Intact prioritization of fearful faces during continuous flash suppression in psychopathy

Affective state recognition and in particular the identification of fear is known to be impaired in psychopathy. It is unclear, however, whether this reflects a deficit in basic perception ('fear blindness') or a deficit in later cognitive processing. To test for a perceptual deficit, 63 male incarcerated offenders, assessed with the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), detected fearful, neutral, and happy facial expressions rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression (CFS). Fearful faces were detected faster than neutral and happy faces. There was no reduction of the fear advantage in the 20 offenders diagnosed with psychopathy according to the PCL-R, and there was no correlation between the fear advantage and PCL-R scores. Deficits in the processing of fearful facial expressions in psychopathy may thus not reflect fear blindness, but impairments at later postperceptual processing stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Designing Visual-Arts Education Programs for Transfer Effects: Development and Experimental Evaluation of (Digital) Drawing Courses in the Art Museum Designed to Promote Adolescents' Socio-Emotional Skills

An active engagement with arts in general and visual arts in particular has been hypothesized to yield beneficial effects beyond arts itself. So-called cognitive and socio-emotional “transfer” effects into other domains have been claimed. However, the empirical basis of these hopes is limited. This is partly due to a lack of experimental comparisons, theory-based designs, and objective measurements in the literature on transfer effects of arts education. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to design and experimentally investigate a theory-based visual-arts education program for adolescents aged between 12 and 19 years (M_age = 15.02, SD_age = 1.75). The program was delivered in a museum context in three sessions and was expected to yield specific and objectively measurable transfer effects. To conduct a randomized field trial, three strictly parallelized and standardized art courses were developed, all of which addressed the topic of portrait drawing. The courses mainly differed regarding their instructional focus, which was either on periods of art history, on the facial expression of emotions, or on the self-perception of a person in the context of different social roles. In the first and more “traditional” course portrait drawing was used to better understand how portraits looked like in former centuries. The two other courses were designed in a way that the artistic engagement in portrait drawing was interwoven with practicing socio-emotional skills, namely empathy and emotion recognition in one course and understanding complex self-concept structures in the other. We expected positive socio-emotional transfer effects in the two “psychological” courses. We used an animated morph task to measure emotion recognition performance and a self-concept task to measure the self-complexity of participants before and after all three courses. Results indicate that an instructional focus on drawing the facial expressions of emotions yields specific improvements in emotion recognition, whereas drawing persons in different social roles yields a higher level of self-complexity in the self-concept task. In contrast, no significant effects on socio-emotional skills were found in the course focussing on art history. Therefore, our study provides causal evidence that visual-arts programs situated in an art-museum context can advance socio-emotional skills, when designed properly.

Does Social Exclusion Alter Sensory and Pain Thresholds in Children and Adolescents with Functional Abdominal Pain? - Results from a Preliminary Study

OBJECTIVE

Functional abdominal pain (AP) is a prevalent issue in childhood and adolescence. The contribution of psychosocial factors in the development and maintenance of this health problem is rather unclear, and experimental studies about underlying mechanisms are lacking. This study investigates whether experimentally induced social exclusion decreases sensory and pain thresholds in children suffering from AP.

SUBJECTS

Twenty children/adolescents with AP and 22 healthy controls.

METHODS

Children/adolescents participated in the Cyberball paradigm, which affects an experience of social exclusion. Thermal sensory and pain thresholds were measured before and after Cyberball.

RESULTS

Children/adolescents with AP showed a divergent reaction regarding their sensory threshold after social exclusion: The control group exhibited a tendency toward a decreased sensory threshold whereas the AP group remained stable. Concerning the pain threshold, no effect of social exclusion could be identified. The increase of both thresholds ("numbing") after Cyberball was positively correlated with symptoms of mental health issues.

CONCLUSIONS

This is the first study to investigate changes in sensory and pain thresholds following painful social interactions in a sample of children/adolescents with a chronic pain condition. Results suggest that AP and control children differ in their reaction of sensory thresholds, which might indicate an altered processing of social exclusion. Replication and further methodological improvements are needed.

