Relationships Between Alexithymia, Affect Recognition, and Empathy After Traumatic Brain Injury

To compare affect recognition by people with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI) for (1) unimodal and context-enriched multimodal media; (2) positive (happy) and negative emotions; and (3) neutral multimodal stimuli. A total of 60 people with moderate to severe TBI and 60 matched controls. (1) facial affect, (2) vocal affect, and (3) multimodal affect. Compared with controls, people with TBI scored significantly lower on both unimodal measures but not on the multimodal measure. Within- group comparisons for people with TBI revealed that they were better at recognizing affect from multimodal than unimodal stimuli. As a group, participants with TBI who were categorized as having impaired facial/vocal affect recognition were less accurate at recognizing all emotions, including happy, than unimpaired participants. Neutral stimuli were more poorly identified by participants with TBI than by those with controls. Context-enriched multimodal stimuli may enhance affect recognition for people with TBI. People with TBI who have impaired affect recognition may have problems identifying both positive (happy) and negative expressions. Furthermore, people with TBI may perceive affect when there is none.

Automated analysis of human affective behavior has attracted increasing attention from researchers in psychology, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, and related disciplines. Promising approaches have been reported, including automatic methods for facial and vocal affect recognition. However, the existing methods typically handle only deliberately displayed and exaggerated expressions of prototypical emotions-despite the fact that deliberate behavior differs in visual and audio expressions from spontaneously occurring behavior. Recently efforts to develop algorithms that can process naturally occurring human affective behavior have emerged. This paper surveys these efforts. We first discuss human emotion perception from a psychological perspective. Next, we examine the available approaches to solving the problem of machine understanding of human affective behavior occurring in real-world settings. We finally outline some scientific and engineering challenges for advancing human affect sensing technology.

This preliminary study investigated the interaction between working memory and social cognition in adolescents and young adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI). It was hypothesized that participants with or without TBI would better recognize social information when working memory or social cognitive load was low, and that adolescents and young adults with TBI would be more affected by increased cognitive demand than their uninjured peers. Eight adolescents and young adults with complicated mild-severe TBI (aged 14-22 years) and eight age- and sex-matched typically developing (TD) adolescents completed computer-based n-back tasks requiring recognition of either face identity or facial affect, with 0-back, 1-, and 2-back conditions. The TBI group had lower scores overall than the TD group, and scores for both groups were lower for affect recognition than identity recognition. Scores for both groups were lower in conditions with a higher working memory load. There was a significant group-by-working memory interaction, with larger group differences in high-working memory conditions. Study results and their potential implications for social outcomes are discussed.

ABSTRACTObjective: To examine sex differences in the effectiveness of a Stories intervention for teaching affect recognition in people with a traumatic brain injury (TBI).Setting: Post-acute rehabilitation facilities.Participants: 203 participants (53 women and 150 men) with moderate to severe TBI were screened. 71 were eligible and randomized to one of three treatment conditions: two affect recognition conditions and an active control (cognition). This paper examines sex differences between the Stories intervention (n = 23, 5 women and 18 men) and the cognitive treatment control (n = 24, 8 women and 16 men).Design: Randomized controlled trial with immediate, 3- and 6-month follow-up post-tests. Interventions were 9 hours of computer-based training with a therapist.Measures: Facial Affect Recognition (DANVA2-AF); Emotional Inference from Stories Test (EIST).Results: A significant treatment effect was observed for the Stories intervention for women, who demonstrated and maintained improved facial affect recognition. In contrast, males in our sample did not benefit from the Stories intervention.Conclusion: This positive finding for the Stories intervention for females contrasts with our conclusions in a previous paper, where an analysis collapsed across sex did not reveal an overall effectiveness of the Stories intervention. This intervention warrants further research and development.

