Parents' Emotion‐Related Beliefs,Behaviours, and Skills Predict Children's Recognition of Emotion

Children who are able to recognize others' emotions are successful in a variety of socioemotional domains, yet we know little about how school‐aged children's abilities develop, particularly in the family context. We hypothesized that children develop emotion recognition skill as a function of parents' own emotion‐related beliefs, behaviours, and skills. We examined parents' beliefs about the value of emotion and guidance of children's emotion, parents' emotion labelling and teaching behaviours, and parents' skill in recognizing children's emotions in relation to their school‐aged children's emotion recognition skills. Sixty‐nine parent–child dyads completed questionnaires, participated in dyadic laboratory tasks, and identified their own emotions and emotions felt by the other participant from videotaped segments. Regression analyses indicate that parents' beliefs, behaviours, and skills together account for 37% of the variance in child emotion recognition ability, even after controlling for parent and child expressive clarity. The findings suggest the importance of the family milieu in the development of children's emotion recognition skill in middle childhood and add to accumulating evidence suggesting important age‐related shifts in the relation between parental emotion socialization and child emotional development. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Facial emotion recognition in Williams syndrome and Down syndrome: A matching and developmental study

In this study both the matching and developmental trajectories approaches were used to clarify questions that remain open in the literature on facial emotion recognition in Williams syndrome (WS) and Down syndrome (DS). The matching approach showed that individuals with WS or DS exhibit neither proficiency for the expression of happiness nor specific impairments for negative emotions. Instead, they present the same pattern of emotion recognition as typically developing (TD) individuals. Thus, the better performance on the recognition of positive compared to negative emotions usually reported in WS and DS is not specific of these populations but seems to represent a typical pattern. Prior studies based on the matching approach suggested that the development of facial emotion recognition is delayed in WS and atypical in DS. Nevertheless, and even though performance levels were lower in DS than in WS, the developmental trajectories approach used in this study evidenced that not only individuals with DS but also those with WS present atypical development in facial emotion recognition. Unlike in the TD participants, where developmental changes were observed along with age, in the WS and DS groups, the development of facial emotion recognition was static. Both individuals with WS and those with DS reached an early maximum developmental level due to cognitive constraints.     

On the advantage of being left-handed in volleyball: further evidence of the specificity of skilled visual perception

High ball speeds and close distances between competitors require athletes in interactive sports to correctly anticipate an opponent's intentions in order to render appropriate reactions. Although it is considered crucial for successful performance, such skill appears impaired when athletes are confronted with a left-handed opponent, possibly because of athletes' reduced perceptual familiarity with rarely encountered left-handed actions. To test this negative perceptual frequency effect hypothesis, we invited 18 skilled and 18 novice volleyball players to predict shot directions of left- and right-handed attacks in a video-based visual anticipation task. In accordance with our predictions, and with recent reports on laterality differences in visual perception, the outcome of left-handed actions was significantly less accurately predicted than the outcome of right-handed attacks. In addition, this left-right bias was most distinct when predictions had to be based on preimpact (i.e., before hand-ball contact) kinematic cues, and skilled players were generally more affected by the opponents' handedness than were novices. The study's findings corroborate the assumption that skilled visual perception is attuned to more frequently encountered actions.     

情绪加工的脑机制研究及其现状

本文从情绪的效价载荷及其脑功能成像研究、面部表情的识别及其脑功能成像研究以及情绪的诱发及其脑功能成像研究等三方面介绍了情绪加工的脑机制及其研究现状。从现有的研究成果来看,大脑皮层在加工不同效价载荷的情绪时具有很大的重叠性;有关面部表情识别的研究表明,不同的神经环路负责调节对不同面部表情的反应;有关诱发的情绪的研究表明,前扣带回皮层在表征实验诱发的情绪时扮演着一个非常重要的角色。文章最后指出了情绪研究目前面临的一些问题,并指出在我国开展情绪的脑机制研究的重要意义。     

Perceived motivational climate influences athletes’ emotion regulation strategies,emotions, and psychobiosocial experiences

The purpose of the study was to investigate whether athletes’ perceptions about the motivational climate created by their coach influence emotion regulation strategies (i.e., cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression), emotions, and psychobiosocial experiences of athletes. A sample of 459 competitive athletes (201 women, 258 men), aged 16–35 years, drawn from individual and team sports, completed self-assessment measures of perceived motivational climate, emotion regulation, sport emotions, and psychobiosocial experiences. Main results from structural equation modeling showed that perceived mastery climate was positively related to cognitive reappraisal, pleasant emotions, and psychobiosocial experiences, while perceived performance climate was positively related to expressive suppression and unpleasant emotions. Moreover, mediation analysis showed perceived mastery climate to have positive indirect effects on pleasant emotions and psychobiosocial experiences via cognitive reappraisal, while performance climate had indirect effects on unpleasant emotions via expressive suppression. Overall findings suggest that the type of motivational climate created by the coach has consequences in terms of athletes’ emotion regulation strategies, emotions, and psychobiosocial experiences.     

