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The ability to generate appropriate responses, especially in social contexts, requires integrating emotional information with ongoing cognitive processes. In particular, inhibitory control plays a crucial role in social interactions, preventing the execution of impulsive and inappropriate actions. In this study, we focused on the impact of facial e...
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... to assess the effect of emotional stimuli on inhibition in the two tasks, we run a two-way ANOVA on error rates (factors: Emotion [Happy, Fear] and task [Emotion Discrimination task, Gender Discrimination task]). This analysis revealed several effects ( T3 Table 3, F2 Figure 2). First, there was a main effect of Emotions as participants made more commission errors in response to happy faces (M = 26.27%; ...
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Over the past fifteen years, research has demonstrated the central role of interpersonal emotions in communicating intentions, goals and desires. These emotions can be conveyed through facial expressions during specific social interactions, such as in the context of coordination between economic agents, where information inferred from them can infl...
The use of surgical-type face masks has become increasingly common during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent findings suggest that it is harder to categorise the facial expressions of masked faces, than of unmasked faces. To date, studies of the effects of mask-wearing on emotion recognition have used categorisation paradigms: authors have presented fac...
Accurate perception of the emotional signals conveyed by others is crucial for successful social interaction. Such perception is influenced not only by sensory input, but also by knowledge we have about the others' emotions. This study addresses the issue of whether knowing that the other's emotional state is congruent or incongruent with their dis...
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... While faces are preferably processed when we directly look at them such that they occupy the center of the visual field [3][4][5][6][7][8] (but see Refs. [9][10][11][12], in daily life faces do often appear at different locations in the visual field. It is well known that performance of multiple visual functions decreases with eccentricity (the distance from the center of the visual field) and this has been shown for low-to high-level visual functions [13][14][15] . ...
Understanding whether people around us are in a good, bad or neutral mood can be critical to our behavior, both when looking directly at them or when they are in our peripheral visual field. However, facial expressions of emotions are often investigated at central visual field or at locations right or left of fixation. Here we assumed that perception of facial emotional valence (the emotion’s pleasantness) changes with distance from central visual field (eccentricity) and that different emotions may be influenced differently by eccentricity. Participants (n = 58) judged the valence of emotional faces across the parafovea (≤ 4°, positive (happy), negative (fearful), or neutral)) while their eyes were being tracked. As expected, performance decreased with eccentricity. Positive valence perception was least affected by eccentricity (accuracy reduction of 10–19% at 4°) and negative the most (accuracy reduction of 35–38% at 4°), and this was not a result of speed-accuracy trade-off or response biases. Within-valence (but not across-valence) performance was associated across eccentricities suggesting perception of different valences is supported by different mechanisms. While our results may not generalize to all positive and negative emotions, they indicate that beyond-foveal investigations can reveal additional characteristics of the mechanisms that underlie facial expression processing and perception.
... Crucially these effects occurred just when emotional stimuli were task-relevant. By contrast, when the same images were task irrelevant (subjects were required to discriminate the actors/actresses' gender and not their facial emotions), facial emotions did not yield any behavioral effect (57)(58)(59)(60). It will be interesting to evaluate whether social cognition training will alter this pattern of results or perhaps make this pattern of results even more pronounced. ...
