Facial Emotion Recognition and Social-Cognitive Correlates of Narcissistic Features

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is associated with both seeming indifference and hypersensitivity to social feedback. This study evaluated whether rejection sensitivity and empathic difficulties in NPD are accounted for by altered facial emotion recognition (FER). Two-hundred non-clinical individuals self-reported NPD features, rejection sensitivity, and empathy and performed an FER task assessing the ability to determine the presence or absence of an emotion when viewing neutral and negative facial stimuli presented at varying emotional intensities (25%, 50%, 75%). Those with higher NPD features were faster at accurately recognizing neutral and low, 25%–intensity emotional stimuli. This response pattern mediated the association between NPD features and increased anger about rejection. Thus, individuals with high NPD traits are hypervigilant toward subtle negative emotions and neutral expressions; this may explain their tendency to experience intense angry feelings when facing the possibility that the others would not meet their need for acceptance.

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“Now I see it, now I don’t”: Determining Threshold Levels of Facial Emotion Recognition for Use in Patient Populations

Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society ◽

10.1017/s1355617715000557 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 21 (7) ◽

pp. 568-572 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Isabelle Chiu ◽

Regina I. Gfrörer ◽

Olivier Piguet ◽

Manfred Berres ◽

Andreas U. Monsch ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Healthy Population ◽

Clinical Settings ◽

Healthy Individuals ◽

Basic Emotions ◽

Threshold Levels ◽

Facial Stimuli ◽

Intensity Rating

AbstractThe importance of including measures of emotion processing, such as tests of facial emotion recognition (FER), as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment is being increasingly recognized. In clinical settings, FER tests need to be sensitive, short, and easy to administer, given the limited time available and patient limitations. Current tests, however, commonly use stimuli that either display prototypical emotions, bearing the risk of ceiling effects and unequal task difficulty, or are cognitively too demanding and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations in FER testing in patient populations, we aimed to define FER threshold levels for the six basic emotions in healthy individuals. Forty-nine healthy individuals between 52 and 79 years of age were asked to identify the six basic emotions at different intensity levels (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, and 125% of the prototypical emotion). Analyses uncovered differing threshold levels across emotions and sex of facial stimuli, ranging from 50% up to 100% intensities. Using these findings as “healthy population benchmarks”, we propose to apply these threshold levels to clinical populations either as facial emotion recognition or intensity rating tasks. As part of any comprehensive social cognition test battery, this approach should allow for a rapid and sensitive assessment of potential FER deficits. (JINS, 2015, 21, 568–572)

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Facial emotion recognition in schizotypy: The role of accuracy and social cognitive bias

Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society ◽

10.1017/s135561771000007x ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 474-483 ◽

Cited By ~ 40

Author(s):

LAURA A. BROWN ◽

ALEX S. COHEN

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Life ◽

Emotion Recognition ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Rating Scale ◽

Life Quality ◽

Recognition Task ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Schizotypal Personality

AbstractFacial emotion recognition deficits have been widely investigated in individuals with schizophrenia; however, it remains unclear whether these deficits reflect a trait-like vulnerability to schizophrenia pathology present in individuals at risk for the disorder. Although some studies have investigated emotion recognition in this population, findings have been mixed. The current study uses a well-validated emotion recognition task, a relatively large sample, and examines the relationship between emotion recognition, symptoms, and overall life quality. Eighty-nine individuals with psychometrically defined schizotypy and 27 controls completed the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire, Penn Emotion Recognition Test, and a brief version of Lehman’s Quality of Life Interview. In addition to labeling facial emotions, participants rated the valence of faces using a Likert rating scale. Individuals with schizotypy were significantly less accurate than controls when labeling emotional faces, particularly neutral faces. Within the schizotypy sample, both disorganization symptoms and lower quality of life were associated with a bias toward perceiving facial expressions as more negative. Our results support previous research suggesting that poor emotion recognition is associated with vulnerability to psychosis. Although emotion recognition appears unrelated to symptoms, it probably operates by means of different processes in those with particular types of symptoms. (JINS, 2010, 16, 474–483.)

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Social cognition impairments in long-term opiate users in treatment

Journal of Psychopharmacology ◽

10.1177/0269881119875981 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (2) ◽

pp. 254-263

Author(s):

Gill Terrett ◽

Kimberly Mercuri ◽

Elizabeth Pizarro-Campagna ◽

Laila Hugrass ◽

H Valerie Curran ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Cognition ◽