Shyness and emotion‐processing skills in preschoolers: a 6‐month longitudinal study

The present study utilized a short‐term longitudinal research design to examine the hypothesis that shyness in preschoolers is differentially related to different aspects of emotion processing. Using teacher reports of shyness and performance measures of emotion processing, including (1) facial emotion recognition, (2) non‐facial emotion recognition, and (3) emotional perspective‐taking, we examined 337 Head Start attendees twice at a 24‐week interval. Results revealed significant concurrent and longitudinal relationships between shyness and facial emotion recognition, and either minimal or non‐existent relationships between shyness and the other aspects of emotion processing. Correlational analyses of concurrent assessments revealed that shyness predicted poorer facial emotion recognition scores for negative emotions (sad, angry, and afraid), but not a positive emotion (happy). Analyses of change over time, on the other hand, revealed that shyness predicted change in facial emotion recognition scores for all four measured emotions. Facial emotion recognition scores did not predict changes in shyness. Results are discussed with respect to expanding the scope of research on shyness and emotion processing to include time‐dependent studies that allow for the specification of developmental processes. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

背景表情对目标表情知觉的影响：中美跨文化比较

随机选取中美大学生各30名,探讨在中西方文化背景下,背景表情对个体知觉目标表情是否会产生影响。结果:（1）当有背景表情时,中国被试对目标表情强度评定的时间比无背景表情时的评定时间长;且背景表情与目标表情一致时,中国被试判断目标表情的强度最强;不一致时,则最弱;而美国被试对目标表情强度的评分及反应时不受背景表情的影响。（2）当背景表情发生变化时,中国被试对于图片的再认正确率显著高于美国被试。结论：美国被试会将注意力放在目标表情上,不易受背景表情的影响,而中国被试对目标表情的判断会受到背景表情的影响。     

Social Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis: a Meta-Analysis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with cognitive decline and impairment in social functioning. Accumulating evidence suggests that patients with MS are impaired in social cognition, including theory of mind (ToM) and emotion recognition. In this meta-analysis of 24 studies, facial emotion recognition and ToM performances of 989 patients with MS and 836 healthy controls were compared. MS was associated with significant impairments with medium effect sizes in ToM (d?=?0.57) and facial emotion recognition (d?=?0.61). Among individual emotions recognition of fear and anger were particularly impaired. The severity of social cognitive deficits was significantly associated with non-social cognitive impairment. These deficits in social cognition may underpin difficulties in social functioning in MS. However, there is a need for further studies investigating the longitudinal evolution of social cognitive deficits and their neural correlates in MS.     

Recognition of emotional facial expressions: the role of facial and contextual information in the accuracy of recognition

Recognition of emotional facial expressions is a central area in the psychology of emotion. This study presents two experiments. The first experiment analyzed recognition accuracy for basic emotions including happiness, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust. 30 pictures (5 for each emotion) were displayed to 96 participants to assess recognition accuracy. The results showed that recognition accuracy varied significantly across emotions. The second experiment analyzed the effects of contextual information on recognition accuracy. Information congruent and not congruent with a facial expression was displayed before presenting pictures of facial expressions. The results of the second experiment showed that congruent information improved facial expression recognition, whereas incongruent information impaired such recognition.     

Psycho-perceptual-motor skills are deemed critical to save the penalty corner in international field hockey

In interceptive sports such as field hockey goalkeeping, the psycho-perceptual-motor skill anticipation is vital for performance due to the extreme time constraints associated with saving a goal. The purpose of this study was to understand the beliefs and attitudes of international field hockey goalkeepers and coaches regarding anticipation of the drag-flick in penalty corners. Seven international goalkeepers and five international coaches were interviewed. Using a constructionist and relativist approach to reflexive thematic data analysis, we identified three overarching themes to anticipate the drag-flick, namely, pre-match video analysis, perception and action, and psychological factors. In the first theme, participants reported that pre-match video analysis allowed goalkeepers and coaches to identify the attacking capabilities of opposing teams. This analysis was used to inform defensive structure and save the drag-flick. In the second theme, participants reported that perception and action, which consisted of the pick-up of visual cues and movement execution, was important to anticipate the drag-flick. Goalkeepers reported that they rely heavily on ball flight, which was central in coaches’ approaches in training drills such as to use a projection machine that presents only ball flight information. The third theme, psychological factors, encompassed, psychological resilience, arousal regulation, leadership and communication, and sports intelligence, which were thought to be vital to facilitate anticipation of the drag-flick. The findings of this study have important implications for how to assess and train visual anticipation in time-constrained interceptive sports skills.     