Facial emotion recognition is a key component of social cognition. Impaired facial emotion recognition is tied to poor psychological wellbeing and deficient social functioning. While previous research has demonstrated the potential for social cognition training to improve overall facial emotion recognition, questions remain regarding what aspects of emotion recognition improve. We report results from a randomized controlled trial that evaluates whether computerized social cognition training can improve recognition of distinct facial emotions in healthy participants. This investigation was designed to better understand the therapeutic potential of social cognition training for individuals with neuropsychiatric disorders. Fifty-five healthy adult participants were randomly assigned to an internet-based intervention during which they either completed social cognition training (SCT) or played control computer games (CON) for 10.5 h over 2–3 weeks. Facial emotion recognition was measured with the Penn ER-40, which was conducted before and after training. The following variables were collected and analyzed: facial emotion recognition accuracy for each emotion (i.e., anger, fear, happy, neutral (no emotional expression), and sad), reaction times for each emotion, and response error types (i.e., frequency of an emotion being chosen incorrectly, frequency of an emotion being missed, and frequency of an emotion being confused for another particular emotion). ANOVAs and t -tests were used to elucidate intervention effects both within and between groups. Results showed that the SCT group improved their accuracy for angry and neutral faces. They also improved their reaction times for neutral, fearful, and sad faces. Compared to the CON group, the SCT group had significantly faster reaction times to neutral faces after training. Lastly, the SCT group decreased their tendency to confuse angry faces for no emotional expression and to confuse no emotional expression for sad faces. In contrast, the CON group did not significantly improve their accuracy or reaction times on any emotional expression, and they did not improve their response error types. We conclude that social cognition training can improve recognition of distinct emotions in healthy participants and decrease response error patterns, suggesting it has the potential to improve impaired emotion recognition and social functioning in individuals with facial emotion recognition deficits.
... A pillar of the model is the idea that emotional stimuli, especially threatening ones, would be capable of automatically grabbing selective attention, prioritizing their processing, and eliciting behavioral responses independently from the subject's current goals (Lang et al., 2000;Vuilleumier, 2005). However, the empirical evidence about how emotional stimuli influence motor control is contradictory and does not provide consistent support to this hypothesis (for a literature survey, see Mancini et al., 2020Mancini et al., , 2022Mirabella, 2018;Mirabella et al., 2022). Aside from methodological issues, appraisal theories of emotions (Moors and Fischer, 2019;Scherer and Moors, 2019) can explain literature inconsistencies. ...
... Recent empirical evidence provides strong support for appraisal theories of emotions. In a series of studies, Mirabella and colleagues showed that emotional facial expressions affect motor control only when task-relevant, i.e., when participants needed to pay attention to the stimuli' valence to give a correct response (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al., 2020Mancini et al., , 2022Mirabella et al., 2022). In all studies, the experimental design consisted of giving two different versions of Go/No-go tasks to healthy participants in a counterbalanced fashion. ...
... By contrast, the difference between happy and threatening faces disappeared when task-irrelevant. Mancini et al. (2022) found evidence that also inhibitory control is impacted by facial emotions, provided that they are task-relevant. In this study, in the Emotional Discrimination task, emotional facial expressions (fearful and happy) were shown in No-go trials. ...
A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing subject's goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures (fearful or happy) and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress' t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors (instances in which they moved even though the No-go signal was presented) for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant.
... Negative facial expressions can draw attentional resources more efficiently than happy facial expressions, allowing people to quickly detect potential threats (Vuilleumier and Huang, 2009). However, as hypervigilance toward negative faces makes it difficult to divert attention, motor responses are slower (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al., 2020Mancini et al., , 2022Mirabella et al., 2022). In our study, the facial stimuli to recognize were always task-relevant, and the BAP group also showed that happy emotions elicited faster responses than fear and sad emotions. ...
Individuals with broad autism phenotype (BAP) have a tendency not to integrate emotional stimuli with the surrounding context. They have also shown different patterns and abilities in processing positive and negative emotions. This study aimed to examine whether the effect of context on target stimuli could vary depending on the type of target emotion in individuals with BAP. Based on the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ) and Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ), 36 individuals with BAP and 33 healthy controls were selected. All the participants performed an overlap-emotional task consisting of six conditions: 2 (congruence: congruent and incongruent) × 3 (emotion: fearful, sad, and happy). Reaction time and accuracy were measured as dependent variables. The results revealed that the individuals with BAP showed no difference in reaction time between the condition of congruence and incongruence, but that the control group was faster to categorize facial expression on the condition of congruence than that of incongruence regardless of the type of target emotion. There were no differences between the two groups in any of the conditions with regard to accuracy. These findings indicate that individuals with BAP tend not to integrate target emotions with contextual information, a feature that could worsen the speed of emotional recognition in individuals with BAP. This study confirmed that the individuals with BAP have different cognition patterns in emotional recognition than the control group.
