sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal % Participants were recruited from a large southwestern university and completed the study as part of a research requirement for an introduction to psychology course. Further, it is possible that participants in our sample would have been diagnosed with other comorbid disorders or were experiencing high levels of anxiety. In addition, an age-related decline in the identification of some negative emotions was not explained by general cognitive decline with age. Beevers CG, Gibb BE, McGeary JE, Miller IW. There were no significant results; for example, for the Age Group Emotion blend, F(2, 102) = 1.75, p =.18, p2 =.03. 10.1080/02699931.2020.1862063 Thus, for each group, n = 29. This allows us to determine whether individuals have difficulty with the identification of emotion in general or whether biases become more prominent as stimulus ambiguity increases. (, Braver, T. S., Satpute, A. Pollak SD, Kistler D. Early experience is associated with the development of categorical representations for facial expressions of emotion. Gotlib and Hammen (1992) suggested that cognitive biases may contribute to some of the interpersonal problems experienced by depressed individuals. These unmeasured factors could have influenced the findings. The current task overcomes this limitation by not relying on reaction time. Gur RC, Erwin RJ, Gur RE, Zwil AS, Heimberg C, Kraemer HC.

However, the vast majority of this research has relied on simple, schematic drawings of faces. Calder and colleagues (2003) also used normal and morphed faces to examine emotional face recognition across the adult life span. Facial expressions play a particularly important role in social communication, as they can convey a wide range of information between social partners (Mayer et al., 1990). uuid:2023aa2f-3bc2-40f1-b34d-98ec8295e2fa No significant differences were observed at the emotion prototypes for happy (morph increment 0: F(1, 105) = 1.28, p =.26) or sad (morph increment 100: F(1, 105) = 2.20, p =.14). It is important for future research to use facial expressions from other well-validated collections, such as the NimStim collection (for more information, see www.macbrain.org), to ensure that these cognitive biases generalize beyond the Ekman collection. We also conducted an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), which included social anxiety, VAS sadness, VAS happiness, and WASI Matrix Reasoning and Vocabulary subtest scores as covariates (the groups differed on these variables). We did not include additional emotions, such as fear, in the present study in order to avoid a lengthy testing session, as older participants may be more prone to fatigue. Thus, 0% = 0% sad and 100% happy, 50% = 50% sad and 50% happy, and 100% = 100% sad and 0% happy. This bias is hypothesized to be pervasive, influencing memory, attention, and interpretation of environmental stimuli. Negative bias in the perception of others facial emotional expressions in major depression. Images that fell in the 0% to 30% and 70% to 100% range were presented twice for each actor while images in the 40% to 60% range were expected to be somewhat more ambiguous and thus were presented 4 times each. Address correspondence to: Christopher Beevers, University of Texas at Austin, Department of Psychology, A800, Austin, TX 78712. email: interpretation bias, depression, cognitive models, information processing.

Gotlib and Hammen (1992) have speculated that information processing biases may contribute to some of the interpersonal difficulties often experienced by depressed people. Jonathan B. Freeman The second task required participants to identify which of two morphed facial expressions demonstrated the greatest target emotion (e.g., which of two faces looked more angry).

Follow-up analyses focused on the significant stimulus continuum morph increment dysphoria group interaction, as an examination of this interaction provides a critical test of our hypotheses and the higher order four-way interaction was not significant. Interpretation of ambiguous information in clinical depression. A second concern is that previous studies have mainly relied on analyses of correct identification performance, which means that it is difficult to disentangle an age-related deficit in discrimination performance from response-bias effects. In sum, the present study provided evidence of an age-related effect on response bias for emotional faces, as older adults were less likely than younger adults to report anger when presented with an ambiguous facial expression that contained both angry and happy features. Biases in the identification of emotional facial expressions in depression and social phobia. 1 0 obj No significant group differences were observed for the other morph increments. Nolen-Hoeksema S. The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. In the present study we used pictures of four female and four male models (1f, 3f, 7f, 8f, 21m, 23m, 27m, and 34m), each showing angry, sad, and happy facial expressions. Cognition and Emotion By contrast, the recognition of surprise and disgust appears to improve with age (Calder et al.). We then used a mixed-plot ANOVA to examine whether dysphoria groups differed in the probability of identifying each emotion along the four continua. Further, if dysphoric participants over-identify negative emotion in others, combining negative emotions would not produce a bias.

