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Feelings first? Sex differences in affective and cognitive processes in emotion recognition.

ABSTRACT: The recognition of emotional expressions is important for social understanding and interaction, but findings on the relationship between emotion recognition, empathy, and theory of mind, as well as sex differences in these relationships, have been inconsistent. This may reflect the relative involvement of affective and cognitive processes at different stages of emotion recognition and in different experimental paradigms. In this study, images of faces were morphed from neutral to full expression of five basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness), which participants were asked to identify as quickly and accurately as possible. Accuracy and response times from healthy males (n = 46) and females (n = 43) were analysed in relation to self-reported empathy (Empathy Quotient; EQ) and mentalising/theory of mind (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test). Females were faster and more accurate than males in recognising dynamic emotions. Linear mixed-effects modelling showed that response times were inversely related to the emotional empathy subscale of the EQ, but this was accounted for by a female advantage on both measures. Accuracy was unrelated to EQ scores but was predicted independently by sex and Eyes Test scores. These findings suggest that rapid processing of dynamic emotional expressions is strongly influenced by sex, which may reflect the greater involvement of affective processes at earlier stages of emotion recognition.

SUBMITTER: Bek J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9424719 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Feelings first? Sex differences in affective and cognitive processes in emotion recognition.

Bek Judith J Donahoe Bronagh B Brady Nuala N

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) 20211227 10

The recognition of emotional expressions is important for social understanding and interaction, but findings on the relationship between emotion recognition, empathy, and theory of mind, as well as sex differences in these relationships, have been inconsistent. This may reflect the relative involvement of affective and cognitive processes at different stages of emotion recognition and in different experimental paradigms. In this study, images of faces were morphed from neutral to full expression ...[more]

PMID: 34806475

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Project description:IntroductionFacial emotion recognition abilities of children have been the focus of attention across various fields, with implications for communication, social interaction, and human behavior. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask in public became mandatory in many countries, hindering social information perception and emotion recognition. Given the importance of visual communication for children's social-emotional development, concerns have been raised on whether face masks could impair their ability to recognize emotions and thereby possibly impact their social-emotional development.MethodsTo this extent, a quasiexperimental study was designed with a two-fold objective: firstly, to identify children's accuracy in recognizing basic emotions (anger, happiness, fear, disgust, sadness) and emotional neutrality when presented with faces under two conditions: one with no-masks and another with faces partially covered by various types of masks (medical, nonmedical, surgical, or cloth); secondly, to explore any correlation between children's emotion recognition accuracy and their affective state. Sixty-nine (69) elementary school students aged 6-7 years old from Greece were recruited for this purpose. Following specific requirements of the second phase of the experiment students were assigned to one of three (3) distinct affective condition groups: Group A-Happiness, Group B-Sadness, and Group C-Emotional Neutrality. Image stimuli were drawn from the FACES Dataset, and students' affective state was registered using the self-reporting emotions-registration tool, AffectLecture app.ResultsThe study's findings indicate that children can accurately recognize emotions even with masks, although recognizing disgust is more challenging. Additionally, following both positive and negative affective state priming promoted systematic inaccuracies in emotion recognition. Most significantly, results showed a negative bias for children in negative affective state and a positive bias for those in positive affective state.DiscussionChildren's affective state significantly influenced their emotion recognition abilities; sad affective states led to lower recognition overall and a bias toward recognizing sad expressions, while happy affective states resulted in a positive bias, improving recognition of happiness, and affecting how emotional neutrality and sadness were actually perceived. In conclusion, this study sheds light on the intriguing dynamics of how face masks affect children's emotion recognition, but also underlines the profound influence of their affective state.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Facial emotion recognition (FER) is essential to guide social functioning and behaviour for interpersonal communication. FER may be altered in severe mental illness such as in psychosis and in borderline personality disorder patients. However, it is unclear if these FER alterations are specifically related to psychosis. Awareness of FER alterations may be useful in clinical settings to improve treatment strategies. The aim of our study was to examine FER in patients with severe mental disorder and their relation with psychotic symptomatology. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Socio-demographic and clinical variables were collected. Alterations on emotion recognition were assessed in 3 groups: patients with first episode psychosis (FEP) (n = 64), borderline personality patients (BPD) (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 137), using the Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, Structured Interview for Schizotypy Revised and Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences scales were used to assess positive psychotic symptoms. WAIS III subtests were used to assess IQ. RESULTS:Kruskal-Wallis analysis showed a significant difference between groups on the FER of neutral faces score between FEP, BPD patients and controls and between FEP patients and controls in angry face recognition. No significant differences were found between groups in the fear or happy conditions. There was a significant difference between groups in the attribution of negative emotion to happy faces. BPD and FEP groups had a much higher tendency to recognize happy faces as negatives. There was no association with the different symptom domains in either group. CONCLUSIONS:FEP and BPD patients have problems in recognizing neutral faces more frequently than controls. Moreover, patients tend to over-report negative emotions in recognition of happy faces. Although no relation between psychotic symptoms and FER alterations was found, these deficits could contribute to a patient's misinterpretations in daily life.

Project description:The constructs of empathy (i.e., understanding and/or sharing another's emotion) and emotion regulation (i.e., the processes by which one manages emotions) have largely been studied in relative isolation of one another. To better understand the interrelationships between their various component processes, this manuscript reports two studies that examined the relationship between empathy and emotion regulation using a combination of self-report and task measures. In study 1 (N = 137), trait cognitive empathy and affective empathy were found to share divergent relationships with self-reported emotion dysregulation. Trait emotion dysregulation was negatively related to cognitive empathy but did not show a significant relationship with affective empathy. In the second study (N = 92), the magnitude of emotion interference effects (i.e., the extent to which inhibitory control was impacted by emotional relative to neutral stimuli) in variants of a Go/NoGo and Stroop task were used as proxy measures of implicit emotion regulation abilities. Trait cognitive and affective empathy were differentially related to both task metrics. Higher affective empathy was associated with increased emotional interference in the Emotional Go/NoGo task; no such relationship was observed for trait cognitive empathy. In the Emotional Stroop task, higher cognitive empathy was associated with reduced emotional interference; no such relationship was observed for affective empathy. Together, these studies demonstrate that greater cognitive empathy was broadly associated with improved emotion regulation abilities, while greater affective empathy was typically associated with increased difficulties with emotion regulation. These findings point to the need for assessing the different components of empathy in psychopathological conditions marked by difficulties in emotion regulation.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00062-w.

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Feelings first? Sex differences in affective and cognitive processes in emotion recognition.

Publications

Feelings first? Sex differences in affective and cognitive processes in emotion recognition.

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