Lower Sensitivity to Happy and Angry Facial Emotions in Young Adults with Psychiatric Problems

A friend in need is a friend indeed: Acute tandem rope skipping enhances inter-brain synchrony of socially avoidant individuals

Team-based physical activity (PA) can improve social cognition; however, few studies have investigated the neurobiological mechanism underlying this benefit. Accordingly, a hyper-scanning protocol aimed to determine whether the interbrain synchrony (IBS) is influenced by an acute bout of team-based PA (i.e., tandem rope skipping). Specifically, we had socially avoidant participants (SOA, N=15 dyads) and their age-matched controls (CO, N=16 dyads) performed a computer-based cooperative task while EEG was recorded before and after two different experimental conditions (i.e., 30-min of team-based PA versus sitting). Phase locking value (PLV) was used to measure IBS. Results showed improved frontal gamma band IBS after the team-based PA compared to sitting when participants received successful feedback in the task (Mskipping = 0.016, Msittting = -0.009, p = 0.082, ηp2 = 0.387). The CO group showed a larger change in frontal and central gamma band IBS when provided failure feedback in the task (Mskipping = 0.017, Msittting = -0.009, p = 0.075, ηp2 = 0.313). Thus, results suggest that socially avoidant individuals may benefit from team-based PA via improved interbrain synchrony. Moreover, our findings deepen our understanding of the neurobiological mechanism by which team-based PA may improve social cognition among individuals with or without social avoidance.

The role of the differential outcomes procedure and schizotypy in the recognition of dynamic facial expressions of emotions

Emotional facial expression recognition is a key ability for adequate social functioning. The current study aims to test if the differential outcomes procedure (DOP) may improve the recognition of dynamic facial expressions of emotions and to further explore whether schizotypal personality traits may have any effect on performance. 183 undergraduate students completed a task where a face morphed from a neutral expression to one of the six basic emotions at full intensity over 10 s. Participants had to press spacebar as soon as they identified the emotion and choose which had appeared. In the first block, participants received no outcomes. In the second block, a group received specific outcomes associated to each emotion (DOP group), while another group received non-differential outcomes after correctly responding (NOP group). Employing generalized linear models (GLMs) and Bayesian inference we estimated different parameters to answer our research goals. Schizotypal personality traits did not seem to affect dynamic emotional facial expression recognition. Participants of the DOP group were less likely to respond incorrectly to faces showing Fear and Surprise at fewer intensity levels. This may suggest that the DOP could lead to better identification of the main features that differentiate each facial expression of emotion.

Links between social avoidance and frontal alpha asymmetry during processing emotional facial stimuli: An exploratory study

Individuals who are socially avoidant actively remove themselves from opportunities for social interaction and have a strong desire for solitude. Although social avoidance is associated with a host of adjustment difficulties, its neural substrates remain under-explored. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory study to compare electroencephalography (EEG) frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) scores during processing emotional facial stimuli in socially avoidant and non-withdrawn comparison individuals. From an original sample of N = 384 undergraduate students, 25 avoidant and 27 comparison individuals were identified. For this subset of participants, EEG modulations and self-reported experience ratings during a picture processing task were assessed. Among the results, the socially avoidant group's ratings of positive stimuli were significantly lower than the non-withdrawn comparison group. The socially avoidant group also had significantly lower FAA scores in response to positive stimuli than the comparison group. Further, asymmetry scores of the comparison group in the positive conditions were higher than in the negative and neutral conditions. However, there were no significant differences between these three conditions in the socially avoidant group. Our results suggest that socially avoidant individuals may eschew interpersonal relationships because of a relatively greater right hemisphere cortical activity, which may contribute to a withdrawal motivation when confronted with negative emotional stimuli in social contexts.

Dissociating Profiles of Social Cognitive Disturbances Between Mixed Personality and Anxiety Disorder

BACKGROUND

An emerging body of research has begun to elucidate disturbances to social cognition in specific personality disorders (PDs). No research has been conducted on patients with Mixed Personality Disorder (MPD), however, who meet multiple diagnostic criteria. Further, very few studies have compared social cognition between patients with PD and those presenting with symptomatic diagnoses that co-occur with personality pathologies, such as anxiety disorder (AD). The aim of this study was to provide a detailed characterization of deficits to various aspects of social cognition in MPD and dissociate impairments specific to MPD from those exhibited by patients with AD who differ in the severity of personality pathology.

