| 1. |
- Cortes, Diana S., et al.
(författare)
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Effects of aging on emotion recognition from dynamic multimodal expressions and vocalizations
- 2021
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Ingår i: Scientific Reports. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2045-2322. ; 11:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Age-related differences in emotion recognition have predominantly been investigated using static pictures of facial expressions, and positive emotions beyond happiness have rarely been included. The current study instead used dynamic facial and vocal stimuli, and included a wider than usual range of positive emotions. In Task 1, younger and older adults were tested for their abilities to recognize 12 emotions from brief video recordings presented in visual, auditory, and multimodal blocks. Task 2 assessed recognition of 18 emotions conveyed by non-linguistic vocalizations (e.g., laughter, sobs, and sighs). Results from both tasks showed that younger adults had significantly higher overall recognition rates than older adults. In Task 1, significant group differences (younger > older) were only observed for the auditory block (across all emotions), and for expressions of anger, irritation, and relief (across all presentation blocks). In Task 2, significant group differences were observed for 6 out of 9 positive, and 8 out of 9 negative emotions. Overall, results indicate that recognition of both positive and negative emotions show age-related differences. This suggests that the age-related positivity effect in emotion recognition may become less evident when dynamic emotional stimuli are used and happiness is not the only positive emotion under study.
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| 2. |
- Cortes, Diana S., et al.
(författare)
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Oxytocin may facilitate neural recruitment in medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal gyrus during emotion recognition in young but not older adults
- 2020
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Ingår i: 2020 Cognitive Aging Conference. ; , s. 22-23
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Normal adult aging is associated with decline in some socioemotional abilities, such as the ability to recognize emotions in others, and age-related neurobiological processes may contribute to these deficits. There is increasing evidence that the neuropeptide oxytocin plays a key role in social cognition, including emotion recognition. The mechanisms through which oxytocin promotes emotion recognition are not well understood yet, and particularly in aging. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled within-subjects design, we investigated the extent to which a single dose of 40 IU of intranasal oxytocin facilitates emotion recognition in 40 younger (M = 24.90 yrs., SD = 2.97, 48% women) and 40 older (M = 69.70 yrs., SD = 2.99, 55% women) men and women. During two fMRI sessions, participants viewed dynamic positive and negative emotional displays. Preliminary analyses show that younger participants recognized positive and negative emotions more accurately than older participants (p < .001), with this behavioral effect not modulated by oxytocin. In the brain data, however, we found an age x treatment interaction in medial prefrontal cortex (xyz [14, 14, 6], p = .007) and superior temporal gyrus (xyz [53, 9, 2], p = .031). In particular, oxytocin (vs. placebo) reduced activity in these regions for older participants, while it enhanced activity in these regions for younger participants. In line with previous research, these findings support the notion that the effects of oxytocin vary by context and individual factors (e.g., social proficiency, age).
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| 3. |
- Döllinger, Lillian, 1986-
(författare)
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I know how you feel : Emotion recognition accuracy and training in psychotherapy education
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Researchers, practitioners and legislators agree that it is important to understand which kinds of psychotherapeutic treatments lead to lasting positive changes in patients’ well-being, how those treatments can be administered in efficient ways and how it can be determined which patients would benefit from which treatment. In recent years, there has also been growing interest in those who practice psychotherapy; specifically, in the socio-emotional and interpersonal characteristics and competencies that psychotherapists should possess to provide high quality treatments for a variety of patients, irrespective of psychotherapy approach. This thesis studies one such important psychotherapist competency, namely the ability to recognize non-verbal emotional expressions in others. Psychotherapists need to be able to help patients experience, understand and express their emotions, and, in this context, it is crucial that they themselves have good socio-emotional competencies, like emotion recognition accuracy. Still, there is surprisingly little research about psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy and about how they could be supported in improving this ability in the course of their education. Study I explores trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy in the beginning and in the end of theoretical and practical psychotherapy education, and compares it to a control group of undergraduate students. The results reveal that trainee psychotherapists in the beginning of their education show superior emotion recognition accuracy for multimodal (audio, video, audio-video) emotional expressions and micro expressions (<200ms) compared to the control group. This suggests that those who choose to become psychotherapists might already possess elevated emotion recognition accuracy or might have developed it early on during their studies. However, after one and a half years of education, their multimodal and micro expression emotion recognition accuracy does not improve significantly more than the control groups’ accuracy. This suggests that standard (psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral) psychotherapy education does not automatically lead to improved emotion recognition accuracy, even though the trainees learn how to conduct psychotherapy and also treat their first patients at the university clinic. Or, alternatively, that the socio-emotional competencies that develop during the education might not be captured by the standardized computerized emotion recognition accuracy tasks used in this study. Nonetheless, this finding might also suggest that more explicit training of emotion recognition accuracy is needed. Study II then investigates two newly developed standardized computerized emotion