... Studies that delved into the DM performance by dividing the IGT into blocks [10,76] showed stronger correlations between cold EFs (investigated through WCST or MCST) and the second part of the IGT. Such data can support that hot EFs and cold EFs work synergically, along a continuum, according to the contingent situation, consistently with findings from other studies (e.g., [27,[88][89][90]). The involvement of cold EF components, also highlighted by evidence regarding the pivotal role of the dlPFC in performing the IGT [75], may depend on the nature of the cognitive demands-which dynamically involve different degrees of cognitive control on affective aspects-as the decision-maker gains more experience (and more information) about the task. ...
Decision making (DM) has a pivotal role in supporting individual autonomy and well-being. It is considered a complex ability exploiting many cognitive functions, among which executive functions (EFs) are crucial. Few studies analyzed the role played by EFs in DM in healthy adults under ambiguity and risk, which are common conditions for most decisions in daily life. This scoping review aims to analyze the relationships between two individual tasks widely used to assess DM under these conditions (Iowa Gambling Task and Game of Dice Task) and EFs. According to the organizing principle that conceptualizes hot and cold EFs, DM under such conditions mainly implies hot EFs, but the relationship with cold EFs is still unclear. Using such an approach, a comprehensive framework is provided, highlighting main findings and identifying possible gaps in the literature. The results suggest different roles played by cold EFs in DM under ambiguity and risk, according to the characteristics of the tasks. The findings can offer guidance to further studies and to design interventions to support DM in healthy adults.
... Moreover, Williams et al. (2020) found better action control only in older adults and when emotions were task-relevant, as in the findings of Nayak et al. (2019). In line with these results, in a series of go-nogo studies, Mirabella and colleagues showed that emotional facial expressions affect motor control only when task relevant, i.e., when participants needed to pay attention to the emotional content of the stimuli valence to give a correct response (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al., 2020Mancini et al., , 2022Mirabella et al., 2022). Therefore, it seems that several variables determine the results, such as whether the emotional stimuli have a beneficial or a detrimental effect and whether positive and negative emotions have a similar effect on action control. ...
Emotions are able to impact our ability to control our behaviours. However, it is not clear whether emotions play a detrimental or an advantageous effect on action control and whether the valence of
the emotional stimuli differently affects such motor abilities. One way to measure reactive inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which estimates the ability to cancel outright a response to the presentation of a stop signal by means of the stop signal reaction times (SSRT). Impaired as well as facilitated action control has been found when faced with emotional stimuli such as stop signals in SSTs and mixed results were observed for positive versus negative stimuli.
Here, we aimed to investigate these unresolved issues more deeply. Action control capabilities were tested in 60 participants by means of a Stop Signal Task, in which the stop signals were represented
by a fearful and a happy body posture together with their neutral counterpart. Results showed that both positive and negative body postures enhanced the ability to suppress an ongoing action
compared to neutral body postures. These results demonstrate that emotional valence-independent emotional stimuli facilitate action control and suggest that emotional stimuli may trigger increased
sensory representation and/or attentional processing that may have promote stop-signal processing and hence improved inhibitory performance.
... Recent studies have shown that emotional facial expressions elicit consistent, replicable behavioural effects only when they are related to participants' goals and not when other features (e.g., gender) are relevant (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al., 2020Mancini et al., , 2022Mirabella et al., 2022). Since these studies have only examined the situations where just single faces were presented and no data for two-person confrontation situations, it would be useful to extend the paradigm of this study to such studies. ...
