Tuning to the Positive: Age-Related Differences in Subjective Perception of Facial Emotion

Picardo, Rochelle; Baron, Andrew Scott; Anderson, Adam K.; Todd, Rebecca M.

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0145643

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…In the present study, we used a morphing paradigm in which ambiguous facial expressions were perceived as being happier (and less angry) after participants were exposed to a working memory task using angry facial expressions. To date, this training effect has been observed in a relatively small sample of aggressive adolescents (Penton-Voak et al, 2013) and in younger children (Picardo, Baron, Anderson, & Todd, 2016). In the present study, we were able to replicate this finding in a much larger population of healthy university students, validating and generalizing the previous findings.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

The influence of the noradrenergic/stress system on perceptual biases for reward

Ehlers

Ross

Todd

2018

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Previous research has established a role for the norepinephrine (NE)/stress system in individual differences in biases to attend to reward or punishment. Outstanding questions concern its role in the flexibility with which such biases can be changed. The goal of this preregistered study was to examine the role of the NE/stress system in the degree to which biases can be trained along the axis of valence in the direction of reward. Participants genotyped for a common deletion variant of ADRA2b (linked to altered NE availability) experienced either an acute stress induction or a control procedure. Following stress induction, a Bbias probe^task was presented before and after training. In the bias probe task, participants made forced choice judgments (happy or angry) on emotional faces with varying degrees of ambiguity. For bias training, participants viewed unambiguously angry faces in a task exploiting visual adaptation effects. The results revealed an overall shift from a slightly positive bias in categorizing faces pretraining to a more positive bias after training. Carriers of the deletion variant overall showed a more positive bias than did the noncarriers. Follow-up analyses showed that pretraining bias was a significant predictor of bias change, with those who showed a more negative bias preadaptation changing more in a positive direction. Critically, this effect was observed under control but not under stress conditions. These results suggest that the NE/stress system plays an important role in influencing traitlike biases as well as short-term changes in the tendency to perceive ambiguous stimuli as being more rewarding than threatening. Keywords Emotion. Motivation. Norephinephrine. Reward Decades of research have supported the common observation that some people see the world through rose-colored glasses, and others through lenses tinted gray (e.g., Eysenck & Eysenck, 1985). In general, we are all more likely to attend to and remember emotionally and motivationally salient environmental cues (Markovic, Anderson, & Todd, 2014; Pourtois, Schettino, & Vuilleumier, 2013). Yet, when a cue is ambiguous in signaling reward or punishment, individuals

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

The influence of the noradrenergic/stress system on perceptual biases for reward

Ehlers

Ross

Todd

2018

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…First, there is an extensive literature documenting systematic individual differences in the direction of biases [for review see (Todd, Cunningham, Anderson, & Thompson, 2012)]. Valence preferences can also vary with developmental stage, such that young children show far more sensitivity and prioritization of happy faces than young adults (Picardo, Baron, Anderson, & Todd, 2016;Todd, Evans, Morris, Lewis, & Taylor, 2011). In the present study, this pattern did not reflect the individual differences in ADRA2B genotype and social anxiety we predicted and measured in this sample.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

Affectively Biased Competition: Sustained Attention is Tuned to Rewarding Expressions and is Not Modulated by Norepinephrine Receptor Gene Variant

Roberts¹,

Manaligod²,

Ross³

et al. 2019

Collabra: Psychology

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It is well established that emotionally salient stimuli evoke greater visual cortex activation than neutral ones, and can distract attention from competing tasks. Yet less is known about underlying neurobiological processes. As a proxy of population level biased competition, EEG steady-state visual evoked potentials are sensitive to competition effects from salient stimuli. Here we wished to examine whether individual differences in norepinephrine activity play a role in emotionally-biased competition. Our previous research has found robust effects of a common variation in the ADRA2B gene, coding for alpha2B norepinephrine (NE) receptors, on emotional modulation of attention and memory. In the present study, EEG was collected while 87 carriers of the ADRA2B deletion variant and 95 non-carriers (final sample) performed a change detection task in which target gratings (gabor patches) were superimposed directly over angry, happy, and neutral faces. Participants indicated the number of phase changes (0-3) in the target. Overlapping targets and distractors were flickered at a distinct driving frequencies. Relative EEG power for faces vs. targets at the driving frequency served as an index of cortical resources allocated to each of the competing stimuli. Deletion carriers and non-carriers were randomly assigned to Discovery and Replication samples and reliability of results across samples was assessed before the groups were combined for greater power. Overall happy faces evoked higher competition than angry or neutral faces; however, we observed no hypothesized effects of ADRA2B. Increased competition from happy faces was not due to the effect of low-level visual features or individuals low in social anxiety. Our results indicate that emotionally biased competition during sustained attention, while reliably observed in young adults, is not influenced by commonly observed individual differences linked to NE receptor function. They further indicate an overall pattern of affectively-biased competition for happy faces, which we interpret in relation to previously observed boundary conditions.

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“…In addition, from a dimensional approach, the major difference between happy and angry faces is on the valence dimension rather than on the arousal dimension [47, 48]. Accordingly, recent evidence shows that adults rate happy and angry faces very similarly on the arousal dimension [49]. Finally, we used the same objects as targets as in Bayliss et al [10] and collected preference ratings in the third block to assess whether emotional expression and gaze direction affect object preferences even when faces concurrently change gaze direction and emotional expression under cognitive load.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotion Unchained: Facial Expression Modulates Gaze Cueing under Cognitive Load

Pecchinenda

Petrucci

2016

PLoS ONE

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Direction of eye gaze cues spatial attention, and typically this cueing effect is not modulated by the expression of a face unless top-down processes are explicitly or implicitly involved. To investigate the role of cognitive control on gaze cueing by emotional faces, participants performed a gaze cueing task with happy, angry, or neutral faces under high (i.e., counting backward by 7) or low cognitive load (i.e., counting forward by 2). Results show that high cognitive load enhances gaze cueing effects for angry facial expressions. In addition, cognitive load reduces gaze cueing for neutral faces, whereas happy facial expressions and gaze affected object preferences regardless of load. This evidence clearly indicates a differential role of cognitive control in processing gaze direction and facial expression, suggesting that under typical conditions, when we shift attention based on social cues from another person, cognitive control processes are used to reduce interference from emotional information.

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Tuning to the Positive: Age-Related Differences in Subjective Perception of Facial Emotion

Cited by 12 publications

References 52 publications

The influence of the noradrenergic/stress system on perceptual biases for reward

The influence of the noradrenergic/stress system on perceptual biases for reward

Affectively Biased Competition: Sustained Attention is Tuned to Rewarding Expressions and is Not Modulated by Norepinephrine Receptor Gene Variant

Emotion Unchained: Facial Expression Modulates Gaze Cueing under Cognitive Load

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