recognition accuracy trainings, one for multimodal emotion recognition accuracy and one for micro expression recognition accuracy. The trainings are evaluated in a sample of undergraduate students using a mixed design. The trainings are compared to one another and to an active control training. Both trainings are found to significantly improve the participants’ emotion recognition accuracy in a one-week posttest. Study III extends those findings using a sample of trainee psychotherapists. Also in the target population, both trainings are found to be effective in the one-week posttest. In addition to that, the multimodal training shows effects for unimodal emotion recognition accuracy for audio-only and video-only stimuli in the one-year follow-up towards the end of psychotherapy education. This indicates that standardized computerized emotion recognition accuracy training can be used as a tool for improving trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy, even though additional interventions might be needed for securing long-term success for all facets of emotion recognition. Future research should explore the practical impact of trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy and the training of this ability. The findings of this thesis are, on the one hand, surprising, in so far as psychotherapy education likely does not lead to improvements in trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy. On the other hand, they are encouraging, because they suggest that this ability can be trained with relatively simple and resource-efficient methods. Emotion recognition accuracy training could become part of standard or individualized psychotherapy training, alongside the training of other relevant verbal and non-verbal socio-emotional and interpersonal psychotherapist competencies.
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| 4. |
- Döllinger, Lillian, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy during 1.5 years of psychotherapy education compared to a control group: No improvement after psychotherapy training
- 2023
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Ingår i: PeerJ. - 2167-8359. ; 11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The ability to recognize and work with patients’ emotions is considered an important part of most psychotherapy approaches. Surprisingly, there is little systematic research on psychotherapists' ability to recognize other people’s emotional expressions. In this study, we compared trainee psychotherapists’ non-verbal emotion recognition accuracy to a control group of undergraduate students at two time points: at the beginning and at the end of one and a half years of theoretical and practical psychotherapy training. Emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) was assessed using two standardized computer tasks, one for recognition of dynamic multimodal (facial, bodily, vocal) expressions and one for recognition of facial micro expressions. Initially, 154 participants enrolled in the study, 72 also took part in the follow-up. The trainee psychotherapists were moderately better at recognizing multimodal expressions, and slightly better at recognizing facial micro expressions, than the control group at the first test occasion. However, mixed multilevel modeling indicated that the ERA change trajectories for the two groups differed significantly. While the control group improved in their ability to recognize multimodal emotional expressions from pretest to follow-up, the trainee psychotherapists did not. Both groups improved their micro expression recognition accuracy, but the slope for the control group was significantly steeper than the trainee psychotherapists’. These results suggest that psychotherapy education and clinical training do not always contribute to improved emotion recognition accuracy beyond what could be expected due to time or other factors. Possible reasons for that finding as well as implications for the psychotherapy education are discussed.
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| 5. |
- Döllinger, Lillian, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy improves after training : emotion recognition training as a tool for psychotherapy education
- 2023
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media S.A.. - 1664-1078. ; 14
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Introduction: Psychotherapists’ emotional and empathic competencies have a positive influence on psychotherapy outcome and alliance. However, it is doubtful whether psychotherapy education in itself leads to improvements in trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), which is an essential part of these competencies.Methods: In a randomized, controlled, double-blind study (N = 68), we trained trainee psychotherapists (57% psychodynamic therapy and 43% cognitive behavioral therapy) to detect non-verbal emotional expressions in others using standardized computerized trainings – one for multimodal emotion recognition accuracy and one for micro expression recognition accuracy – and compared their results to an active control group one week after the training (n = 60) and at the one-year follow up (n = 55). The participants trained once weekly during a three-week period. As outcome measures, we used a multimodal emotion recognition accuracy task, a micro expression recognition accuracy task and an emotion recognition accuracy task for verbal and non-verbal (combined) emotional expressions in medical settings.Results: The results of mixed multilevel analyses suggest that the multimodal emotion recognition accuracy training led to significantly steeper increases than the other two conditions from pretest to the posttest one week after the last training session. When comparing the pretest to follow-up differences in slopes, the superiority of the multimodal training group was still detectable in the unimodal audio modality and the unimodal video modality (in comparison to the control training group), but not when considering the multimodal audio-video modality or the total score of the multimodal emotion recognition accuracy measure. The micro expression training group showed a significantly steeper change trajectory from pretest to posttest compared to the control training group, but not compared to the multimodal training group. However, the effect vanished again until the one-year follow-up. There were no differences in change trajectories for the outcome measure about emotion recognition accuracy in medical settings.Discussion: We conclude that trainee psychotherapists’ emotion recognition accuracy can be effectively trained, especially multimodal emotion recognition accuracy, and suggest that the changes in unimodal emotion recognition accuracy (audio-only and video-only) are long-lasting. Implications of these findings for the psychotherapy education are discussed.