Processing of Dynamic Affective Information in Adults With ADHD

OBJECTIVE

ADHD has been repeatedly linked to problems in social functioning. Although some theories assume that the emotion recognition deficits are explained by general attentional deficits, mounting evidence suggests that they may actually constitute a distinct impairment. However, it remains unclear whether the deficient processing affects specific emotional categories or may generalize to all basic emotions. The present study aims to investigate these questions by assessing the sensitivity to all six basic emotions in adults with ADHD.

METHOD

The participants judged the emotion onset in animated morph clips displaying facial expressions that slowly changed from neutral to emotional.

RESULTS

ADHD participants exhibited an impaired recognition of sad and fearful facial expressions.

CONCLUSION

The present findings indicate that ADHD is possibly associated with a specific deficit in the recognition of facial emotions signaling negative social feedback.

Risky business! Behavioral bias and motivational salience of rule-violations in children with conduct disorder

Conduct disorder is characterized by both habitual aggression as well as non-aggressive rule-breaking behavior. While a large body of research has focused on aggressive behavior to date, the subtype of non-aggressive rule-breaking behavior is poorly understood. The current study represents a first attempt to directly assess decision biases toward rule-breaking behavior, their motivational salience, and the association with interpersonal factors in conduct disorder. Participants (n = 20 children with conduct disorder and n = 20 healthy controls) played a video game with the goal to deliver a hot pizza by bicycle to a marked location on a two-dimensional city map. In each trial, participants decided whether to use the regular route (streets) or opt for a potential shortcut that was either permitted (bicycle lane) or prohibited (park). The efficiency of the shortcut was parametrically varied to assess individual decision functions. Consistent with our hypotheses, group differences emerged only when taking a shortcut represented a rule violation (park condition), with the conduct disorder group committing significantly more rule violations than controls. Furthermore, conduct disorder children showed a substantial frequency of rule violations even in the absence of shortcut related gains, indicating a pronounced insensitivity towards sanctions. Importantly, this tendency was associated with self-reported impulsivity and rule violations in real life.

Investigating social-contextual determinants of cooperation in incarcerated violent offenders

Antisocial and psychopathic personality traits constitute a severe and treatment resistant form of externalizing psychopathology. While deficits in social information processing have been extensively investigated in these individuals, less is known about their capacity for altruism and cooperation. In particular, no studies to date have investigated whether established social-contextual determinants of cooperation, e.g., group affiliation and number of expected interactions, can motivate cooperative behaviour in antisocial individuals. The present study compared cooperative behaviour of incarcerated violent offenders (N = 52) and controls (N = 46) by using an established social interaction paradigm (Give Some Dilemma) where two players divide monetary units between themselves and the counterpart. Group affiliation (in- vs. out-group) and number of expected interactions (single-trial vs. repeated-trial interactions) were manipulated. Violent offenders as compared to controls shared less monetary units with their counterparts, indicating an overall reduced cooperation. Both groups showed increased cooperation rates towards in-group members and in repeated interactions. Higher psychopathic traits were associated with lower cooperation in single-trial interactions in the violent offender group. Although cooperation was comparably reduced in violent offenders, behaviour in both groups was determined by the number of expected interactions as well as group affiliation, thus providing evidence for equivalent social-contextual determinants.

Empathy and altruistic behavior in antisocial violent offenders with psychopathic traits

Deficiencies in empathic functioning are considered a core characteristic of violent behavior. Enhancing empathy in aggressive populations may thus represent a promising intervention target. Hence, the aims of the present work were two-fold: First, we wanted to thoroughly assess empathic competencies and second, we aimed to investigate effects of an empathy induction on experienced empathy levels and prosocial behavior in a sample of violent offenders relative to matched controls. Empathy was assessed using both self-report as well as objective measures. For the empathy induction, participants were presented with empathy inducing and control videos. To assess the effects of the empathy induction on behavior, participants played a dictator game indicative of prosocial behavior after every video. Violent offenders showed no systematic impairment in empathy measures. Despite lower shares in the dictator game across conditions, the empathy induction led to a substantial increase in prosocial behavior in both groups. Importantly, high psychopathy scores were distinctively associated with lower self-reported empathy levels, an attenuated affective responsiveness to the empathy induction, and less altruistic behavior. Treatment programs aiming to improve empathy should take individual characteristics into account and may be applied to distinctive subgroups rather than to violent offenders per se.