Faces are fundamental stimuli for social interactions since they provide significant information about people’s identity and emotional states. With the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic, global use of preventive measures, such as disposable surgical face masks (DSFMs), has been imposed. The massive use of DSFMs covering a large part of the face could interfere with identity and emotion recognition. Thus, the main aim of the current study was (i) to assess how DSFMs affect identity recognition (Experiment 1), (ii) how DSFMs affect emotion recognition (Experiment 2), and (iii) whether individual empathy levels correlate with emotion recognition with DSFMs. The potential relation between identity and emotion recognition with and without DSFMs was also investigated. Two tasks were administered to 101 healthy participants: (i) the Old-new face memory task aimed to assess whether the learning context (i.e., DSFMs on/off) affects recognition performance, whereas (ii) the Facial affect task explored DSFMs’ effect on emotion recognition. Results from the former showed that the stimuli’s features in the learning stage affect recognition performances; that is, faces wearing DSFMs were better recognized if wearing DSFMs at first exposure and vice versa. Results from the Facial affect task showed that DSFMs lead to reduced disgust, happiness, and sadness recognition. No significant correlation emerged between identity and emotion recognition. The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) was administered to assess affective and cognitive empathy; however, IRI scores did not correlate with either face memory recognition or facial affect recognition. Overall, our results demonstrate (a) a “context effect” for face memory with and without DSFMs; (b) a disruptive effect of DSFMs depending on the expressed emotion; and (c) no correlation between empathy and emotion recognition with DSFMs.

This study compared the ability of children with social phobia and children with no psychiatric disorder to accurately judge facial affect. Fifteen children and adolescents with social phobia and 14 control children were asked to identify emotions depicted in slides from the Pictures of Facial Affect. In addition, they rated their level of anxiety on a pictorial Likert scale prior to and upon completion of the facial recognition task. The results indicated that children with social phobia had significantly poorer facial affect recognition skills than normal controls and reported greater anxiety upon completion of the recognition task. Multivariate analysis revealed significant differences between groups in the number of errors based on the type of facial affect. Posthoc analysis indicated that deficits were most pronounced for facial representations of happiness, sadness, and disgust. The results are discussed in relation to an integrated model of social skills training that includes facial affect recognition training as a integral component in treatment programs for children and adolescents with social phobia. Directions for future research with larger samples of more ethnically diverse children and adolescents are presented.

A – 62 Attention and Inhibitory Control Predict Affect Production in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

BACKGROUNDMedulloblastoma survivors are at risk for social deficits, yet underlying mechanisms are poorly understood.METHODSFacial affect recognition was assessed in 50 medulloblastoma survivors treated with craniospinal radiation (median[range] 21.4[12.5–30.9] years old, 11.0[5.7–22.6] years since diagnosis) and 56 non-cancer age-, sex-, and race-matched controls. Brain activation and connectivity in core regions/nodes of the face perception network (fusiform gyri, occipital gyri, superior temporal sulcus) were examined using structural and functional neuroimaging. Structural networks were constructed from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data and individual node strength and efficiency were assessed. Functional MRI (fMRI) was conducted using a 1-back facial affect recognition task with assessment of regional differences in task-related cerebral blood flow (BOLD). Standardized neurocognitive testing was completed with 24 hours of brain imaging.RESULTSMedulloblastoma survivors performed worse on a behavioral measure of facial affect recognition (P=0.003) compared to matched controls. During the facial affect recognition task, controls demonstrated greater BOLD activation of the left and right fusiform gyri and the left and right middle occipital gyri compared to survivors (P’s<0.05, corrected for multiple comparisons). DTI indicated weaker core node strength in survivors in the right lateral occipital gyri (P=0.02) and efficiency was lower in the left (P=0.01) and right (P=0.03) occipital gyri compared to controls.CONCLUSIONSMedulloblastoma survivors have deficits in facial affect recognition and reduced activation and efficiency in brain regions comprising the face perception network compared to matched controls. Interventions targeting this specific skill and neural network may improve social functioning in survivors.