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| 6. |
- Döllinger, Lillian, et al.
(författare)
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Training Emotion Recognition Accuracy : Results for Multimodal Expressions and Facial Micro Expressions
- 2021
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 1664-1078. ; 12
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Nonverbal emotion recognition accuracy (ERA) is a central feature of successful communication and interaction, and is of importance for many professions. We developed and evaluated two ERA training programs—one focusing on dynamic multimodal expressions (audio, video, audio-video) and one focusing on facial micro expressions. Sixty-seven subjects were randomized to one of two experimental groups (multimodal, micro expression) or an active control group (emotional working memory task). Participants trained once weekly with a brief computerized training program for three consecutive weeks. Pre-post outcome measures consisted of a multimodal ERA task, a micro expression recognition task, and a task about patients' emotional cues. Post measurement took place approximately a week after the last training session. Non-parametric mixed analyses of variance using the Aligned Rank Transform were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the training programs. Results showed that multimodal training was significantly more effective in improving multimodal ERA compared to micro expression training or the control training; and the micro expression training was significantly more effective in improving micro expression ERA compared to the other two training conditions. Both pre-post effects can be interpreted as large. No group differences were found for the outcome measure about recognizing patients' emotion cues. There were no transfer effects of the training programs, meaning that participants only improved significantly for the specific facet of ERA that they had trained on. Further, low baseline ERA was associated with larger ERA improvements. Results are discussed with regard to methodological and conceptual aspects, and practical implications and future directions are explored.
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| 7. |
- Fischer, Håkan, 1962-, et al.
(författare)
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Why the Single-N Design Should Be the Default in Affective Neuroscience
- 2024
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Ingår i: Affective Science. - : Springer Nature. - 2662-2041 .- 2662-205X. ; 5:1, s. 62-66
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Many studies in affective neuroscience rely on statistical procedures designed to estimate population averages and base their main conclusions on group averages. However, the obvious unit of analysis in affective neuroscience is the individual, not the group, because emotions are individual phenomena that typically vary across individuals. Conclusions based on group averages may therefore be misleading or wrong, if interpreted as statements about emotions of an individual, or meaningless, if interpreted as statements about the group, which has no emotions. We therefore advocate the Single-N design as the default strategy in research on emotions, testing one or several individuals extensively with the primary purpose of obtaining results at the individual level. In neuroscience, the equivalent to the Single-N design is deep imaging, the emerging trend of extensive measurements of activity in single brains. Apart from the fact that individuals react differently to emotional stimuli, they also vary in shape and size of their brains. Group-based analysis of brain imaging data therefore refers to an “average brain” that was activated in a way that may not be representative of the physiology of any of the tested individual brains, nor of how these brains responded to the experimental stimuli. Deep imaging avoids such group-averaging artifacts by simply focusing on the individual brain. This methodological shift toward individual analysis has already opened new research areas in fields like vision science. Inspired by this, we call for a corresponding shift in affective neuroscience, away from group averages, and toward experimental designs targeting the individual.
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| 8. |
- Gerhardsson, Andreas, 1984-
(författare)
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Processing affective information after sleep loss
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is not fully understood why we need to sleep, although it is evident that sleep loss has consequences for many emotional and cognitive functions. The last couple of decades, sleep researchers have been increasingly devoted to better understand the relationship between sleep and affect. However, it is still poorly understood how sleep deprivation influences the way in which affective information is processed. The aim of this thesis was to investigate if there is a bias towards affective information after sleep deprivation and whether such bias influence information processing.Study I tested reinforcement learning from positive as compared to negative feedback after two nights of sleep restriction. There were no indications of the expected reward-seeking behavior in generalized learning or in the learning strategy. A slowing in learning rate inferred from computational modeling was observed primarily for negative feedback. This could be indicative of a slowing in memory integration. It is unclear if the dopamine alterations proposed to cause reward-seeking behavior after total sleep deprivation are also implicated after sleep restriction.Study II examined the neurophysiological response of the competition of attention between unpleasant and neutral pictures after two nights of sleep restriction. We found no alterations of sleep restriction on attention in relation to picture valence, or on executive control of attention. Despite observations of an increased sleepiness, an impaired sustained attention, and reduced positive affect, the few hours of allowed sleep may have been enough to counteract an affective bias and an executive control impairment.Study III tested if one night of total sleep deprivation altered working memory for positive, negative, or neutral pictures using two levels of working memory load. Results showed that working memory accuracy was generally impaired after sleep deprivation, independent of picture valence. However, in the sleep deprived group we observed faster responses to positive and slower responses to negative pictures. These results could indicate a bias towards both positive and negative pictures, but with opposite consequences on working memory speed.Study IV used the same protocol as Study III to combinedly test two common findings among older adults: That they prioritize positive over negative stimuli (the positivity effect), and that they are less affected by sleep deprivation. Working memory performance was overall better for positive than negative pictures, with no differences between the sleep conditions. This positivity effect was only present in the low working memory load condition. These results show that even after a state-dependent challenge such as sleep deprivation, the positivity effect remains in older adults, at least when working memory load is low.Overall, the Studies in this thesis demonstrate signs of affective bias as well as lack thereof after total and partial sleep deprivation. The use of a diverse set of tasks and methodology may have contributed to the discrepancies in the findings, but it also highlights that we have yet to fully understand how lack of sleep may influence the processing of affectively valuable information.
