Turning a deaf ear to fear: impaired recognition of vocal affect in psychopathic individuals

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.     

Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions and Vocal Tones in Children With Psychopathic Tendencies

The authors investigated the ability of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device scores (P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press), to recognize emotional facial expressions and vocal tones. The Psychopathy Screening Device indexes a behavioral syndrome with two dimensions: affective disturbance and impulsive and conduct problems. Nine children with psychopathic tendencies and 9 comparison children were presented with 2 facial expression and 2 vocal tone subtests from the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (S. Nowicki & M. P. Duke, 1994). These subtests measure the ability to name sad, fearful, happy, and angry facial expressions and vocal affects. The children with psychopathic tendencies showed selective impairments in the recognition of both sad and fearful facial expressions and sad vocal tone. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in their recognition of happy or angry facial expressions or fearful, happy, and angry vocal tones. The results are interpreted with reference to the suggestion that the development of psychopathic tendencies may reflect early amygdala dysfunction (R. J. R. Blair, J. S. Morris, C. D. Frith, D. I. Perrett, & R. Dolan, 1999).     

Recognition of emotion in facial expressions and vocal tones in children with psychopathic tendencies.

The authors investigated the ability of children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, divided according to their Psychopathy Screening Device scores (P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press), to recognize emotional facial expressions and vocal tones. The Psychopathy Screening Device indexes a behavioral syndrome with two dimensions: affective disturbance and impulsive and conduct problems. Nine children with psychopathic tendencies and 9 comparison children were presented with 2 facial expression and 2 vocal tone subtests from the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy (S. Nowicki & M. P. Duke, 1994). These subtests measure the ability to name sad, fearful, happy, and angry facial expressions and vocal affects. The children with psychopathic tendencies showed selective impairments in the recognition of both sad and fearful facial expressions and sad vocal tone. In contrast, the two groups did not differ in their recognition of happy or angry facial expressions or fearful, happy, and angry vocal tones. The results are interpreted with reference to the suggestion that the development of psychopathic tendencies may reflect early amygdala dysfunction (R. J. R. Blair, J. S. Morris, C. D. Frith, D. I. Perrett, & R. Dolan, 1999).     

An inter-hemispheric imbalance in the psychopath’s brain

Psychopathy is associated with two extremities. On the one hand, psychopathic individuals lack any concern for social norms and they are severely poor in maintaining healthy social relationships. In addition, the ability of individuals with psychopathy to feel certain emotions such as empathy, guilt or fear is seriously compromised. In contrast to these deficits, some behaviors and tendencies are exaggerated in psychopathy. For instance, psychopathic individuals display higher than normal impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, aggression and risk-taking. There are indications in the literature that pro-social behavior, as well as the feelings of empathy, guilt and fear are mediated predominantly by regions within the right hemisphere (RH), whereas impulsivity, stimulation-seeking, aggression and risk-taking are linked primarily with left hemisphere (LH) activity. From a neurobiological perspective, it seems that psychopathy may be associated with an altered and imbalanced inter-hemispheric dynamics; a relatively hyperfunctioning LH and/or a hypofunctioning RH. Furthermore, within the psychopathic population, the RH hypofunctioning is more characteristic of primary psychopathy with its affective and interpersonal deficits, while the LH hyperfunctioning is most typical of the secondary psychopathy which is marked by impulsivity and antisocial style.     

Young Offenders’ Emotion Recognition Dysfunction Across Emotion Intensities: Explaining Variation Using Psychopathic Traits,Conduct Disorder and Offense Severity

Antisocial individuals have problems recognizing negative emotions (e.g. Marsh & Blair in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 32:454–465, 2009); however, due to issues with sampling and different methods used, previous findings have been varied. Sixty-three male young offenders and 37 age-, IQ- and socio-economic status-matched male controls completed a facial emotion recognition task, which measures recognition of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise and neutral expressions across 4 emotional intensities. Conduct disorder (YSR), and psychopathic and callous/unemotional traits (YPI) were measured, and offenders’ offense data were taken from the Youth Offending Service’s case files. Relative to controls, offenders were significantly worse at identifying sadness, low intensity disgust and high intensity fear. A significant interaction for anger was also observed, with offenders showing reduced low- but increased high-intensity anger recognition in comparison with controls. Within the young offenders levels of conduct disorder and psychopathic traits explained variation in sadness and disgust recognition, whereas offense severity explained variation in anger recognition. These results suggest that antisocial youths show specific problems in recognizing negative emotions and support the use of targeted emotion recognition interventions for problematic behavior.     