Many individuals who sustain moderate-severe traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are poor at recognizing emotional expressions, with a greater impairment in recognizing negative (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness, and anger) than positive emotions (e.g., happiness and surprise). It has been questioned whether this "valence effect" might be an artifact of the wide use of static facial emotion stimuli (usually full-blown expressions) which differ in difficulty rather than a real consequence of brain impairment. This study aimed to investigate the valence effect in TBI, while examining emotion recognition across different intensities (low, medium, and high). Twenty-seven individuals with TBI and 28 matched control participants were tested on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). The TBI group was more impaired in overall emotion recognition, and less accurate recognizing negative emotions. However, examining the performance across the different intensities indicated that this difference was driven by some emotions (e.g., happiness) being much easier to recognize than others (e.g., fear and surprise). Our findings indicate that individuals with TBI have an overall deficit in facial emotion recognition, and that both people with TBI and control participants found some emotions more difficult than others. These results suggest that conventional measures of facial affect recognition that do not examine variance in the difficulty of emotions may produce erroneous conclusions about differential impairment. They also cast doubt on the notion that dissociable neural pathways underlie the recognition of positive and negative emotions, which are differentially affected by TBI and potentially other neurological or psychiatric disorders.

Bilan psychologique et neuropsychologique

P02-324 - Increased visual-ventral prefrontal cortical coupling during facial affect recognition

Help Me Cry Again: A Post-stroke Case Study

Both autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and alexithymia are linked to difficulties in facial affect recognition (FAR) together with differences in social brain activity. According to the alexithymia hypothesis, difficulties in emotion processing in ASD can be attributed to increased levels of co-occurring alexithymia. Despite substantial evidence supporting the hypothesis at the behavioral level, the effects of co-occurring alexithymia on brain function during FAR remain unexplored. Data from 120 participants (60 ASD, 60 control) who completed an FAR task were analyzed using functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral measures. The task included both explicit and implicit measures of FAR. Autistic participants were further categorized based on their alexithymia status. Group differences in FAR performance and associated brain activation were investigated. Autistic participants showed lower FAR performance than control participants, regardless of alexithymia status. Imaging revealed 3 cortical clusters with reduced activation in participants with alexithymia compared with ASD participants without alexithymia during explicit FAR, including the left inferior parietal gyrus, cuneus, and middle temporal gyrus. During implicit FAR, ASD participants with alexithymia showed 3 cortical clusters of increased activation, including the left precentral gyrus, right precuneus, and temporoparietal junction. Our study shows an unexpected dissociation between behavior and brain response: While ASD affects FAR performance, only co-occurring alexithymia modulates corresponding social brain activations. Although not supporting the alexithymia hypothesis on the behavioral level, the study highlights the complex relationship between ASD and co-occurring alexithymia, emphasizing the significance of co-occurring conditions in understanding emotion processing in ASD.

The processing of emotional expressions is fundamental for normal socialization and interaction. Reduced responsiveness to the expressions of sadness and fear has been implicated in the development of psychopathy (R. J. R. Blair, 1995). The current study investigates the ability of adult psychopathic individuals to process vocal affect. Psychopathic and nonpsychopathic adults, defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; R. D. Hare, 1991), were presented with neutral words spoken with intonations conveying happiness, disgust, anger, sadness, and fear and were asked to identify the emotion of the speaker on the basis of prosody. The results indicated that psychopathic inmates were particularly impaired in the recognition of fearful vocal affect. These results are interpreted with reference to the low-fear and violence inhibition mechanism models of psychopathy.

The goal of this study was to assess facial affect recognition abilities in subjects with various schizophrenia subtypes and subjects with major depression. A total of six disorganized, 21 paranoid and 18 residual subjects with schizophrenia (DSM-IV criteria) were compared with 21 subjects with major depression (DSM-IV criteria) and 30 matched healthy control subjects. Two experimental tasks requiring the sorting and rating of emotional facial expressions were applied. Disorganized and paranoid subjects showed strong impairments in the sorting of emotional facial expressions. Depressive subjects displayed only minor deficits, and residual subjects were unimpaired. Subjects with disorganized schizophrenia rated emotional facial expressions as more aroused, and depressive subjects rated them as less aroused, than the other study groups. Our study demonstrates strong deficits in facial affect recognition in subjects with schizophrenia and pronounced disorganized or psychotic symptoms. Deficits in facial affect recognition are specific to schizophrenia. They may be considered as a state marker of schizophrenia.