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Computer-generated virtual faces become increasingly realistic including the simulation of emotional expressions. These faces can be used as well-controlled, realistic and dynamic stimuli in emotion research. However, the validity of virtual facial expressions in comparison to natural emotion displays still needs to be shown for the different emotions and different age groups. Thirty-two healthy volunteers between the age of 20 and 60 rated pictures of natural human faces and faces of virtual characters (avatars) with respect to the expressed emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral. Results indicate that virtual emotions were recognized comparable to natural ones. Recognition differences in virtual and natural faces depended on specific emotions: whereas disgust was difficult to convey with the current avatar technology, virtual sadness and fear achieved better recognition results than natural faces. Furthermore, emotion recognition rates decreased for virtual but not natural faces in participants over the age of 40. This specific age effect suggests that media exposure has an influence on emotion recognition. Virtual and natural facial displays of emotion may be equally effective. Improved technology (e.g. better modelling of the naso-labial area) may lead to even better results as compared to trained actors. Due to the ease with which virtual human faces can be animated and manipulated, validated artificial emotional expressions will be of major relevance in future research and therapeutic applications.

Infant cries and facial expressions influence social interactions and elicit caretaking behaviors from adults. Recent neuroimaging studies suggest that neural responses to infant stimuli involve brain regions that process rewards. However, these studies have yet to investigate individual differences in tendencies to engage or withdraw from motivationally relevant stimuli. To investigate this, we used event-related fMRI to scan 17 nulliparous women. Participants were presented with novel infant cries of two distress levels (low and high) and unknown infant faces of varying affect (happy, sad, and neutral) in a randomized, counter-balanced order. Brain activation was subsequently correlated with scores on the Behavioral Inhibition System/Behavioral Activation System scale. Infant cries activated bilateral superior and middle temporal gyri (STG and MTG) and precentral and postcentral gyri. Activation was greater in bilateral temporal cortices for low- relative to high-distress cries. Happy relative to neutral faces activated the ventral striatum, caudate, ventromedial prefrontal, and orbitofrontal cortices. Sad versus neutral faces activated the precuneus, cuneus, and posterior cingulate cortex, and behavioral activation drive correlated with occipital cortical activations in this contrast. Behavioral inhibition correlated with activation in the right STG for high- and low-distress cries relative to pink noise. Behavioral drive correlated inversely with putamen, caudate, and thalamic activations for the comparison of high-distress cries to pink noise. Reward-responsiveness correlated with activation in the left precentral gyrus during the perception of low-distress cries relative to pink noise. Our findings indicate that infant cry stimuli elicit activations in areas implicated in auditory processing and social cognition. Happy infant faces may be encoded as rewarding, whereas sad faces activate regions associated with empathic processing. Differences in motivational tendencies may modulate neural responses to infant cues.

Although disgust has been implicated in moral judgments, the extent to which the influence of disgust on moral judgment is distinct from other negative affective states remains unclear. To address this gap in knowledge, participants in Study 1 were randomized to a disgust (hand submersion in imitation vomit), discomfort (hand submersion in ice water), or neutral (hand submersion in room temperature water) affect condition while moral judgments of offenses were simultaneously assessed. The results showed that participants in the discomfort condition made the most severe moral judgments, particularly for moderate offenses. To examine if disgust may have more of an effect on some moral violations than others, participants in Study 2 were randomized to similar affect inductions while judgments of purity and non-purity offenses were simultaneously assessed. The results showed that those who had their hand submerged in imitation vomit recommended harsher punishment for purity violations relative to moral violations unrelated to purity. The opposite was true for those who submerged their hands in ice water, whereas punishment ratings for purity and non-purity violations did not significantly differ for those who submerged their hands in room temperature water. The implications of these findings for further delineating the specific role of experienced disgust in moral decision-making are discussed.

Anne O'Hare Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Marion Rutherford Royal Hospital for Sick Children Contact author: Susan Peppé, Speech and Hearing Sciences, Queen Margaret University, Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh EH12 8TS, United Kingdom. E-mail: speppe{at}qmu.ac.uk . Purpose: This study aimed to identify the nature and extent of receptive and expressive prosodic deficits in children with high-functioning autism (HFA). Method: Thirty-one children with HFA, 72 typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age, and 33 adults with normal speech completed the prosody assessment procedure, Profiling Elements of Prosodic Systems in Children. Results: Children with HFA performed significantly less well than controls on 11 of 12 prosody tasks ( p < .005). Receptive prosodic skills showed a strong correlation ( p < .01) with verbal mental age in both groups, and to a lesser extent with expressive prosodic skills. Receptive prosodic scores also correlated with expressive prosody scores, particularly in grammatical prosodic functions. Prosodic development in the HFA group appeared to be delayed in many aspects of prosody and deviant in some. Adults showed near-ceiling scores in all tasks. Conclusions: The study demonstrates that receptive and expressive prosodic skills are closely associated in HFA. Receptive prosodic skills would be an appropriate focus for clinical intervention, and further investigation of prosody and the relationship between prosody and social skills is warranted. KEY WORDS: high-functioning autism, prosody, intonation, language, assessment CiteULike     Connotea     Del.icio.us     Digg     Facebook     Reddit     Technorati     Twitter     What's this?