贝叶斯决策理论对复杂运动决策中运动预期的启发——以网球和足球为例

对运动决策的研究是认知运动心理学的一个重要领域。运动预期被认为是运动决策的核心, 受到运动学和非运动学信息的影响。其中, 对运动预期研究的一个关键问题是探讨不同信息源对运动结果预期的贡献以及两者之间的相互作用。研究者运用贝叶斯决策理论解释运动预期中不同信息的整合过程, 分析运动员在复杂的竞赛情景中如何做出最佳决策, 尤其是对该理论在网球和足球领域的潜在应用进行分析。在不确定的情况下, 竞技体育中并非所有的选择、结果或概率都是已知的, 故有研究者认为概率论和经典的决策理论不能有效解决此类问题。然而新近提出的启发式近似, 为运动员在贝叶斯框架下如何快速做出选择提供了理论依据：首先, 在复杂和有时间压力的竞赛情景中, 启发式近似假设运动员依据竞赛中不同信息源的不确定程度, 很可能选择在运动学信息和情境先验之间进行切换启发式, 提高运动预期的效率。其次, 判断效用通过卷积效应影响两种信息源的整合, 降低情境先验的影响程度。     

Facial expressions allow inference of both emotions and their components

Following Yik and Russell (1999) a judgement paradigm was used to examine to what extent differential accuracy of recognition of facial expressions allows evaluation of the well-foundedness of different theoretical views on emotional expression. Observers judged photos showing facial expressions of seven emotions on the basis of: (1) discrete emotion categories; (2) social message types; (3) appraisal results; or (4) action tendencies, and rated their confidence in making choices. Emotion categories and appraisals were judged significantly more accurately and confidently than messages or action tendencies. These results do not support claims of primacy for message or action tendency views of facial expression. Based on a componential model of emotion it is suggested that judges can infer components from categories and vice versa.     

The Recognition of Adults' and Children's Facial Expressions of Emotions

The purpose of this study was to compare the recognition performance of children who identified facial expressions of emotions using adults' and children's stimuli. The subjects were 60 children equally distributed in six subgroups as a function of sex and three age levels: 5, 7, and 9 years. They had to identify the emotion that was expressed in 48 stimuli (24 adults' and 24 children's expressions) illustrating six emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness. The task of the children consisted of selecting the facial stimulus that best matched a short story that clearly described an emotional situation. The results indicated that recognition performances were significantly affected by the age of the subjects: 5-year-olds were less accurate than 7- and 9-year-olds who did not differ among themselves. There were also differences in recognition levels between emotions. No effects related to the sex of the subjects and to the age of the facial stimuli were observed.     

Recognition of facial emotions in neuropsychiatric disorders

Recognition of facial emotions represents an important aspect of interpersonal communication and is governed by select neural substrates. We present data on emotion recognition in healthy young adults utilizing a novel set of color photographs of evoked universal emotions. In addition, we review the recent literature on emotion recognition in psychiatric and neurologic disorders, and studies that compare different disorders.     

Neural systems for recognition of emotional prosody: a 3-D lesion study

Which brain regions are associated with recognition of emotional prosody? Are these distinct from those for recognition of facial expression? These issues were investigated by mapping the overlaps of co-registered lesions from 66 brain-damaged participants as a function of their performance in rating basic emotions. It was found that recognizing emotions from prosody draws on the right frontoparietal operculum, the bilateral frontal pole, and the left frontal operculum. Recognizing emotions from prosody and facial expressions draws on the right frontoparietal cortex, which may be important in reconstructing aspects of the emotion signaled by the stimulus. Furthermore, there were regions in the left and right temporal lobes that contributed disproportionately to recognition of emotion from faces or prosody, respectively.     