The perception of emotional information in stimuli constructed to be emotionally ambiguous has a number of qualities that we believe make it a useful tool with which to assess social information processing. 0 The ANCOVA results also showed effects of age on response bias for sad-happy emotion blends. 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Careers. However, when placed under conditions of divided attention, such that their attentional resources were depleted, older adults showed the same bias toward negative stimuli as younger adults. official website and that any information you provide is encrypted Similarly, Persad and Polivy (1993) reported that depressed individuals had a generalized deficit in their recognition of facial expressions that depicted a variety of emotions (e.g., sad, happy, fear, anger, surprise, indifference). To the best of our knowledge, the finding of an age-related effect in response bias for emotionally ambiguous morphed faces is novel. In addition, participants completed the StateTrait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) and social items from the Fear Questionnaire (Marks & Mathews, 1979). Thought suppression and memory biases during and after depressive episodes. endobj The present findings may also be considered in the light of previous research reporting age-related differences in attention to negative and positive faces. This tendency may contribute to some of the interpersonal difficulties often experienced by dysphoric individuals. Images were randomized within and between continua. We used nonparametric tests for severely skewed data that could not be normalized by transformation (i.e., VOSP). Mood congruent memory in dysphoria: The roles of state affect and cognitive style. Consider a facial expression that was created to express 30% sadness and 70% happiness. There were seven European-American models and one Latino-American model. First, this task does not rely on reaction time to infer biased processing. It may be that depressed individuals experience interpersonal difficulties in part because of biases in how they interpret the type of emotion their social partner is experiencing. Each trial began with a central fixation cross that was presented for 250 ms.

They also completed measures of mood, perceptual ability, and cognitive functioning. 0 VoR Further, they display a variety of interpersonal deficits (e.g., Joiner, 2000), such as having poorer social skills as rated by social partners and neutral observers (Segrin, 1990), excessive reassurance seeking (Prinstein et al., 2005), and more negative verbal and non-verbal communication (Hale et al., 1997) than non-depressed people. Evidence for attention to threatening stimuli in depression. 2021-02-12T07:57:32-08:00 Following the face-classification task, participants also completed neuropsychological assessments of crystallized and fluid intellectual ability (respectively, the Vocabulary and Matrix Reasoning subtests of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, WASI) (Wechsler, 1999); general, nonemotional, visual perception (The Incomplete Letters subtest of the Visual Object and Space Perception Battery, or VOSP; Warrington & James, 1991); and nonemotional facial perceptual ability (Benton, Sivan, Hamsher, Varney, & Spreen, 1994). Information processing and cognitive organization in unipolar depression: Specificity and comorbidity issues. ambiguity Cyti8Ya;-g% Facial emotion discrimination: II. To determine whether depression severity was maintained, participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996) immediately before completing study procedures. Further, depressed individuals took longer to identify sad than angry facial expressions. A person experiencing high levels of depressive symptoms may perceive emotion differently than a person suffering from clinical depression. This produced prototypical emotional expressions at each end of the continuum, with increasingly ambiguous stimuli towards the middle of each continuum (see Figure 1). This significant interaction was followed-up by examining group differences at each morph increment. This may become tiresome for the social partner over time and contribute to the erosion of the relationship. en Average age was 21.62 (SD = 6.08). Mathews A, Ridgeway V, Williamson DA. For example, Carstensen and colleagues (2003) suggested that older adults engage in response-focused emotion-regulation strategies aimed at minimizing negative affect. Journal of the American Statistical Association. trajectories Results from an 11 (morph increment: 0 10) 2 (dysphoria group: dysphoric, non-dysphoric) mixed plot analysis indicated a significant main effect for morph increment, F(10, 1050) = 1177.92, p <.001, 2 =.91, and a significant morph increment dysphoria group interaction, F(10, 1050) = 6.34, p <.001, 2 =.06. However, it is advisable to be cautious when interpreting null results, such as the present discrimination findings; further research with larger sample sizes would be informative. However, a direct comparison of results across studies is complicated by methodological differences as, for example, Isaacowitz and colleagues could not calculate signal detection measures of response bias because their data were not in a binary format, and this may explain the differences observed. B., Hamsher, K. S., de, Varney, N. R., Spreen, O. Results from an 11 (morph increment: 0 10) 2 (dysphoria group: dysphoric, non-dysphoric) mixed plot analysis indicated a significant main effect for morph increment, F(10, 1050) = 1282.74, p <.001, 2 =.94, and a non-significant morph increment dysphoria group interaction, F(10, 1050) = 0.54, p =.86, 2 =.00. Given the large number of follow-up tests, we used Sidaks (1967) adjustment to alpha to set significance level. We did consider using a more putatively objective definition of bias. We chose these three primary emotions because research has previously shown that there are generally consistent age-related impairments for anger and sadness, and preservation for happiness (e.g., Sullivan & Ruffman).