Recognition of peer emotions in children with ADHD: Evidence from an animated facial expressions task

A growing body of literature suggests that ADHD is associated with emotion recognition impairments that may be linked to deficient interpersonal functioning. However, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these recognition impairments is extremely limited. Here, we used dynamic stimuli to investigate whether impaired emotion recognition in children with ADHD may be associated with impairments in perceptual sensitivity. Participants (ADHD: N = 26; Controls: N = 26) viewed video sequences of neutral faces slowly developing into one of the six basic emotional expressions (angry, happy, fearful, sad, disgusted and surprised) and were instructed to indicate via a button press the precise moment at which they were able to correctly recognize the emotional expression. The results showed that compared to controls, children with ADHD exhibited lower accuracy rates across all emotional expressions while there was no evidence for impaired perceptual sensitivity. Thus, the study provides evidence for a generalized categorization impairment across all emotional categories and is consistent with developmental delay accounts of ADHD. Future studies are needed in order to further investigate the developmental course of social cognition deficits in ADHD.

Frontal alpha asymmetry and callous-unemotional traits in imprisoned violent offenders: A pilot study

Based on the approach-withdrawal model of hemispheric asymmetry, anger and aggression have been linked to an approach-related pattern, characterized by stronger relative left-hemispheric anterior cortical activity. Recent work suggests that also in individuals with extremely violent tendencies, such as imprisoned offenders, approach-related asymmetry may be associated with self-reported trait anger and aggression. A putative association between alpha asymmetry and further characteristics relevant for aggression, such as callous-unemotional (CU) traits, remains to be explored. CU traits may increase the probability of aggressive behavior; nevertheless, they may also enable individuals to inhibit and postpone the overt display of aggression until circumstances grant its strongest impact. In the current exploratory study, we measured trait aggression, CU traits, and resting-state EEG asymmetry in the alpha band (8-13 Hz) in imprisoned violent offenders in a German high security prison. Results revealed that particularly trait callousness was associated with stronger relative right-hemispheric anterior cortical activity (i.e., a withdrawal-related pattern). An association between alpha asymmetry and aggression was not replicated. These preliminary findings suggest that, due to the involved emotional and interpersonal detachment, callousness might be withdrawal related, despite its potential to bring about aggressive behavior. They also imply that the identification of putative clinical subtypes in prisoners is required, as varying psychopathology might undermine an association between alpha asymmetry and aggression.

Preliminary evidence for increased parasympathetic activity during social inclusion and exclusion in adolescents with functional abdominal pain

OBJECTIVE

Peer victimization (e.g. social exclusion) has been shown to be associated with physical health problems such as functional somatic complaints and especially symptoms of pain. To date, no study has investigated the mechanisms underlying this association in clinical pediatric samples. The aim of this study was to evaluate the parasympathetic activity during a social exclusion experience in adolescents with functional abdominal pain (FAP).

METHODS

Twenty adolecents with FAP and 21 matched healthy participants were compared regarding parameters of parasympathetic activation before, during, and after participating in the Cyberball-game, a well-established paradigm to induce social exclusion.

RESULTS

Adolescents with FAP showed an increase in parasympathetic activation during both consecutive phases of the Cyberball game (inclusion as well as exclusion condition) whereas the healthy control group remained stable. There were no differences in subjective experience of in- and exclusion between the groups.

CONCLUSION

The parasympathetic activation pattern may indicate altered processing of social stimuli in adolescents with FAP.

Facial Affect Recognition in Violent and Nonviolent Antisocial Behavior Subtypes

Prior studies provide evidence for impaired recognition of distress cues in individuals exhibiting antisocial behavior. However, it remains unclear whether this deficit is generally associated with antisociality or may be specific to violent behavior only. To examine whether there are meaningful differences between the two behavioral dimensions rule-breaking and aggression, violent and nonviolent incarcerated offenders as well as control participants were presented with an animated face recognition task in which a video sequence of a neutral face changed into an expression of one of the six basic emotions. The participants were instructed to press a button as soon as they were able to identify the emotional expression, allowing for an assessment of the perceived emotion onset. Both aggressive and nonaggressive offenders demonstrated a delayed perception of primarily fearful facial cues as compared to controls. These results suggest the importance of targeting impaired emotional processing in both types of antisocial behavior.