Psychopathy and Identification of Facial Expressions of Emotion

The authors examined the association between psychopathy and identification of facial expressions of emotion. Previous research in this area is scant and has produced contradictory findings (Blair et. al., 2001, 2004; Glass & Newman, 2006; Kosson et al., 2002). One hundred and forty-five male jail inmates, rated using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version participated in a facial affect recognition task. Participants were shown faces containing one of five emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or shame) displayed at one of two different levels of intensity of expression (100% or 60%). The authors predicted that psychopathy would be associated with decreased affect recognition, particularly for sad and fearful emotional expressions, and decreased recognition of less intense displays of facial affect. Results were largely consistent with expectations in that psychopathy was negatively correlated with overall facial recognition of affect, sad facial affect, and recognition of less intense displays of affect. An unexpected negative correlation with recognition of happy facial affect was also found. These results suggest that psychopathy may be associated with a general deficit in affect recognition.     

Psychopathic Traits Associate Differentially to Anger,Disgust and Fear Recognition among Men and Women

Psychopathy is characterized by deficits in empathy and violation of the rights of others. Recent data link psychopathy-based lack of empathy to deficits in emotion recognition (ER), in particular fear and sadness. However, questions remain about emotions like anger and disgust and some studies even report a positive relationship between psychopathy and ER. Notably, the overwhelming majority of these studies have been conducted only with men, and studies in the general population suggest that women have better ER than men. To our knowledge, only two small studies have explicitly examined ER and psychopathy among women and they did find deficits in anger and disgust recognition. Therefore, mixed findings about ER and psychopathy may be due to gender differences that need to be clarified. This study aimed at bridging this gap using a large sample of 129 male (49 %) and 132 female (51 %) participants who completed psychopathy self-reports, and a computerized facial ER task. Among women there were deficits and advantages in ER: High social dominance and lack of anxiety traits were related to decreased fear and anger recognition respectively. Traits characterized by impulsiveness and rebelliousness were associated with better disgust and anger recognition respectively. For men, psychopathic traits characterized by ruthless manipulation of others, as well as lack of fear, were related to deficits recognizing anger. These results suggest that among women some psychopathic traits may confer an advantage in ER and give impetus for studies examining gender differences in the neurobiological substrates and manifestation of the syndrome.     

The Matching of Facial Expressions by Deaf and Hearing Children and Their Production and Comprehension of Emotion Labels

This paper reports the results of three tasks comparing the development of the understanding of facial expressions of emotion in deaf and hearing children. Two groups of hearing and deaf children of elementary school age were tested for their ability to match photographs of facial expressions of emotion, and to produce and comprehend emotion labels for the expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Accuracy data showed comparable levels of performance for deaf and hearing children of the same age. Happiness and sadness were the most accurately matched expressions and the most accurately produced and comprehended labels. Anger was the least accurately matched expression and the most poorly comprehended emotion label. Disgust was the least accurately labeled expression; however, deaf children were more accurate at labeling this expression, and also at labeling fear, than hearing children. Error data revealed that children confused anger with disgust, and fear with surprise. However, the younger groups of deaf and hearing children also showed a tendency to confuse the negative expressions of anger, disgust, and fear with sadness. The results suggest that, despite possible differences in the early socialisation of emotion, deaf and hearing children share a common understanding of the emotions conveyed by distinctive facial expressions.     

Concurrent and prospective associations between facial affect recognition accuracy and childhood antisocial behavior

This study examined the concurrent and prospective associations between children's ability to accurately recognize facial affect at age 8.5 and antisocial behavior at age 8.5 and 10.5 years in a sub sample of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children cohort (5,396 children; 2,644, 49% males). All observed effects were small. It was found that at age 8.5 years, in contrast to nonantisocial children; antisocial children were less accurate at decoding happy and sad expressions when presented at low intensity. In addition, concurrent antisocial behavior was associated with misidentifying expressions of fear as expressions of sadness. In longitudinal analyses, children who misidentified fear as anger exhibited a decreased risk of antisocial behavior 2 years later. The study suggests that concurrent rather than future antisocial behavior is associated with facial affect recognition accuracy. Aggr. Behav. 36:305–314, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

An investigation of basic facial expression recognition in autism spectrum disorders

This study was designed to test three competing hypotheses (impaired configural processing; impaired Theory of Mind; atypical amygdala functioning) to explain the basic facial expression recognition profile of adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In Experiment 1 the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series were presented upright and inverted. Individuals with ASD were significantly less accurate than controls at recognising upright facial expressions of fear, sadness and disgust and their pattern of errors suggested some configural processing difficulties. Impaired recognition of inverted facial expressions suggested some additional difficulties processing the facial features. Unexpectedly, the clinical group misidentified fear as anger. In Experiment 2 feature processing of facial expressions was investigated by presenting stimuli in a piecemeal fashion, starting with either just the eyes or the mouth. Individuals with ASD were impaired at recognising fear from the eyes and disgust from the mouth; they also confused fearful eyes as being angry. The findings are discussed in terms of the three competing hypotheses tested.     