Cognitive Functioning ◽

Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Healthy Controls ◽

Facial Mimicry

Background: Long-term opiate users experience pervasive social difficulties, but there has been surprisingly limited research focused on social-cognitive functioning in this population. Aim: The aim of this study was to investigate whether three important aspects of social cognition (facial emotion recognition, theory of mind (ToM) and rapid facial mimicry) differ between long-term opiate users and healthy controls. Methods: The participants were 25 long-term opiate users who were enrolled in opiate substitution programmes, and 25 healthy controls. Facial emotion recognition accuracy was indexed by responses to 60 photographs of faces depicting the six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust). ToM was assessed using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task, which requires participants to infer mental states of others from partial facial cues. Rapid facial mimicry was assessed by recording activity in the zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii muscle regions while participants passively viewed images of happy and angry facial expressions. Results: Relative to the control group, the opiate user group exhibited deficits in both facial emotion recognition and ToM. Moreover, only control participants exhibited typical rapid facial mimicry responses to happy facial expressions. Conclusions: These data indicate that long-term opiate users exhibit abnormalities in three distinct areas of social-cognitive processing, pointing to the need for additional work to establish how social-cognitive functioning relates to functional outcomes in this group. Such work may ultimately inform the development of interventions aimed at improving treatment outcomes for long-term opiate users.

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Clinical symptomatology and facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: Which relationship?

European Psychiatry ◽

10.1016/j.eurpsy.2016.01.066 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 33 (S1) ◽

pp. S96-S96

Author(s):

A. Arous ◽

J. Mrizak ◽

R. Trabelsi ◽

A. Aissa ◽

H. Ben Ammar ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Cognitive Abilities ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Psychiatric Symptoms ◽

Depression Scale ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Psychotic Symptoms ◽

Facial Emotions ◽

Competing Interest

IntroductionPatients with schizophrenia show impairments in social cognitive abilities, such as recognizing facial emotions. However, the relationships between specific deficits of emotion recognition and with clusters of psychotic remain unclear.ObjectivesTo explore whether facial emotion recognition was associated with severity of symptoms and to which presentation of psychotic symptoms.MethodsFacial emotion recognition (FER) were evaluated in 58 patients with stable schizophrenia with a newly validated FER task constructed from photographs of the face of a famous Tunisian actress representing the Ekman's six basic emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise). Symptomatology evaluation comprised the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), the Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS) and the Clinical Global Impressions Scale Improvement and severity (CGI).ResultsPatients who failed to identify anger had significantly higher scores in hyperactivity item (P < 0.0001). The patients who had a difficulty to identify sadness had more grandiosity (P ≤ 0.002). The impairment in happiness recognition was correlated with hallucination (P = 0.007) and delusion (P = 0.024) items. Incapacity to identify fear was associated to lack of judgment and insight (P = 0.004).ConclusionsDeficits in recognition of specific facial emotions may reflect severity of psychiatric symptoms. They may be related to specific clusters of psychotic symptoms, which need to be confirmed in further studies.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

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Social Cognitive Dysfunction Following Pediatric Arterial Ischemic Stroke

Stroke ◽

10.1161/strokeaha.120.032955 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 52 (5) ◽

pp. 1609-1617

Author(s):

Nicholas P. Ryan ◽

Mardee Greenham ◽

Anne L. Gordon ◽

Michael Ditchfield ◽

Lee Coleman ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽

Emotion Recognition ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Resonance Imaging ◽

Arterial Ischemic Stroke ◽

Ischemic Brain

Background and Purpose: Childhood and adolescence coincide with rapid maturation of distributed brain networks supporting social cognition; however, little is known about the impact of early ischemic brain insult on the acquisition of these skills. This study aimed to examine the influence of arterial ischemic stroke (AIS) on facial emotion recognition and theory of mind (ToM) abilities of children and adolescents initially recruited to a single-center, prospective longitudinal study of recovery following AIS. Methods: The study involved 67 participants, including 30 children with AIS (mean time since stroke=5 years) and 37 age-matched typically developing controls who were assessed on measures of cognitive ToM, facial emotion recognition, and affective ToM. Acute clinical magnetic resonance imaging, including diffusion-weighted imaging sequences, were used to evaluate prospective structure-function relationships between acute lesion characteristics (size, location, and arterial territories affected) and long-term social cognitive abilities. Results: Relative to age-matched typically developing controls, children with AIS showed significantly worse performance on measures of basic facial emotion processing, cognitive ToM, and affective ToM. In univariate models, poorer ToM was associated with larger infarcts, combined cortical-subcortical pathology, and involvement of multiple arterial territories. In multivariate analyses, larger lesions and multiterritory infants were predictive of ToM processing but not facial emotion recognition. Poorer cognitive ToM predicted less frequent prosocial behavior and increased peer problems. Conclusions: Social cognitive skills appear vulnerable to disruption from early ischemic brain insult. In the first study to examine social cognition in a prospective cohort of children with AIS, our findings suggest that acute magnetic resonance imaging-based lesion characteristics may have predictive value for long-term social cognitive outcomes and may assist to identify children at elevated risk for social cognitive dysfunction.