Empathy promotes altruistic behavior in economic interactions

What are the determinants of altruism? While economists assume that altruism is mainly driven by fairness norms, social psychologists consider empathy to be a key motivator for altruistic behavior. To unite these two theories, we conducted an experiment in which we compared behavior in a standard economic game that assesses altruism (the so-called Dictator Game) with a Dictator Game in which participants' behavioral choices were preceded either by an empathy induction or by a control condition without empathy induction. The results of this within-subject manipulation show that the empathy induction substantially increased altruistic behavior. Moreover, the increase in experienced empathy predicted over 40% of the increase in sharing behavior. These data extend standard economic theories that altruism is based on fairness considerations, by showing that empathic feelings can be a key motivator for altruistic behavior in economic interactions.

Theory of mind abilities in patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures

BACKGROUND

Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) have been frequently linked to deficits in affect regulation and altered processing of emotionally salient information. However, less is known about how patients suffering from PNES actually process and interpret affective social stimuli. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate basal facial affect recognition as well as mind-reading skills in a sample of patients with PNES and matched control subjects.

METHODS

Patients with PNES (N=15) and healthy controls (N=15) completed self-report questionnaires that measured alexithymia and perceived stress vulnerability. Affect perception was tested using a series of computerized movies of models whose facial expressions slowly change from neutral to full-blown emotions (anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise), allowing for a fine-grained assessment of facial emotion recognition impairments. Further, all participants were presented with the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition, a well-validated video-based test for the evaluation of subtle mind-reading deficits.

RESULTS

Data analyses revealed increased alexithymic traits and, impaired mentalizing skills in individuals with PNES, while basal facial expression recognition was not compromised.

DISCUSSION

The present findings are the first to demonstrate that patients with PNES exhibit several deficits in reasoning about their own and other people's mental states. Patients with PNES may benefit from psychotherapeutic interventions that focus on disturbed affect regulation and aim to enhance emotional awareness.

Temporal estimation of threatening stimuli in social anxiety disorder: investigation of the effects of state anxiety and fearfulness

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Prior studies suggest that particularly negative emotional events tend to be experienced as temporally dilated. Perceptual characteristics of the threat cue (averted or directed angry face), state as well as individual anxiety levels have been shown to contribute to the temporal distortions, but the interplay between these factors is not well understood. The present study investigated the relative contributions of these factors in a first study using clinical sample with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and healthy controls (HC).

METHODS

Participants performed a temporal bisection task (TBT) before and after a stress provocation phase, which served to induce state anxiety. During the TBT task, angry and neutral faces with averted vs. direct gaze were presented for the length of 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400, 1600 ms, and judged regarding their similarity to the standard durations.

RESULTS

A temporal overestimation effect for angry vs. neutral facial expressions was evident in both the HC and the SAD groups. An effect of experimentally induced state anxiety was evident solely in the SAD group, reflected in an overall increased temporal overestimation of angry vs. neutral expressions following the mood manipulation.

LIMITATIONS

The clinical sample may represent a high-functioning group, as the study was conducted on college students. Replication in more heterogeneous SAD samples is needed in order to draw further conclusions.

CONCLUSIONS

These results may be relevant for the understanding of the etiology and maintenance of SAD and potentially for the development of novel intervention methods.

Unemotional traits predict early processing deficit for fearful expressions in young violent offenders: an investigation using continuous flash suppression

BACKGROUND

Research evidence suggests that cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in social information processing may underlie the key aspects associated with the emergence of aggression and psychopathy. Despite extensive research in this field, it is unclear whether this deficit relates to general attentional problems or affects early stages of information processing. Therefore, the aim was to explore the link between aggression, psychopathic traits, and the early processing deficits in young antisocial violent offenders (YAVOs) and healthy controls (CTLs).