Influence of intensity on children’s sensitivity to happy, sad, and fearful facial expressions

Most previous studies investigating children’s ability to recognize facial expressions used only intense exemplars. Here we compared the sensitivity of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds with that of adults (n = 24 per age group) for less intense expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear. The developmental patterns differed across expressions. For happiness, by 5 years of age, children were as sensitive as adults even to low intensities. For sadness, by 5 years of age, children were as accurate as adults in judging that the face was expressive (i.e., not neutral), but even at 10 years of age, children were more likely to misjudge it as fearful. For fear, children’s thresholds were not adult-like until 10 years of age, and children often confused it with sadness at 5 years of age. For all expressions, including even happy expressions, 5- and 7-year-olds were less accurate than adults in judging which of two expressions was more intense. Together, the results indicate that there is slow development of accurate decoding of subtle facial expressions.     

Somatic Markers and Response Reversal: Is There Orbitofrontal Cortex Dysfunction in Boys with Psychopathic Tendencies?

This study investigated the performance of boys with psychopathic tendencies and comparison boys, aged 9 to 17 years, on two tasks believed to be sensitive to amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex functioning. Fifty-one boys were divided into two groups according to the Psychopathy Screening Device (PSD, P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press) and presented with two tasks. The tasks were the gambling task (A. Bechara, A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, & S. W. Anderson, 1994) and the Intradimensional/Extradimensional (ID/ED) shift task (R. Dias, T. W. Robbins, & A. C. Roberts, 1996). The boys with psychopathic tendencies showed impaired performance on the gambling task. However, there were no group differences on the ID/ED task either for response reversal or extradimensional set shifting. The implications of these results for models of psychopathy are discussed.     

Can an anger face also be scared? Malleability of facial expressions

Do people always interpret a facial expression as communicating a single emotion (e.g., the anger face as only angry) or is that interpretation malleable? The current study investigated preschoolers' (N = 60; 3-4 years) and adults' (N = 20) categorization of facial expressions. On each of five trials, participants selected from an array of 10 facial expressions (an open-mouthed, high arousal expression and a closed-mouthed, low arousal expression each for happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust) all those that displayed the target emotion. Children's interpretation of facial expressions was malleable: 48% of children who selected the fear, anger, sadness, and disgust faces for the "correct" category also selected these same faces for another emotion category; 47% of adults did so for the sadness and disgust faces. The emotion children and adults attribute to facial expressions is influenced by the emotion category for which they are looking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Recognition of facial affect in psychopathic offenders

The authors examined the reliability of facial affect processing deficits found in psychopathic individuals (R. Blair et al., 2004) and whether they could be modified by attentional set. One hundred eleven offenders, classified using the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (R. Hare, 2003) and Welsh Anxiety Scale (G. Welsh, 1956), performed a facial affect recognition task under 2 conditions. On the basis of research linking psychopathy, amygdala dysfunction, and deficits in facial affect recognition, the authors predicted that psychopathic offenders would display performance deficits when required to identify the emotional expression of particular faces. In addition, given evidence linking the affective processing deficits in psychopathy to focus of attention, the authors predicted that any deficits in facial affect processing would disappear when participants could anticipate which affective cues would be relevant on a given trial. Contrary to expectation, psychopathic offenders performed as well as controls in both conditions. The authors conclude that the conditions that reveal affective deficits in psychopathic individuals require further specification.     

The influence of emotion type,social value orientation and processing focus on approach-avoidance tendencies to negative dynamic facial expressions

Facial expressions of anger and fear have been seen to elicit avoidance behavior in the perceiver due to their negative valence. However, recent research uncovered discrepancies regarding these immediate motivational implications of fear and anger, suggesting that not all negative emotions trigger avoidance to a comparable extent. To clarify those discrepancies, we considered recent theoretical and methodological advances, and investigated the role of social preferences and processing focus on approach-avoidance tendencies (AAT) to negative facial expressions. We exposed participants to dynamic facial expressions of anger, disgust, fear, or sadness, while they processed either the emotional expression or the gender of the faces. AATs were assessed by reaction times of lever movements, and by posture changes via head-tracking. We found that—relative to angry faces-, fearful and sad faces triggered more approach, with a larger difference between fear and anger in prosocial compared to individualistic participants. Interestingly, these findings are in line with a recently developed concern hypothesis, suggesting that—relative to other negative expressions—expressions of distress may facilitate approach, especially in participants with prosocial preferences.     