When building personal relationships, it is important to select optimal partners, even based on the first meeting. This study was inspired by the idea that people who smile are considered more trustworthy and attractive. However, this may not always be true in daily life. Previous studies have used a relatively simple method of judging others by presenting a photograph of one person’s face. To move beyond this approach and examine more complex situations, we presented the faces of two people confronted with each other to participants and asked them to judge them from a third-person perspective. Through three experiments, participants were asked to judge which of the two persons was more appropriate for forming alliances, more trustworthy, or more attractive, respectively. In all experiments, images were shown for a short (500 ms) or a long time (5 s). In all three experiments, the results showed that participants were more likely to choose persons with happy faces than those with neutral, sad, or angry faces when the image presentation was short. Contrarily, the facial expressions did not affect those judgments when the image presentation was long. Instead, judgments were correlated with personality estimated from the model’s neutral face in a single-person presentation. These results suggest that although facial expressions can affect the judgments of others when observing two-person confrontations from a third-person perspective, when participants have more time to elaborate their judgments, they go beyond expressions.
... The Artificial Pain Model proposed in this article is just a prototype. In the future, we will study more about the nature of emotion and the relationship between emotion and emotional overt actions (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al., 2020Mancini et al., , 2022Mirabella et al., 2022). ...
Affective empathy is an indispensable ability for humans and other species' harmonious social lives, motivating altruistic behavior, such as consolation and aid-giving. How to build an affective empathy computational model has attracted extensive attention in recent years. Most affective empathy models focus on the recognition and simulation of facial expressions or emotional speech of humans, namely Affective Computing. However, these studies lack the guidance of neural mechanisms of affective empathy. From a neuroscience perspective, affective empathy is formed gradually during the individual development process: experiencing own emotion—forming the corresponding Mirror Neuron System (MNS)—understanding the emotions of others through the mirror mechanism. Inspired by this neural mechanism, we constructed a brain-inspired affective empathy computational model, this model contains two submodels: (1) We designed an Artificial Pain Model inspired by the Free Energy Principle (FEP) to the simulate pain generation process in living organisms. (2) We build an affective empathy spiking neural network (AE-SNN) that simulates the mirror mechanism of MNS and has self-other differentiation ability. We apply the brain-inspired affective empathy computational model to the pain empathy and altruistic rescue task to achieve the rescue of companions by intelligent agents. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one to reproduce the emergence process of mirror neurons and anti-mirror neurons in the SNN field. Compared with traditional affective empathy computational models, our model is more biologically plausible, and it provides a new perspective for achieving artificial affective empathy, which has special potential for the social robots field in the future.
... Estimated SSRT gives the measure of the duration of the inhibitory process, with a lower value indicating a more rapid ability to respond to a Stop signal (Cai et al., 2015). SST studies have reported that, in some cases, emotional stimuli impaired response inhibition compared to neutral images (Verbruggen and De Houwer, 2007;Herbert and Sütterlin, 2011;Kalanthroff et al., 2013;Rebetez et al., 2015;Mancini et al., 2022), while in other studies emotional stimuli facilitated response inhibition compared to neutral cues (Pessoa et al., 2012;Senderecka, 2016;Choi and Cho, 2020). On the other hand, some studies reported no differences between response inhibition for emotional versus neutral stimuli (Sagaspe et al., 2011;Patterson et al., 2016) but consider evidence from Go/No-Go task 15. ...
... The SST is designed to provide a sensitive measure of the time taken by the brain to inhibit or suppress inappropriate motor responses (Logan et al., 1997;Matzke et al., 2018). Most of the existing studies have employed SST using emotional stimuli and have demonstrated that the presentation of an emotional image before the Go stimulus generally interferes with our ability to stop an action (Verbruggen and De Houwer, 2007;Kalanthroff et al., 2013;Rebetez et al., 2015), while when the emotional stimulus is presented as the stop, a facilitatory effect has been generally reported (Pessoa et al., 2012;Senderecka, 2016Senderecka, , 2018, but see the modulatory role of task, as in Mancini et al. (2022). However, Pessoa et al. (2012) demonstrated that it is the intensity of the stimulus that may play a crucial role (i.e., dual competition framework), by showing that the presentation of low-threat fearful facial stimuli as stops facilitates action suppression, while the presentation of a high-threat stimulus, such as a fear conditioned tone, disrupted such ability. ...
