inverted U-curve pattern has been validated regarding ad appreciation, ad liking, and purchase intention by using declarative methods. However, at present, there is no evidence of consumers' neurophysiological responses to visual metaphors included in advertising. Given this gap, the aim of this research is to assess consumer neurophysiological responses to print advertisements that include visual metaphors, using neuroscience-based techniques. Forty-three participants (22W-21M) were exposed to 28 stimuli according to three levels of visual complexity, while their reactions were recorded with an electroencephalogram (EEG), eye tracking (ET), and galvanic skin response (GSR). The results indicated that, regardless of metaphor type, ads with metaphors evoke more positive reactions than non-metaphor ads. EEG results revealed a positive relationship between cognitive load and conceptual complexity that is not mediated by comprehension. This suggests that the cognitive load index could be a suitable indicator of complexity, as it reflects the amount of cognitive resources needed to process stimuli. ET results showed significant differences in the time dedicated to exploring the ads; however, comprehension doesn't mediate this relationship. Moreover, no cognitive load was detected from GSR. ET and GSR results suggest that neither methodology is a suitable measure of cognitive load in the case of visual metaphors. Instead, it seems that they are more related to the attention and/or emotion devoted to the stimuli. Our empirical analysis reveals the importance of using neurophysiological measures to analyze the appropriate use of visual metaphors and to find out how to maximize their impact on advertising effectiveness.

The sampling precision of research in five major areas of psychology

After obtaining a sample of published, peer-reviewed articles from journals with high and low impact factors in social, cognitive, neuro-, developmental, and clinical psychology, we used a priori equations recently derived by Trafimow (Educational and Psychological Measurement, 77, 831-854, 2017; Trafimow & MacDonald in Educational and Psychological Measurement, 77, 204-219, 2017) to compute the articles' median levels of precision. Our findings indicate that developmental research performs best with respect to precision, whereas cognitive research performs the worst; however, none of the psychology subfields excelled. In addition, we found important differences in precision between journals in the upper versus lower echelons with respect to impact factors in cognitive, neuro-, and clinical psychology, whereas the difference was dramatically attenuated for social and developmental psychology. Implications are discussed.

The nature and extent of emotion recognition and empathy impairments in children showing disruptive behaviour referred into a crime prevention programme

Childhood disruptive behaviour has been linked to later antisocial and criminal behaviour. Emotion recognition and empathy impairments, thought to be caused by inattention to the eye region, are hypothesised to contribute to antisocial and criminal behaviour. This is the first study to simultaneously examine emotion recognition and empathy impairments, their relationship, and the mechanism behind these impairments, in children with disruptive behaviour. We hypothesised that children with disruptive behaviour would exhibit negative emotion recognition and cognitive and affective empathy impairments, but that these impairments would not be due to reduced attention to the eye region. We expected these emotion impairments to be driven by disruptive behaviour. We also expected a relationship between emotion recognition and cognitive empathy only. Ninety-two children with disruptive behaviour, who were participating in a police crime prevention programme and rated by their schoolteacher using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (DB; mean age 8.8 years, 80% male), took part. There was a comparison group of 58 typically developing children (TD; mean age 9.7 years, 78% male). All children completed emotion recognition and empathy tasks, both with concurrent eye tracking to assess social attention. Not only were DB children significantly impaired in negative emotion and neutral emotion recognition, and in cognitive and affective empathy compared to the TD children, but severity of disruptive behaviour also predicted intensity of emotion impairments. There were no differences in social attention to the eye region. Negative emotion recognition and empathy impairments are already present in an identifiable group of children displaying disruptive behaviour. These findings provide evidence to encourage the use of targeted interventions.