METHOD

Building on our previous research, we administered a large battery of self-report and performance-based measures of social cognition to age-, sex- and education-matched groups of patients with MPD or AD, and healthy control participants (HCs; n = 29, 23, and 54, respectively). This permitted a detailed profiling of these clinical groups according to impairments in emotion recognition and regulation, imitative control, low-level visual perspective taking, and empathic awareness and expression.

RESULTS

The MPD group demonstrated poorer emotion recognition for negative facial expressions relative to both HCs and AD. Compared with HCs, both clinical groups also performed significantly worse in visual perspective taking and interference resolution, and reported higher personal distress when empathizing and more state-oriented emotion regulation.

CONCLUSION

We interpret our results to reflect dysfunctional cognitive control that is common to patients with both MPD and AD. Given the patterns of affective dispositions that characterize these two diagnostic groups, we suggest that prolonged negative affectivity is associated with inflexible styles of emotion regulation and attribution. This might potentiate the interpersonal dysfunction exhibited in MPD, particularly in negatively valenced and challenging social situations.

Emotion sensitivity and self-reported symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder across the lifespan: A population-based sample approach

BACKGROUND

Individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms show deficits in emotion processing, but results of prior studies have been conflicting, and little is known about developmental trajectories of emotion processing over time. We examined the association between GAD symptoms and sensitivity to recognizing emotional facial expressions (emotion sensitivity: ES) for three emotions (happiness, anger, fear) in a large, diverse, population-based sample. We hypothesized that higher anxiety scores would be associated with poorer performance, and expected that ES performance and anxiety scores would decline across the lifespan.

METHOD

Participants were 7,176 responders to a web-based ES study (age range = 10-96 years old).

RESULTS

Higher GAD-7 scores were associated with poorer ES performance for all emotion categories (happiness, anger, fear). The relationship between GAD-7 and ES scores remained significant after controlling for the effects of age and sex, and there was no significant interaction, indicating that the relationship does not change across age. Age significantly predicted ES and GAD-7 scores across emotions, with older ages showing lower ES scores and lower anxiety.

CONCLUSIONS

In the largest study of its kind, GAD symptoms were associated with impaired ES performance across three emotion types. Future research should explore the connection between anxiety symptoms, cognitive processing, and social processing to better characterize the mechanisms of how GAD is linked with both social and non-social information processing. Future work may also look at if ES is related over time to changes in anxiety, making it a promising target for intervention.

Deficits in Response Inhibition in Patients with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: The Impaired Self-Protection System Hypothesis

Problems in inhibitory control are regarded in Psychology as a key problem associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They, however, might not be primary deficits, but instead a consequence of inattention. At least two components have been identified and dissociated in studies in regards to inhibitory control: interference suppression, responsible for controlling interference by resisting irrelevant or misleading information, and response inhibition, referring to withholding a response or overriding an ongoing behavior. Poor error awareness and self-monitoring undermine an individual's ability to inhibit inadequate responses and change course of action. In non-social contexts, an individual depends on his own cognition to regulate his mistakes. In social contexts, however, there are many social cues that should help that individual to perceive his mistakes and inhibit inadequate responses. The processes involved in perceiving and interpreting those social cues are arguably part of a self-protection system (SPS). Individuals with ADHD not only present impulsive behaviors in social contexts, but also have difficulty perceiving their inadequate responses and overriding ongoing actions toward more appropriate ones. In this paper, we discuss that those difficulties are arguably a consequence of an impaired SPS, due to visual attention deficits and subsequent failure in perceiving and recognizing accurately negative emotions in facial expressions, especially anger. We discuss evidence that children with ADHD exhibit problems in a series of components involved in the activation of that system and advocate that the inability to identify the anger expressed by others, and thus, not experiencing the fear response that should follow, is, ultimately, what prevents them from inhibiting the ongoing inappropriate behavior, since a potential threat is not registered. Getting involved in high-risk situations, such as reckless driving, could also be a consequence of not registering a threat and thus, not experiencing fear.