The facial expression of contempt has been regarded to communicate feelings of moral superiority. Contempt is an emotion that is closely related to disgust, but in contrast to disgust, contempt is inherently interpersonal and hierarchical. The aim of this study was twofold. First, to investigate the hypothesis of preferential amygdala responses to contempt expressions versus disgust. Second, to investigate whether, at a neural level, men would respond stronger to biological signals of interpersonal superiority (e.g., contempt) than women. We performed an experiment using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in which participants watched facial expressions of contempt and disgust in addition to neutral expressions. The faces were presented as distractors in an oddball task in which participants had to react to one target face. Facial expressions of contempt and disgust activated a network of brain regions, including prefrontal areas (superior, middle and medial prefrontal gyrus), anterior cingulate, insula, amygdala, parietal cortex, fusiform gyrus, occipital cortex, putamen and thalamus. Contemptuous faces did not elicit stronger amygdala activation than did disgusted expressions. To limit the number of statistical comparisons, we confined our analyses of sex differences to the frontal and temporal lobes. Men displayed stronger brain activation than women to facial expressions of contempt in the medial frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. Conversely, women showed stronger neural responses than men to facial expressions of disgust. In addition, the effect of stimulus sex differed for men versus women. Specifically, women showed stronger responses to male contemptuous faces (as compared to female expressions), in the insula and middle frontal gyrus. Contempt has been conceptualized as signaling perceived moral violations of social hierarchy, whereas disgust would signal violations of physical purity. Thus, our results suggest a neural basis for sex differences in moral sensitivity regarding hierarchy on the one hand and physical purity on the other.

Background Expressed Emotions (EE) are associated with oppositional behavior (OPB) in children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). EE has been linked to altered stress responses in some disorders, but ADHD has not been studied. We test the hypothesis that OPB in ADHD is mediated by altered stress-related cortisol reactivity to EE. Methods Two groups of children (with/without ADHD) and their respective parents were randomly assigned to two different conditions with/without negative emotion and participated in an emotion provocation task. Parents' EE, their ratings of their children's OPB and their children's salivary cortisol levels were measured. Results Low parental warmth was associated with OPB in ADHD. High levels of parental EE elicited a larger cortisol response. Stress-related cortisol reactivity mediated the EE-OPB link for all children. This highlights the general importance of parent-child interactions on externalizing behavior problems. Conclusion High EE is a salient stressor for ADHD children that leads to increased levels of cortisol and OPB. The development of OPB might be mediated by the stress-response to high EE.

Smokers report pleasant reactions to viewing cigarettes, suggesting that smoking cues may be appetitive in nature. Two studies have investigated this hypothesis through physiological assessment. The first study found that smoking cues were physiologically appetitive in nature, with dampened startle response to smoking pictures in comparison to neutral pictures. The second found that smoking pictures did not modulate the startle response, suggesting such cues may not be physiologically appetitive. The goal of the present study was to further investigate how participants' motivation to quit smoking might modulate responses to smoking cues. Twenty-two nicotine-dependent smokers viewed standardized pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, and smoking pictures. Eleven of the subjects reported no intent to quit (precontemplators) and 11 reported planning to quit within the next 6 months (contemplators). Acoustic startle probes were randomly administered while subjects viewed the pictures, and eyeblink startle magnitude was measured with electromyography (EMG). As a whole, participants exhibited dampened startle responses during smoking pictures, relative to unpleasant pictures. Precontemplators showed robust startle inhibition to smoking pictures, in comparison to both neutral and unpleasant pictures. Contemplators, however, showed blunted unpleasant picture augmentation and a lack of startle inhibition for pleasant pictures. These findings are consistent with the idea that smoking pictures are appetitive in nature. Furthermore, they suggest that smokers at a later stage of change may exhibit a lesser response.

There exists a stereotype that women are more expressive than men; however, research has almost exclusively focused on a single facial behavior, smiling. A large-scale study examines whether women are consistently more expressive than men or whether the effects are dependent on the emotion expressed. Studies of gender differences in expressivity have been somewhat restricted to data collected in lab settings or which required labor-intensive manual coding. In the present study, we analyze gender differences in facial behaviors as over 2,000 viewers watch a set of video advertisements in their home environments. The facial responses were recorded using participants' own webcams. Using a new automated facial coding technology we coded facial activity. We find that women are not universally more expressive across all facial actions. Nor are they more expressive in all positive valence actions and less expressive in all negative valence actions. It appears that generally women express actions more frequently than men, and in particular express more positive valence actions. However, expressiveness is not greater in women for all negative valence actions and is dependent on the discrete emotional state.

Can taking the perspective of other people modify our own affective responses to stimuli? To address this question, we examined the neurobiological mechanisms supporting the ability to take another person’s perspective and thereby emotionally experience the world as they would. We measured participants’ neural activity as they attempted to predict the emotional responses of two individuals that differed in terms of their proneness to experience negative affect. Results showed that behavioral and neural signatures of negative affect (amygdala activity and a distributed multivoxel pattern reflecting affective negativity) simulated the presumed affective state of the target person. Furthermore, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)—a region implicated in mental state inference—exhibited a perspective-dependent pattern of connectivity with the amygdala, and the multivoxel pattern of activity within the mPFC differentiated between the two targets. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on perspective-taking and self-regulation.

This study examined infants' negative emotionality as moderating the effect of parent—child mutually responsive orientation (MRO) on children's self-regulation (n = 102). Negative emotionality was observed in angereliciting episodes and in interactions with parents at 7 months. MRO was coded in naturalistic interactions at 15 months. Self-regulation was measured at 25 months in effortful control battery and as self-regulated compliance to parental requests and prohibitions. Negative emotionality moderated the effects of mother—child, but not father—child, MRO. Highly negative infants were less self-regulated when they were in unresponsive relationships (low MRO), but more self-regulated when in responsive relationships (high MRO). For infants not prone to negative emotionality, there was no link between MRO and self-regulation. The \"regions of significance\" analysis supported the differential susceptibility model not the diathesis—stress model.