Biased Facial Expression Interpretation in Shy Children

The relationship between shyness and the interpretations of the facial expressions of others was examined in a sample of 123 children aged 12 to 14 years. Participants viewed faces displaying happiness, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, as well as a neutral expression, presented on a computer screen. The children identified each expression by pressing a button on an external keyboard. For each expression, children also rated (a) the degree to which they felt the child displaying the expression would like them, (b) the probability that someone at school would look at them with that expression, and (c) their own emotional reaction to interacting with a child displaying the expression. Participants also completed the Children's Shyness Questionnaire and the Children's Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire. We hypothesized that shyness in children would be related to negatively biased interpretations of facial expressions. Although the accuracy with which the children could identify the facial expressions was not related to their degree of shyness, negative biases were found in their interpretations of the meanings of the expressions. Furthermore, rejection sensitivity significantly mediated many of these biased interpretations. These findings may have implications for interventions for children experiencing shyness and social anxiety, especially social‐skills training approaches. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Children's Recognition of Emotional Facial Expressions Through Photographs and Drawings

The author's purpose was to examine children's recognition of emotional facial expressions, by comparing two types of stimulus: photographs and drawings. The author aimed to investigate whether drawings could be considered as a more evocative material than photographs, as a function of age and emotion. Five- and 7-year-old children were presented with photographs and drawings displaying facial expressions of 4 basic emotions (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, and fear) and were asked to perform a matching task by pointing to the face corresponding to the target emotion labeled by the experimenter. The photographs we used were selected from the Radboud Faces Database and the drawings were designed on the basis of both the facial components involved in the expression of these emotions and the graphic cues children tend to use when asked to depict these emotions in their own drawings. Our results show that drawings are better recognized than photographs, for sadness, anger, and fear (with no difference for happiness, due to a ceiling effect). And that the difference between the 2 types of stimuli tends to be more important for 5-year-olds compared to 7-year-olds. These results are discussed in view of their implications, both for future research and for practical application.     

Psychopathy traits and the processing of emotion words: Results of a lexical decision task

Research has indicated that individuals possessing psychopathic traits exhibit a deficit in the processing of emotional stimuli. Lexical decision task studies found that psychopathic individuals do not demonstrate affective facilitation in processing emotional words relative to nonpsychopathic individuals. However, these investigations have not examined processing of discrete affective categories and their relation to the callous/unemotional (F1) and impulse control/antisocial (F2) factors of psychopathy. Sixty undergraduate men completed a self-report measure of psychopathy traits and a lexical decision task assessing response latencies to anger, sadness, fear, and happiness words. Results reflected an association between F2 and a heightened experience of anger, whereas F1 was associated with a diminished experience of sadness. Findings are discussed in terms of the relation to existing research using alternative methods of processing affect.     

Caricaturing facial expressions

The physical differences between facial expressions (e.g. fear) and a reference norm (e.g. a neutral expression) were altered to produce photographic-quality caricatures. In Experiment 1, participants rated caricatures of fear, happiness and sadness for their intensity of these three emotions; a second group of participants rated how 'face-like' the caricatures appeared. With increasing levels of exaggeration the caricatures were rated as more emotionally intense, but less 'face-like'. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar relationship between emotional intensity and level of caricature for six different facial expressions. Experiments 3 and 4 compared intensity ratings of facial expression caricatures prepared relative to a selection of reference norms - a neutral expression, an average expression, or a different facial expression (e.g. anger caricatured relative to fear). Each norm produced a linear relationship between caricature and rated intensity of emotion; this finding is inconsistent with two-dimensional models of the perceptual representation of facial expression. An exemplar-based multidimensional model is proposed as an alternative account.     

Processing of observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy

Facial autonomic responses may contribute to emotional communication and reveal individual affective style. In this study, the authors examined how observed pupillary size modulates processing of facial expression, extending the finding that incidentally perceived pupils influence ratings of sadness but not those of happy, angry, or neutral facial expressions. Healthy subjects rated the valence and arousal of photographs depicting facial muscular expressions of sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust. Pupil sizes within the stimuli were experimentally manipulated. Subjects themselves were scored with an empathy questionnaire. Diminishing pupil size linearly enhanced intensity and valence judgments of sad expressions (but not fear, surprise, or disgust). At debriefing, subjects were unaware of differences in pupil size across stimuli. These observations complement an earlier study showing that pupil size directly influences processing of sadness but not other basic emotional facial expressions. Furthermore, across subjects, the degree to which pupil size influenced sadness processing correlated with individual differences in empathy score. Together, these data demonstrate a central role of sadness processing in empathetic emotion and highlight the salience of implicit autonomic signals in affective communication.