The influence of working memory on visual search for emotional facial expressions.

Background: The concept of alexithymia is characterized by difficulties identifying and describing one's emotions. Alexithymic individuals are impaired in the recognition of others' emotional facial expressions. Alexithymia is quite common in patients suffering from major depressive disorder. The face-in-the-crowd task is a visual search paradigm that assesses processing of multiple facial emotions. In the present eye-tracking study, the relationship between alexithymia and visual processing of facial emotions was examined in clinical depression.Materials and Methods: Gaze behavior and manual response times of 20 alexithymic and 19 non-alexithymic depressed patients were compared in a face-in-the-crowd task. Alexithymia was empirically measured via the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia-Scale. Angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions of different individuals were shown as target and distractor stimuli. Our analyses of gaze behavior focused on latency to the target face, number of distractor faces fixated before fixating the target, number of target fixations, and number of distractor faces fixated after fixating the target.Results: Alexithymic patients exhibited in general slower decision latencies compared to non-alexithymic patients in the face-in-the-crowd task. Patient groups did not differ in latency to target, number of target fixations, and number of distractors fixated prior to target fixation. However, after having looked at the target, alexithymic patients fixated more distractors than non-alexithymic patients, regardless of expression condition.Discussion: According to our results, alexithymia goes along with impairments in visual processing of multiple facial emotions in clinical depression. Alexithymia appears to be associated with delayed manual reaction times and prolonged scanning after the first target fixation in depression, but it might have no impact on the early search phase. The observed deficits could indicate difficulties in target identification and/or decision-making when processing multiple emotional facial expressions. Impairments of alexithymic depressed patients in processing emotions in crowds of faces seem not limited to a specific affective valence. In group situations, alexithymic depressed patients might be slowed in processing interindividual differences in emotional expressions compared with non-alexithymic depressed patients. This could represent a disadvantage in understanding non-verbal communication in groups.

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Efficient visual search for facial emotions in patients with major depression

BMC Psychiatry ◽

10.1186/s12888-021-03093-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Charlott Maria Bodenschatz ◽

Felix Czepluch ◽

Anette Kersting ◽

Thomas Suslow

Keyword(s):

Visual Search ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Spatial Attention ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Study Groups ◽

Fixation Time ◽

Gaze Behavior ◽

Healthy Individuals ◽

Emotional Facial Expressions ◽

Manual Response

Abstract Background Major depressive disorder has been associated with specific attentional biases in processing emotional facial expressions: heightened attention for negative and decreased attention for positive faces. However, using visual search paradigms, previous reaction-time-based research failed, in general, to find evidence for increased spatial attention toward negative facial expressions and reduced spatial attention toward positive facial expressions in depressed individuals. Eye-tracking analyses allow for a more detailed examination of visual search processes over time during the perception of multiple stimuli and can provide more specific insights into the attentional processing of multiple emotional stimuli. Methods Gaze behavior of 38 clinically depressed individuals and 38 gender matched healthy controls was compared in a face-in-the-crowd task. Pictures of happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions were utilized as target and distractor stimuli. Four distinct measures of eye gaze served as dependent variables: (a) latency to the target face, (b) number of distractor faces fixated prior to fixating the target, (c) mean fixation time per distractor face before fixating the target and (d) mean fixation time on the target. Results Depressed and healthy individuals did not differ in their manual response times. Our eye-tracking data revealed no differences between study groups in attention guidance to emotional target faces as well as in the duration of attention allocation to emotional distractor and target faces. However, depressed individuals fixated fewer distractor faces before fixating the target than controls, regardless of valence of expressions. Conclusions Depressed individuals seem to process angry and happy expressions in crowds of faces mainly in the same way as healthy individuals. Our data indicate no biased attention guidance to emotional targets and no biased processing of angry and happy distractors and targets in depression during visual search. Under conditions of clear task demand depressed individuals seem to be able to allocate and guide their attention in crowds of angry and happy faces as efficiently as healthy individuals.

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Working memory for emotional facial expressions: Role of the estrogen in young women

Psychoneuroendocrinology ◽

10.1016/j.psyneuen.2008.04.007 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 33 (7) ◽

pp. 964-972 ◽

Cited By ~ 38

Author(s):

Antonella Gasbarri ◽

Assunta Pompili ◽

Armida d’Onofrio ◽

Agata Cifariello ◽

Maria Clotilde Tavares ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Young Women ◽

Emotional Facial Expressions

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Older adults detect happy facial expressions less rapidly

Royal Society Open Science ◽

10.1098/rsos.191715 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (3) ◽

pp. 191715

Author(s):

Akie Saito ◽

Wataru Sato ◽

Sakiko Yoshikawa

Keyword(s):

Older Adults ◽

Young Adults ◽

Visual Search ◽

Facial Expressions ◽

Experimental Psychology ◽

Search Task ◽

Visual Search Task ◽

Age Groups ◽

Emotional Facial Expressions ◽

Visual Properties

Previous experimental psychology studies based on visual search paradigms have reported that young adults detect emotional facial expressions more rapidly than emotionally neutral expressions. However, it remains unclear whether this holds in older adults. We investigated this by comparing the abilities of young and older adults to detect emotional and neutral facial expressions while controlling the visual properties of faces presented (termed anti-expressions) in a visual search task. Both age groups detected normal angry faces more rapidly than anti-angry faces. However, whereas young adults detected normal happy faces more rapidly than anti-happy faces, older adults did not. This suggests that older adults may not be easy to detect or focusing attention towards smiling faces appearing peripherally.

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