Continued research aimed at identifying the cognitive, social, and behavioral processes that serve to maintain depression may ultimately inform treatment development and help reduce the significant distress that is often associated with an episode of depression. A similar but less robust pattern was observed for facial expressions that combined fear and happiness. There was no evidence of an association between age and response bias for angry versus sad faces. We used these stimuli to create three emotion blends: angryhappy, sadhappy, and sadangry. The third task required participants to identify which of six pictures of emotional facial expressions matched an emotional soundtrack. Geerts E, Bouhuys N. Multi-level prediction of short-term outcome of depression: Non-verbal interpersonal process, cognitions, and personality traits. Note: No statistically significant differences between depression groups were observed for gender or age.

Sidak Z. Rectangular confidence regions for the means of multivariate normal distributions. In conclusion, these findings promote further understanding of the cognitive processes associated with dysphoria. In the present study we used only three emotions (anger, sadness, and happiness), with each emotion contrasted against each other. Development of the MacBrain Face Stimulus Set was overseen by Nim Tottenham and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development. Older and younger adults did not differ significantly in their ability to discriminate between positive and negative emotions. More recently, researchers have begun to examine how depressed individuals process interpersonal stimuli. Means (standard deviation) for probability of identifying second emotion along each morphed continuum. In comparison with younger adults, older adults showed a reduced tendency to report ambiguous faces as being angry rather than happy, whereas the groups did not differ significantly in their ability to discriminate between emotional facial expressions. It would seem informative to investigate this further, for example, by using neuroimaging methods to assess activity in this neural system while older and younger adults engage in emotion-discrimination tasks, such as the one used here. Another issue regarding this task is how to define biased emotion identification. The reduced tendency of older adults (relative to younger adults) to report the presence of anger in ambiguous facial expressions, which combine negative and positive features, may be compatible with either an emotion-regulation view of normal aging or with neurocognitive accounts, noted earlier. Although a variety of stimuli could be used to examine information processing biases for interpersonal content, facial expressions depicting emotional expressions are the most commonly used stimuli. We entered A scores into a 3 2 mixed-design analysis of variance with emotion blend (angryhappy, sadhappy, sadangry) and group (younger, older adults) as independent variables (see Table 2 for means, standard deviations, and confidence intervals of the mean difference). Psychological aspects of depression: Toward a cognitive-interpersonal integration. application/pdf ANCOVA results also indicated that younger adults were relatively more likely than older adults to report sad faces in sadhappy blends (adjusted means, .14 vs.17), F(1, 51) = 4.80, p =.03, p2 =.09.

For example, older adults may perceive negative emotional information (e.g., hostile component of an ambiguous emotional expression) but be reluctant to report its presence. Moreover, four previous studies (Phillips & Allen, 2004; Phillips et al. Future work should consider exploring the interpersonal consequences of this cognitive bias, as this may be a pathway by which a dysphoric episode is maintained. This study examined whether dysphoria influences the identification of non-ambiguous and ambiguous facial expressions of emotion.