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| 9. |
- Högman, Lennart, 1960-, et al.
(författare)
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Cognition, prior aggression, and psychopathic traits in relation to impaired multimodal emotion recognition in psychotic spectrum disorders
- 2023
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychiatry. - : Frontiers Media S.A.. - 1664-0640. ; 14
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: Psychopathic traits have been associated with impaired emotion recognition in criminal, clinical and community samples. A recent study however, suggested that cognitive impairment reduced the relationship between psychopathy and emotion recognition. We therefore investigated if reasoning ability and psychomotor speed were impacting emotion recognition in individuals with psychotic spectrum disorders (PSD) with and without a history of aggression, as well as in healthy individuals, more than self-rated psychopathy ratings on the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure (TriPM). Methods: Eighty individuals with PSD (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, delusional disorder, other psychoses, psychotic bipolar disorder) and documented history of aggression (PSD+Agg) were compared with 54 individuals with PSD without prior aggression (PSD-Agg) and with 86 healthy individuals on the Emotion Recognition Assessment in Multiple Modalities (ERAM test). Individuals were psychiatrically stable and in remission from possible substance use disorders. Scaled scores on matrix reasoning, averages of dominant hand psychomotor speed and self-rated TriPM scores were obtained. Results: Associations existed between low reasoning ability, low psychomotor speed, patient status and prior aggression with total accuracy on the ERAM test. PSD groups performed worse than the healthy group. Whole group correlations between total and subscale scores of TriPM to ERAM were found, but no associations with TriPM scores within each group or in general linear models when accounting for reasoning ability, psychomotor speed, understanding of emotion words and prior aggression. Conclusion: Self-rated psychopathy was not independently linked to emotion recognition in PSD groups when considering prior aggression, patient status, reasoning ability, psychomotor speed and emotion word understanding.
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| 10. |
- Högman, Lennart, 1960-, et al.
(författare)
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Impaired facial emotion perception of briefly presented double masked stimuli in violent offenders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders
- 2020
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Ingår i: Schizophrenia Research. - : Elsevier BV. - 2215-0013. ; 19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social interactions require decoding of subtle rapidly changing emotional cues in others to facilitate socially appropriate behaviour. It is possible that impairments in the ability to detect and decode these signals may increase the risk for aggression. Therefore, we examined violent offenders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and compared these with healthy controls on a computerized paradigm of briefly presented double masked faces exhibiting 7 basic emotions. Our hypotheses were that impaired semantic understanding of emotion words and low cognitive ability would yield lowest emotion recognition. SSD exhibited lower accuracy of emotion perception than controls (46.1% compared with 64.5%, p = 0.026), even when considering the unbiased hit rate (22.4% compared with 43%, Z = 2.62, p < 0.01). Raw data showed uncommon but significant misclassifications of fear as sad, disgust as sad, sad as happy and angry as surprise. Once guessing and presentation frequencies were considered, only overall accuracy differed between SSD and healthy controls. There were significant correlations between cognitive ability, antipsychotic dose, speed and emotion accuracy in the SSD group. In conclusion, that there were no specific emotion biases in the SSD group compared to healthy controls, but particular individuals may have greater impairments in facial emotion perception, being influenced by intellectual ability, psychomotor speed and medication dosages, rather than specifically emotion word understanding. This implies that both state and trait factors influence emotion perception in the aggressive SSD group and may reveal one source of potential misunderstanding of social situations which may lead to boundary violations and aggression.
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