Perceiving facial affective ambiguity: A behavioral and neural comparison of adolescents and adults.

The current study examined perceptual differences between adults and youth in perceiving ambiguous facial expressions. We estimated individuals' internal representation for facial expressions and compared it between age groups (adolescents: N = 108, Mage = 13.04 years, 43.52% female; adults: N = 81, Mage = 31.54, 65.43% female). We found that adolescents' perceptual representation for facial emotion is broader than that of adults', such that adolescents experience more difficulty in identifying subtle configurational differences of facial expressions. At the neural level, perceptual uncertainty in face-selective regions (e.g., fusiform face area, occipital face area) were significantly higher for adolescents than for adults, suggesting that adolescents' brains more similarly represent lower intensity emotional faces than do adults'. Our results provide evidence for age-related differences concerning psychophysical differences in perceptual representation of emotional faces at the neural and behavioral level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

[1]  Eva H. Telzer,et al.  Love flows downstream: mothers’ and children’s neural representation similarity in perceiving distress of self and family , 2017, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[2]  Shuo Wang,et al.  The human amygdala parametrically encodes the intensity of specific facial emotions and their categorical ambiguity , 2017, Nature Communications.

[3]  L. F. Barrett,et al.  Working memory capacity is associated with optimal adaptation of response bias to perceptual sensitivity in emotion perception. , 2016, Emotion.

[4]  L. Somerville,et al.  What develops during emotional development? A component process approach to identifying sources of psychopathology risk in adolescence , 2015, Dialogues in clinical neuroscience.

[5]  T. L. Watson,et al.  A Bayesian approach to person perception , 2015, Consciousness and Cognition.

[6]  G. Aguirre,et al.  Seeing the world through non rose-colored glasses: anxiety and the amygdala response to blended expressions , 2015, Front. Hum. Neurosci..

[7]  C. Clifford,et al.  Cone of direct gaze as a marker of social anxiety in males , 2013, Psychiatry Research.

[8]  C. Clifford,et al.  Gaze categorization under uncertainty: psychophysics and modeling. , 2013, Journal of vision.

[9]  Anthony J Bishara,et al.  Testing the significance of a correlation with nonnormal data: comparison of Pearson, Spearman, transformation, and resampling approaches. , 2012, Psychological methods.

[10]  Nancy Kanwisher,et al.  An algorithmic method for functionally defining regions of interest in the ventral visual pathway , 2012, NeuroImage.

[11]  Yang Seok Cho,et al.  Context Modulation of Facial Emotion Perception Differed by Individual Difference , 2012, PloS one.

[12]  Russell A. Poldrack,et al.  Deconvolving BOLD activation in event-related designs for multivoxel pattern classification analyses , 2012, NeuroImage.

[13]  J. Tanaka,et al.  The NimStim set of facial expressions: Judgments from untrained research participants , 2009, Psychiatry Research.

[14]  J. Cohn,et al.  Development of perceptual expertise in emotion recognition , 2009, Cognition.

[15]  C. Clifford,et al.  Visual representation of eye gaze is coded by a nonopponent multichannel system. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[16]  L. Pessoa,et al.  Neural Correlates of Perceptual Choice and Decision Making during Fear–Disgust Discrimination , 2007, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[17]  R. Poldrack.  Region of interest analysis for fMRI. , 2007, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[18]  Anders M. Dale,et al.  An automated labeling system for subdividing the human cerebral cortex on MRI scans into gyral based regions of interest , 2006, NeuroImage.

[19]  Margot J. Taylor,et al.  The development of emotional face processing during childhood. , 2006, Developmental science.

[20]  Mark W. Woolrich,et al.  Advances in functional and structural MR image analysis and implementation as FSL , 2004, NeuroImage.

[21]  Andrew L. Alexander,et al.  Contextual Modulation of Amygdala Responsivity to Surprised Faces , 2004, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[22]  Stephen M Smith,et al.  Fast robust automated brain extraction , 2002, Human brain mapping.

[23]  R. Adolphs.  Neural systems for recognizing emotion , 2002, Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

[24]  M. Bradley,et al.  Emotional reactions in children: verbal, physiological, and behavioral responses to affective pictures. , 2001, Psychophysiology.

[25]  Kathleen M. Thomas,et al.  Amygdala response to facial expressions in children and adults , 2001, Biological Psychiatry.

[26]  H. Critchley,et al.  The functional neuroanatomy of social behaviour: changes in cerebral blood flow when people with autistic disorder process facial expressions. , 2000, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[27]  E. McClure.  A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. , 2000, Psychological bulletin.

[28]  L. Huffman.  Emotional Development: The Organization of Emotional Life in the Early Years , 1997 .

[29]  Glenn Geher,et al.  Emotional intelligence and the identification of emotion , 1996 .

[30]  A. J. Fridlund.  Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View , 1994 .

[31]  A. L. Gross,et al.  Children's understanding of emotion from facial expressions and situations: A review , 1991 .

[32]  E. Leibenluft,et al.  Developmental differences in the neural mechanisms of facial emotion labeling. , 2016, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

[33]  T. Dalgleish.  Basic Emotions , 2004 .

[34]  Paul L. Harris,et al.  Children's understanding of emotion , 1989 .

[35]  Nikolaus Kriegeskorte,et al.  Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience Systems Neuroscience , 2022 .

[36]  M. Gendron,et al.  Language as context for the perception of emotion , 2007, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.