Facial emotion detection in Vestibular Schwannoma patients with and without facial paresis

Abstract

This study investigates whether there exist differences in facial emotion detection accuracy in patients suffering from Vestibular Schwannoma (VS) due to their facial paresis. Forty-four VS patients, half of them with, and half of them without a facial paresis, had to classify pictures of facial expressions as being emotional or non-emotional. The visual information of images was systematically manipulated by adding different levels of visual noise. The study had a mixed design with emotional expression (happy vs. angry) and visual noise level (10% to 80%) as repeated measures and facial paresis (present vs. absent) and degree of facial dysfunction as between subjects' factors. Emotion detection accuracy declined when visual information declined, an effect that was stronger for anger than for happy expressions. Overall, emotion detection accuracy for happy and angry faces did not differ between VS patients with or without a facial paresis, although exploratory analyses suggest that the ability to recognize emotions in angry facial expressions was slightly more impaired in patients with facial paresis. The findings are discussed in the context of the effects of facial paresis on emotion detection, and the role of facial mimicry, in particular, as an important mechanism for facial emotion processing and understanding.

A Utilização da Imitação Facial em Tarefas de Reconhecimento de Expressões Emocionais

“…Assim, logrou-se testá-la fazendo uso de pacientes com paralisia completa dos movimentos voluntários faciais. Estes foram convidados a reconhecer expressões faciais emocionais em fotos, e apresentaram um desempenho negativo na tarefa que envolve a ativação da musculatura facial, o mimetismo, um mecanismo de simulação de alto nível, crucialmente envolvido na atribuição explícita de emoções (Blom, Aarts, Kunst, Wever, & Semin, 2021;Rymarczyk, Żurawski, Jankowiak-Siuda, & Szatkowska, 2018;Tramacere, Ferrari, Gentilucci, Giuffrida, & De Marco, 2018).…”

Moving Emotions: An examination of the role of facial mimicry in emotion understanding.

“…These patients tend to show rather intact emotion understanding abilities, even though some elements of more complex emotion understanding might be impaired. Whereas earlier research cannot completely rule out that facial mimicry did occur (e.g., in case of unilateral side paralysis in VS patients; Blom et al, 2020aBlom et al, , 2020b, in more extreme cases of paralysis -such as LIS patients-emotional understanding still appears without facial mimicry. However, Embodied cognition in emotion processing | 43 emotion understanding in these patients could be relatively established and developed due to previous -bodily-experience with emotion, as well as due to established conceptual emotion knowledge or other compensatory emotion understanding routes (e.g., Bate et al, 2013).…”

“…We wish to note here that the current study is part of a larger project that examined possible differences in emotion processing of facial expressions as well as perceived quality of life, social function and emotion between VS patients with and without facial paresis. This project aims to provide a first step in obtaining a more complete picture of emotion processing and emotion regulation in patients by using several experimental tasks as well as questionnaires (see Blom, Aarts, Wever, Kunst & Semin, in press b ;Blom, Aarts, Kunst, Wever & Semin, 2020a).…”

“…One such process pertains to the ease of detecting emotional facial expressions, especially considering the hypothesis that facial mimicry becomes more relevant when emotional information is more ambiguous (Arnold & Winkielman, 2019;Winkielman et al, 2018). Therefore, Blom and colleagues conducted a different experiment with the same VS patient sample to examine emotion detection in (happy and angry) facial expressions with different levels of visibility (Blom, Aarts, Kunst, Wever & Semin, 2020a).…”