2020-12-24truewww.tandfonline.com10.1080/02699931.2020.1862063www.tandfonline.comtrue2020-12-2410.1080/02699931.2020.1862063 Across the whole sample, participants were less able to discriminate between emotion blends containing two negative emotions (sadangry) than between emotion blends combining a negative and a positive emotion (sadhappy, or angryhappy). Our primary analysis examined whether dysphoria groups differentially identified emotion in the morphed faces across the four emotion continua. 4 0 obj Dozois DJA.

Depressed participants rated the ambiguous schematic pictures as significantly more negative than controls. The task (three blocks) took approximately 20 min to complete. Thus, older individuals may underreport their identification of negative emotions when confronted with emotionally ambiguous situations, and it should not be assumed that this reflects a deficit in their perception of negative emotion. (, Phillips, L. H., MacLean, R. D. J., Allen, R. (, Richards, A., French, C. C., Calder, A. J., Webb, B., Fox, R., Young, A. W. (, Spielberger, C. D., Gorsuch, R. L., Lushene, R., Vagg, P. R., Jacobs, G. A. Note: For younger and older adults, N = 29.

In line with this possibility, Bouhuys and colleagues (Bouhuys et al., 1999; Geerts & Bouhuys, 1998) presented three ambiguous and nine non-ambiguous schematic facial expressions to depressed and control participants. This proposal seems consistent with the finding that older adults were less likely than younger adults to endorse negative than positive response options, possibly as a result of a desire to avoid acknowledging the presence of negative emotion. If the present findings are confirmed, it would seem helpful to increase the awareness of health professionals of potential difficulties of older adults in reporting negative emotional information in an unbiased way. Cognitive vulnerability to persistent depression. Psychiatry Research.. Young, A. W., Rowland, D., Calder, A. J., Etcoff, N. L., Seth, A., Perrett, D. I. For instance, Gur et al. uuid:c24f12d1-ca64-4542-bd0e-ddc2f03abfc1 When these five variables (i.e., vocabulary, nonverbal reasoning, social anxiety, sad mood, happy mood) were included as covariates in the analyses, there was still no evidence of age-related effects on discrimination accuracy. Although we have used reaction time tasks to measure information processing (e.g., Beevers & Carver, 2003; Beevers et al., 2007), some investigators have suggested that slow and variable motor responses observed in some psychiatric conditions may potentially confound manual reaction time data (Mathews et al., 1996). We have considered some possibilities in the introduction, such as the lack of consistency in the emotion combinations used across studies. The new PMC design is here! Participants who did not maintain their dysphoria status from pre-testing to the time of the experiment (n = 31) were excluded from this study. Additional research examining social information processing with a clinically diagnosed sample is clearly warranted. Learn more In addition, we used prototype (unmorphed) angry, happy, sad, and neutral expressions from two additional male and female models in practice trials. The present findings may also be accommodated within a neurocognitive account of emotion processing (e.g., LeDoux, 1996). No significant differences were observed for the other morph increments (see Table 2). B., Keys, B. Cognitive organization of self-schematic content in nondysphoric, mildly dysphoric, and moderately-severely dysphoric individuals. Each participant provided informed consent to take part in the study in accordance with approval from the University of Southampton Psychology Research Ethics Committee. However, further research using a wider selection of emotions would be required to confirm this. Task duration was approximately 20 minutes. This non-significant interaction suggests that the dysphoria groups did not differentially perceive the morphed faces on this continuum (see Table 2). 2021-02-12T07:57:32-08:00 Results confirmed that younger adults were more likely than older adults to report anger in angryhappy blends (adjusted means, .50 vs .06), F(1, 51) = 5.71, p =.02, p2 =.10. There are a number of reasons to use facial stimuli. If so, this may lead to a bias for relatively greater reporting of the presence of negative information in younger adults. This format encouraged participants to use the full range of response options and to familiarize themselves with the new response choices for the block. In some studies, depressed individuals ability to identify emotional facial expressions appears to be impaired. They were asked to classify each face, using one of six response options as accurately and as quickly as possible (e.g., for the sadhappy block, options were very sad, moderately sad, slightly sad, slightly happy, moderately happy, and very happy). A recent eye-tracking study (Knight et al., 2007) revealed that older adults allocated less attention to a negative face when it was paired with a neutral face than younger adults did. Probability estimates were obtained for each individual via binary logistic regression using the morph increment (0100) to predict whether the second emotion was identified (yes, no) for each continuum. The evidence to this point suggests that depressed people are more likely to identify negative emotion in ambiguous emotional expressions than non-depressed individuals. Thus, dysphoria does not appear to impact the identification of non-ambiguous expressions of emotion. In contrast, no group differences were observed when sadness and anger and fear and anger were morphed together. Prototype angry, happy, and sad expressions were selected from the NimStim Face Stimulus Set (http://www.macbrain.org/resources.htm), which includes more than 600 facial stimuli depicting a wide range of emotions (including fearful, happy, sad, angry, surprised, calm, and disgusted). We recruited 30 healthy, high-functioning older adults, aged 61 to 92 years, from a non-clinical, community population (e.g., local community and social clubs). endstream The groups did not differ significantly in response-bias scores for sad faces, relative to happy faces, in the sadhappy blend (.04 vs.17), t(56) = 1.54, p =.13, nor for sad faces relative to angry faces in the sadangry blend (.15 vs.18), t(56) = 0.20, p =.84. Several limitations of the current study should also be noted. Q, The dynamic process of ambiguous emotion perception, Cognition and Emotion, 2020. doi:10.1080/02699931.2020.1862063. Given previously reported findings, we hypothesized that, in comparison with younger adults, older participants would show reduced perceptual discrimination of negative (i.e., angry and sad) faces, relative to happy faces, and that they would also show a greater response bias against negative (i.e., angry and sad) faces, relative to happy faces. We included the mood and anxiety measures because these variables may be associated with a bias to evaluate ambiguous information in a negative manner (e.g., Garner et al., 2007; Mogg & Bradley, 1998; Richards et al., 2002). A further ANCOVA showed no group difference in response bias for the sadangry blend (adjusted means,.16 vs.16), F < 1. Bold font indicates significant group differences (p <.05) for that morph increment. 1