... Indeed, in most of the existing studies, the valence of the stop stimuli was irrelevant to the required response. However, Mancini et al. (2022), using a Go/No-Go task, showed that fearful facial expressions improve inhibitory control (measured as the rate of commission error) with respect to happy (and not neutral) expressions but only when relevant to participants goals, i.e., when participants have to refrain from moving at the presentation of an emotional stimulus. These results are in line with findings that suggest how fearful emotional stimuli increase the RTs and the rate of commission errors with respect to happy facial expressions (Mirabella, 2018;Mancini et al., 2020). ...
Since the dawn of cognitive neuroscience, emotions have been recognized to impact on several executive processes, such as action inhibition. However, the complex interplay between emotional stimuli and action control is not yet fully understood. One way to measure inhibitory control is the stop-signal task (SST), which estimates the ability to cancel outright an action to the presentation of a stop signal by means of the stop-signal reaction times (SSRTs). Impaired as well as facilitated action control has been found when faced with intrinsic emotional stimuli as stop signals in SSTs. Here, we aimed at investigating more deeply the power of negative stimuli to influence our action control, testing the hypothesis that a previously neutral stimulus [i.e., the image of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)], which has been conditioned through vicarious fear learning, has the same impact on reactive action inhibition performance as an intrinsically negative stimulus (i.e., a fearful face or body). Action control capabilities were tested in 90 participants by means of a SST, in which the stop signals were represented by different negative stimuli. Results showed that the SARS-CoV-2 image enhanced the ability to suppress an ongoing action similarly to observing fearful facial expressions or fearful body postures. Interestingly, we found that this effect was predicted by impulsivity traits: for example, the less self-control the participants had, the less they showed emotional facilitation for inhibitory performance. These results demonstrated that vicarious fear learning has a critical impact on cognitive abilities, making a neutral image as threatening as phylogenetically innate negative stimuli and able to impact on our behavioral control.
... In addition to emotional factors, difficulties in facial affect recognition are associated with cognitive impairments, including attention and impulsivity. [16][17][18][19][20] In a review of facial emotional recognition in adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Dan 16 reported that adolescents with ADHD found the recognition of facial expressions difficult due to differences in their brain activity. Löytömäki et al. 17 stated that a delay in emotional recognition in patients with ADHD is associated with the linguistic and cognitive skills required for selective intervention procedures. ...
Objective:
Facial affect recognition is associated with neuropsychological status and psychiatric diseases. We hypothesized that facial affect recognition is associated with psychological status and perception of other affects.
Methods:
A total of 80 images depicting facial affect, including 20 Neutral, 20 Angry, 20 Fear, and 20 Sad, were screened for use in our research. A total of 100 healthy individuals were asked to rate these images using a 10-point Likert scale and complete psychological scales assessing the emotional statuses and cognitive functions.
Results:
The participants' emotional state of aggression, attention, and impulsivity may have been associated with their interpretation of the Angry facial expressions. The participants often rated the Angry facial expressions as Fear. The participants rated Fear images as Angry or Sad. In response to a Sad facial expression, the participants reported psychological statuses of attention and impulsivity which were associated with the facial expression rating. The participants rated the Sad expression as Angry or Fear.
Conclusion:
The psychological statuses of the participants were significantly correlated with their interpretation of facial affects. In particular, a psychological state of attention was often correlated with incorrect affect ratings. Attention and impulsivity could affect the rating of the sad facial expressions.
