“Now I see it, now I don’t”: Determining Threshold Levels of Facial Emotion Recognition for Use in Patient Populations

Abstract

The importance of including measures of emotion processing, such as tests of facial emotion recognition (FER), as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment is being increasingly recognized. In clinical settings, FER tests need to be sensitive, short, and easy to administer, given the limited time available and patient limitations. Current tests, however, commonly use stimuli that either display prototypical emotions, bearing the risk of ceiling effects and unequal task difficulty, or are cognitively too demanding and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations in FER testing in patient populations, we aimed to define FER threshold levels for the six basic emotions in healthy individuals. Forty-nine healthy individuals between 52 and 79 years of age were asked to identify the six basic emotions at different intensity levels (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, and 125% of the prototypical emotion). Analyses uncovered differing threshold levels across emotions and sex of facial stimuli, ranging from 50% up to 100% intensities. Using these findings as "healthy population benchmarks", we propose to apply these threshold levels to clinical populations either as facial emotion recognition or intensity rating tasks. As part of any comprehensive social cognition test battery, this approach should allow for a rapid and sensitive assessment of potential FER deficits.

Facial Emotion Recognition Performance Differentiates Between Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia and Major Depressive Disorder

“…24 The 6 basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, and happiness) were presented for both sexes at threshold intensity levels, as previously established. 25 Each facial stimulus was shown 6 times consecutively and was rated on its congruent emotion (eg, rating on sadness when sad face is shown) and its 5 incongruent basic emotions (eg, rating on anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and happiness when sad face is shown) (Supplementary eFigure 1). Stimuli were presented in 2 pseudorandomized versions, whereby no type of emotion was shown more than twice in a row.…”

Neural correlates of naturalistic social cognition: brain-behavior relationships in healthy adults

“…A major limitation for research on normal variation is that most studies use highly simplistic stimuli and fail to capture the demands posed by real-life social encounters. Therefore, the majority of these tasks produce ceiling effects in behavior responses (Dodell-Feder et al, 2013;Chiu et al, 2015;Henry et al, 2015). While, on the one hand, they allow for tightly controlled experiments, overly simplistic models also come at an important cost: They are bound to be artificial, because the target processes (e.g.…”

Virtual Reality for Research in Social Neuroscience

“…In addition to studies using the International Affective Picture System [5] or standard facial expressions [6], social neuroscientists have used sentences [7,8], paragraphs [9,10] and scripted imagery of social events [11]. Unfortunately, static and simplistic stimuli may not be representative of real-life social encounters, and tasks with static stimuli may result in ceiling effects [12,13]. Moreover, static stimuli tend to be non-natural due to target processes (viewing a facial expression) not occurring as isolated events in real life.…”