Thus, in both studies, the extent to which the findings represent age-related deficits in recognition of the target emotion, or differential effects of the contrasting emotions, was unclear. To achieve an overall alpha of.05 with 11 post-hoc tests and a correlation of.30 among our dependent variables, we had to set significance level to a p-value of .009. See Table 1 for means. In addition to these strengths, the task as designed in the current study also has its limitations. Results are discussed in relation to other research into age-related effects on emotion processing. Criterion validity, severity cut scores, and test-retest reliability of the beck depression inventory-II in a university counseling center sample. Identifying an emotion 60% of the time in expressions that contain 30% of that emotion could be interpreted as biased. Results suggested that older adults were impaired when identifying angry and sad facial expressions, and when matching emotional sounds to angry, sad, and disgusted faces. (, Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Indeed, other similar studies have defined bias by comparing responses of dysphoric and non-dysphoric groups (Joormann & Gotlib, 2007). Older adults showed a reduced tendency to report anger in these emotionally ambiguous faces, compared with younger adults. However, depressed individuals took longer to identify happiness than non-depressed participants. We assumed the non-dysphoric group provided normative responses on this task and deviations from these responses reflected a bias. Dysphoria appears to enhance the identification of negative emotion in others when positive emotion is also present. Beevers CG, Meyer B. Studies using morphed facial expressions may be more sensitive to age-related effects in emotional processing, compared with those using pure facial expressions as stimuli (such as prototypical happy, sad, or angry faces), because the latter may be easily identified and produce a ceiling effect in performance. CI = confidence interval. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the

One-sample t tests using adjusted means revealed that the mean response-bias score for sad faces (in sadhappy blends) did not differ significantly from zero (no bias) for younger adults, t(28) = 1.18, p =.25, d = 0.22, but it was significantly different for older adults, t(28) = 2.31, p =.03, d = 0.43. Direnfeld DM, Roberts JE. Montagne B, Kessels RPC, Frigerio E, de Haan EHF, Perrett DI. E-mail: Search for other works by this author on: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Aging: Clinical and Experimental Research, Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, Copyright 2008 by The Gerontological Society of America, COVID-19-Related Changes in Assistance Networks for U.S.

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