METHOD

Participants were presented with rapidly changing Mondrian-like images in one eye, while a neutral or emotional (happy, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised, sad) face was slowly introduced to the other eye. Participants indicated the location in which the face had appeared on the screen, reflecting the time when they became aware of the stimulus. The relative processing advantage was obtained by subtracting mean reaction times for emotional from neutral faces.

RESULTS

The results indicated that individuals with higher levels of unemotional traits tended to exhibit an extensive early processing disadvantage for fearful facial expressions; this relationship was only evident in the YAVO as opposed to the CTL sample.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings indicate that an emotion processing deficit in antisocial individuals is present even at the most basic levels of processing and closely related to certain psychopathic traits. Furthermore, this early processing deficit appears to be highly specific to fearful expressions, which is consistent with predictions made by influential models of psychopathy. The clinical significance and potential implications of the results are discussed.

Subliminal cues bias perception of facial affect in patients with social phobia: evidence for enhanced unconscious threat processing

Socially anxious individuals have been shown to exhibit altered processing of facial affect, especially expressions signaling threat. Enhanced unaware processing has been suggested an important mechanism which may give rise to anxious conscious cognition and behavior. This study investigated whether individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) are perceptually more vulnerable to the biasing effects of subliminal threat cues compared to healthy controls. In a perceptual judgment task, 23 SAD and 23 matched control participants were asked to rate the affective valence of parametrically manipulated affective expressions ranging from neutral to angry. Each trial was preceded by subliminal presentation of an angry/neutral cue. The SAD group tended to rate target faces as “angry” when the preceding subliminal stimulus was angry vs. neutral, while healthy participants were not biased by the subliminal stimulus presentation. The perceptual bias in SAD was also associated with higher reaction time latencies in the subliminal angry cue condition. The results provide further support for enhanced unconscious threat processing in SAD individuals. The implications for etiology, maintenance, and treatment of SAD are discussed.

Threat processing in generalized social phobia: an investigation of interpretation biases in ambiguous facial affect

Facial affect is one of the most important information sources during the course of social interactions, but it is susceptible to distortion due to the complex and dynamic nature. Socially anxious individuals have been shown to exhibit alterations in the processing of social information, such as an attentional and interpretative bias toward threatening information. This may be one of the key factors contributing to the development and maintenance of anxious psychopathology. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether a threat-related interpretation bias is evident for ambiguous facial stimuli in a population of individuals with a generalized Social Anxiety Disorder (gSAD) as compared to healthy controls. Participants judged ambiguous happy/fearful, angry/fearful and angry/happy blends varying in intensity and rated the predominant affective expression. The results obtained in this study do not indicate that gSAD is associated with a biased interpretation of ambiguous facial affect.

Addressing perceptual insensitivity to facial affect in violent offenders: first evidence for the efficacy of a novel implicit training approach

BACKGROUND

Although impaired recognition of affective facial expressions has been conclusively linked to antisocial behavior, little is known about the modifiability of this deficit. This study investigated whether and under which circumstances the proposed perceptual insensitivity can be addressed with a brief implicit training approach.

METHOD

Facial affect recognition was assessed with an animated morph task, in which the participants (44 male incarcerated violent offenders and 43 matched controls) identified the onset of emotional expressions in animated morph clips that gradually changed from neutral to one of the six basic emotions. Half of the offenders were then implicitly trained to direct attention to salient face regions (attention training, AT) using a modified dot-probe task. The other half underwent the same protocol but the intensity level of the presented expressions was additionally manipulated over the course of training sessions (sensitivity to emotional expressions training, SEE training). Subsequently, participants were reassessed with the animated morph task.

RESULTS

Facial affect recognition was significantly impaired in violent offenders as compared with controls. Further, our results indicate that only the SEE training group exhibited a pronounced improvement in emotion recognition.

CONCLUSIONS

We demonstrated for the first time that perceptual insensitivity to facial affect can be addressed by an implicit training that directs attention to salient regions of a face and gradually decreases the intensity of the emotional expression. Future studies should focus on the potential of this intervention to effectively increase empathy and inhibit violent behavior in antisocial individuals.