The effects of context on facial affect recognition

In a sample of 325 college students, we examined how context influences judgments of facial expressions of emotion, using a newly developed facial affect recognition task in which emotional faces are superimposed upon emotional and neutral contexts. This research used a larger sample size than previous studies, included more emotions, varied the intensity level of the expressed emotion to avoid potential ceiling effects from very easy recognition, did not explicitly direct attention to the context, and aimed to understand how recognition is influenced by non-facial information, both situationally-relevant and situationally-irrelevant. Both accuracy and RT varied as a function of context. For all facial expressions of emotion other than happiness, accuracy increased when the emotion of the face and context matched, and decreased when they mismatched. For all emotions, participants responded faster when the emotion of the face and image matched and slower when they mismatched. Results suggest that the judgment of the facial expression is itself influenced by the contextual information instead of both being judged independently and then combined. Additionally, the results have implications for developing models of facial affect recognition and indicate that there are factors other than the face that can influence facial affect recognition judgments.     

The role of motion and intensity in deaf children’s recognition of real human facial expressions of emotion

There is substantial evidence to suggest that deafness is associated with delays in emotion understanding, which has been attributed to delays in language acquisition and opportunities to converse. However, studies addressing the ability to recognise facial expressions of emotion have produced equivocal findings. The two experiments presented here attempt to clarify emotion recognition in deaf children by considering two aspects: the role of motion and the role of intensity in deaf children’s emotion recognition. In Study 1, 26 deaf children were compared to 26 age-matched hearing controls on a computerised facial emotion recognition task involving static and dynamic expressions of 6 emotions. Eighteen of the deaf and 18 age-matched hearing controls additionally took part in Study 2, involving the presentation of the same 6 emotions at varying intensities. Study 1 showed that deaf children’s emotion recognition was better in the dynamic rather than static condition, whereas the hearing children showed no difference in performance between the two conditions. In Study 2, the deaf children performed no differently from the hearing controls, showing improved recognition rates with increasing rates of intensity. With the exception of disgust, no differences in individual emotions were found. These findings highlight the importance of using ecologically valid stimuli to assess emotion recognition.     

Infant and maternal responses to emotional facial expressions: A longitudinal study

The current longitudinal study (N = 107) examined mothers’ facial emotion recognition using reaction time and their infants’ affect-based attention at 5, 7, and 14 months of age using eyetracking. Our results, examining maternal and infant responses to angry, fearful and happy facial expressions, show that only maternal responses to angry facial expressions were robustly and positively linked across time points, indexing a consistent trait-like response to social threat among mothers. However, neither maternal responses to happy or fearful facial expressions nor infant responses to all three facial emotions show such consistency, pointing to the changeable nature of facial emotion processing, especially among infants. In general, infants’ attention toward negative emotions (i.e., angry and fear) at earlier timepoints was linked to their affect-biased attention for these emotions at 14 months but showed greater dynamic change across time. Moreover, our results provide limited evidence for developmental continuity in processing negative emotions and for the bidirectional interplay of infant affect-biased attention and maternal facial emotion recognition. This pattern of findings suggests that infants’ affect-biased attention to facial expressions of emotion are characterized by dynamic changes.     

Recognition of facial affect in Borderline Personality Disorder

Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been described as emotionally hyperresponsive, especially to anger and fear in social contexts. The aim was to investigate whether BPD patients are more sensitive but less accurate in terms of basic emotion recognition, and show a bias towards perceiving anger and fear when evaluating ambiguous facial expressions. Twenty-five women with BPD were compared with healthy controls on two different facial emotion recognition tasks. The first task allowed the assessment of the subjective detection threshold as well as the number of evaluation errors on six basic emotions. The second task assessed a response bias to blends of basic emotions. BPD patients showed no general deficit on the affect recognition task, but did show enhanced learning over the course of the experiment. For ambiguous emotional stimuli, we found a bias towards the perception of anger in the BPD patients but not towards fear. BPD patients are accurate in perceiving facial emotions, and are probably more sensitive to familiar facial expressions. They show a bias towards perceiving anger, when socio-affective cues are ambiguous. Interpersonal training should focus on the differentiation of ambiguous emotion in order to reduce a biased appraisal of others.     

Making sense of self-conscious emotion: linking theory of mind and emotion in children with autism

Self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment and shame are associated with 2 aspects of theory of mind (ToM): (a) the ability to understand that behavior has social consequences in the eyes of others and (b) an understanding of social norms violations. The present study aimed to link ToM with the recognition of self-conscious emotion. Children with and without autism identified facial expressions conscious of self-conscious and non-self-conscious emotions from photographs. ToM was also measured. Children with autism performed more poorly than comparison children at identifying self-conscious emotions, though they did not differ in the recognition of non-self-conscious emotions. When ToM ability was statistically controlled, group differences in the recognition of self-conscious emotion disappeared. Discussion focused on the links between ToM and self-conscious emotion.