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Ecological momentary facial emotion recognition in psychotic disorders

Psychological Medicine ◽

10.1017/s0033291720004419 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-9

Author(s):

Colin A. Depp ◽

Snigdha Kamarsu ◽

Tess F. Filip ◽

Emma M. Parrish ◽

Philip D. Harvey ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Gold Standard ◽

Convergent Validity ◽

Social Cognitive ◽

Psychotic Disorders ◽

Recognition Task ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Psychotic Symptoms ◽

Ecological Momentary

Abstract Background Cognitive tasks delivered during ecological momentary assessment (EMA) may elucidate the short-term dynamics and contextual influences on cognition and judgements of performance. This paper provides initial validation of a smartphone task of facial emotion recognition in serious mental illness. Methods A total of 86 participants with psychotic disorders (non-affective and affective psychosis), aged 19–65, were administered in-lab ‘gold standard’ affect recognition, neurocognition, and symptom assessments. They subsequently completed 10 days of the mobile facial emotion recognition task, assessing both accuracy and self-assessed performance, along with concurrent EMA of psychotic symptoms and mood. Validation focused on task adherence and predictors of adherence, gold standard convergent validity, and symptom and diagnostic group variation. Results The mean rate of adherence to the task was 79%; no demographic or clinical variables predicted adherence. Convergent validity was observed with in-lab measures of facial emotion recognition, and no practice effects were observed on the mobile facial emotion recognition task. EMA reports of more severe voices, sadness, and paranoia were associated with worse performance, whereas mood more strongly associated with self-assessed performance. Conclusion The mobile facial emotion recognition task was tolerated and demonstrated convergent validity with in-lab measures of the same construct. Social cognitive performance, and biased judgements previously shown to predict function, can be evaluated in real-time in naturalistic environments.

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Beeinträchtigtes Erkennen emotionaler Gesichtsausdrücke durch psychiatrische Patientinnen bei Alexithymie

Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie Psychologie und Psychotherapie ◽

10.1024/1661-4747/a000135 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 61 (1) ◽

pp. 7-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Daniel Dittrich ◽

Gregor Domes ◽

Susi Loebel ◽

Christoph Berger ◽

Carsten Spitzer ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Emotion Recognition ◽

Emotional Expression ◽

Depression Scale ◽

Facial Emotion Recognition ◽

Facial Emotion ◽

Check List ◽

Psychosomatische Erkrankungen ◽

Psychiatrische Patienten ◽

Symptom Check List ◽

Tas 20

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Hypothese eines mit Alexithymie assoziierten Defizits beim Erkennen emotionaler Gesichtsaudrücke an einer klinischen Population. Darüber hinaus werden Hypothesen zur Bedeutung spezifischer Emotionsqualitäten sowie zu Gender-Unterschieden getestet. 68 ambulante und stationäre psychiatrische Patienten (44 Frauen und 24 Männer) wurden mit der Toronto-Alexithymie-Skala (TAS-20), der Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Scale (MADRS), der Symptom-Check-List (SCL-90-R) und der Emotional Expression Multimorph Task (EEMT) untersucht. Als Stimuli des Gesichtererkennungsparadigmas dienten Gesichtsausdrücke von Basisemotionen nach Ekman und Friesen, die zu Sequenzen mit sich graduell steigernder Ausdrucksstärke angeordnet waren. Mittels multipler Regressionsanalyse untersuchten wir die Assoziation von TAS-20 Punktzahl und facial emotion recognition (FER). Während sich für die Gesamtstichprobe und den männlichen Stichprobenteil kein signifikanter Zusammenhang zwischen TAS-20-Punktzahl und FER zeigte, sahen wir im weiblichen Stichprobenteil durch die TAS-20 Punktzahl eine signifikante Prädiktion der Gesamtfehlerzahl (β = .38, t = 2.055, p < 0.05) und den Fehlern im Erkennen der Emotionen Wut und Ekel (Wut: β = .40, t = 2.240, p < 0.05, Ekel: β = .41, t = 2.214, p < 0.05). Für wütende Gesichter betrug die Varianzaufklärung durch die TAS-20-Punktzahl 13.3 %, für angeekelte Gesichter 19.7 %. Kein Zusammenhang bestand zwischen der Zeit, nach der die Probanden die emotionalen Sequenzen stoppten, um ihre Bewertung abzugeben (Antwortlatenz) und Alexithymie. Die Ergebnisse der Arbeit unterstützen das Vorliegen eines mit Alexithymie assoziierten Defizits im Erkennen emotionaler Gesichtsausdrücke bei weiblchen Probanden in einer heterogenen, klinischen Stichprobe. Dieses Defizit könnte die Schwierigkeiten Hochalexithymer im Bereich sozialer Interaktionen zumindest teilweise begründen und so eine Prädisposition für psychische sowie psychosomatische Erkrankungen erklären.

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