Investigation of the hostile attribution bias toward ambiguous facial cues in antisocial violent offenders

Aggressive individuals exhibit a strong tendency to attribute hostile intent to the behavior of others, which may lead to provocation and aggravation of socially inappropriate reactions. Limited research has investigated the hostile attribution bias in the perception of facial affect. This study examined a hostile response bias to emotionally ambiguous faces in a population of 55 incarcerated antisocial violent offenders as compared to matched control subjects. Results suggest that aggression is associated with a strong preference to interpret ambiguous stimuli containing proportions of an angry expression as hostile, while there was no evidence for a generally biased interpretation of distress cues under conditions of uncertainty. Thus, the tendency to misinterpret nonverbal cues in social interactions may at least partly underlie aggressive-impulsive behavior in susceptible individuals.

Facial affect perception and mentalizing abilities in female patients with persistent somatoform pain disorder

BACKGROUND

Numerous studies have demonstrated a robust link between alexithymic traits and somatic complaints in patients suffering from psychosomatic disorders, while less is known about disease-related impairments in the processing of affective social information. Deficits in emotion recognition can lead to misinterpretations of social signals and induce distress in interpersonal interactions. This, in turn, might contribute to somatoform symptomatology in affected individuals. The aim of the present study was to investigate basal facial affect recognition as well as higher-order cognitive mind-reading skills in order to further clarify the association between alexithymia and the processing of social affective information in a homogenous sample of patients suffering from somatoform pain.

METHODS

We employed a series of animated morph clips that gradually displayed the onset and development of the six basic emotional expressions to investigate facial affect perception in a female sample of patients diagnosed with persistent somatoform pain disorder (PSPD) and matched healthy controls. In addition, all participants were presented with the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition to explore mind-reading abilities.

RESULTS

Specifically impaired mentalizing skills and increased alexithymic traits were observed in PSPD, while emotional facial expression recognition appeared to be intact in these patients.

CONCLUSIONS

PSPD subjects tend to overattribute inappropriate affective states to others, which could be the consequence of the inability to adequately experience and express their own emotional reactions. This cognitive bias might lead to the experience of poor psychosocial functioning and has the potential to negatively impact the course and outcome of this psychopathology.

Impaired identification of threat-related social information in male delinquents with antisocial personality disorder

The present study aimed to investigate the identification of threat-related facial expressions in aggressive individuals with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Thirty-two male delinquents and matched healthy controls were presented with a series of animated morph-clips that gradually display the onset and development of angry, fearful, and happy facial expressions. ASPD subjects required significantly higher levels of emotional intensity to correctly identify the onset of an angry facial expression as compared to control participants. In contrast, recognition of fearful and happy expressions was unimpaired. These findings suggest a specific deficit in the identification of hostile facial expressions in ASPD populations.

Early predictors of posttraumatic stress in accident victims

This study investigated the predictive value of pretraumatic and peritraumatic variables and early PTSD-like symptoms (within 48 h post-event) in determining the severity of posttraumatic stress in accident victims. Symptom development appears to be related to initial PTSD-like reactions, while demographic variables play a role in predicting symptom severity 6 months post-event.

An European pupil project linked to the scientific aims of the experiment AQUARIUS-XENOPUS on the taxi Soyuz flight Andromede to ISS

The German-French biological experiment AQUARIUS-XENOPUS which flew on the Soyuz flight Andromede to the International Space Station ISS (launched October 21, 2001 in Baikonour/Kazakhstan) was extended by an outreach project. Pupils of class 10 to 12 from Ulm/D and Nancy-Tomblaine/F studied swimming behavior of Xenopus tadpoles on ground. They were instructed to perform all experimental steps following the protocol of similar video recordings on ISS. After the flight, they evaluated the kinetics of swimming of both ground controls and space animals. The pupil project included theoretical components to introduce them to the field of gravitational biology. One feature of the project was the exchange of ideas between pupils by meetings which took place in Ulm (June 2001), Nancy (February 2002) and Paris (May 2002). We consider our approach as a successful way to include young people in space experiments on a cheap cost level and to bring ideas of gravitational biology into the curricula of European schools.