Early experience shapes the amygdala’s sensitivity to race.

Here is a fascinating finding. Not surprising, I suppose, but Telzer et al. show that orphan human infants raised with exposure to only same-race faces (European or Asian) have heightened amygdala responses to out-group faces than those raised with exposure to same- and other-race faces. Later age of adoption is associated with greater biases to race.

In the current study, we investigated how complete infant deprivation to out-group race impacts behavioral and neural sensitivity to race. Although monkey models have successfully achieved complete face deprivation in early life, this is typically impossible in human studies. We overcame this barrier by examining youths with exclusively homogenous racial experience in early postnatal development. These were youths raised in orphanage care in either East Asia or Eastern Europe as infants and later adopted by American families. The use of international adoption bolsters confidence of infant exposure to race (e.g., to solely Asian faces or European faces). Participants completed an emotional matching task during functional MRI. Our findings show that deprivation to other-race faces in infancy disrupts recognition of emotion and results in heightened amygdala response to out-group faces. Greater early deprivation (i.e., later age of adoption) is associated with greater biases to race. These data demonstrate how early social deprivation to race shapes amygdala function later in life and provides support that early postnatal development may represent a sensitive period for race perception.

We use body cues, not facial expression, to discriminate intense positive and negative emotions.

Interesting work from Aviezer et al:

The distinction between positive and negative emotions is fundamental in emotion models. Intriguingly, neurobiological work suggests shared mechanisms across positive and negative emotions. We tested whether similar overlap occurs in real-life facial expressions. During peak intensities of emotion, positive and negative situations were successfully discriminated from isolated bodies but not faces. Nevertheless, viewers perceived illusory positivity or negativity in the nondiagnostic faces when seen with bodies. To reveal the underlying mechanisms, we created compounds of intense negative faces combined with positive bodies, and vice versa. Perceived affect and mimicry of the faces shifted systematically as a function of their contextual body emotion. These findings challenge standard models of emotion expression and highlight the role of the body in expressing and perceiving emotions.

The force of affective norms - the stranger effect

Szczurek et al. make a more distanced and structured description of an experience we all have had - being put on guard in a chat with another person if their facial expressions and body language do not appropriately mirror or complement our own:

What happens when affective displays deviate from normative expectations? In this study, participants evaluated target individuals displaying flat, incongruent, or congruent expressions seemingly in response to pictures eliciting positive, neutral, or negative affect. Relative to targets who displayed normative reactions, those who violated affective norms (affective deviants) were rated more negatively on various dimensions of social judgment. Participants also preferred greater social distance from affective deviants, reported more moral outrage in response to them, and inferred that these targets did not share their moral values. Incongruent affect resulted in more negative social judgment than did flat affect, and this relationship was moderated by stimulus valence. Finally, the relationship between targets’ affective expressions and participants’ avoidant intentions was mediated by the extent to which participants thought the targets shared their moral values. These findings demonstrate the interpersonal costs of affective deviance, revealing the pervasiveness and force of affective norms.

Mapping discrete and dimensional emotions onto the brain.

Here I am passing on the abstract and one summary figure from a useful recent review article by Stephan Hamann:

A longstanding controversy in the field of emotion research has concerned whether emotions are better conceptualized in terms of discrete categories, such as fear and anger, or underlying dimensions, such as arousal and valence. In the domain of neuroimaging studies of emotion, the debate has centered on whether neuroimaging findings support characteristic and discriminable neural signatures for basic emotions or whether they favor competing dimensional and psychological construction accounts. This review highlights recent neuroimaging findings in this controversy, assesses what they have contributed to this debate, and offers some preliminary conclusions. Namely, although neuroimaging studies have identified consistent neural correlates associated with basic emotions and other emotion models, they have ruled out simple one-to-one mappings between emotions and brain regions, pointing to the need for more complex, network-based representations of emotion.

Figure - Levels of mapping between emotion models and the brain. The left panel illustrates the most commonly proposed one-to-one mappings between elements of emotion theories and individual brain regions. For example, amygdala activation typically correlates with emotional arousal, whereas activation in the orbitofrontal cortex correlates with emotional valence. As noted in the text, these one-to-one mappings run afoul of numerous experimental findings that show that, for example, fear consistently activates regions other than the amygdala, and the amygdala in turn is associated with several emotion processes. Such difficulties with one-to-one mappings have motivated a shift to more complex interrelationships, such as functional networks. For example, in the right panel, network mappings may involve individual brain regions (small rectangles) participating in networks that carry out the processing mediating different emotions. An individual region, such as the amygdala (red rectangle) can participate in multiple networks and that region's role can be modulated according to the currently active network configuration. These network dynamics have important implications for evaluating the neuroimaging evidence for different emotion theories.

Men with wider faces are more generous.

Here is an interesting piece from Stirrat and Perrett:

Male facial width-to-height ratio appears to correlate with antisocial tendencies, such as aggression, exploitation, cheating, and deception. We present evidence that male facial width-to-height ratio is also associated with a stereotypically male prosocial tendency: to increase cooperation with other in-group members during intergroup competition. We found that men who had wider faces, compared with men who had narrower faces, showed more self-sacrificing cooperation to help their group members when there was competition with another group. We propose that this finding makes sense given the evolutionary functions of social helpfulness and aggression.

Here are some rambling clips from their discussion:

Human cooperation and altruism have very likely evolved within a long history of conflict between group. Therefore, one would expect people to have evolved either innate responses or innate learning abilities regarding aggression between groups. There are good evolutionary reasons for men to be especially intergroup oriented, because membership in groups (like social status within those groups) correlates positively with the number of mating opportunities for men. As men with wider faces are rated as physically less attractive and display more antisocial behavior that is likely to be unattractive as well, males with wider faces may adopt this stereotypically male strategy of intergroup orientation and within-group helping behavior (including aggressive defense) as a compensatory strategy for affirming their group membership and gaining prestige with both men and women in their group.

Understanding this contingent inter- and intragroup male behavior is crucial to interpreting the relation between appearance and behavior. For example, in a fascinating recent article, Wong, Ormiston, and Haselhuhn indicated that the facial width-to-height ratio of chief executive officers (CEOs) predicted their firms’ financial performance. For Wong et al., the possible salient personal characteristics of the CEO that improve a firm’s performance are power and aggressive and exploitative behavior. Clearly, given the data in our study, it is possible that the correlation between CEOs’ facial width-to-height ratio and their firms’ financial performance is due not to CEOs’ aggressive tendencies, but to their tendencies toward self-sacrifice on behalf of their firms.

Universality of facial expressions of emotion challenged.

This  work by Jack et al (open access to full article) comes as quite a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy on the universality of human facial movements associated with the six basic emotional states:

Since Darwin’s seminal works, the universality of facial expressions of emotion has remained one of the longest standing debates in the biological and social sciences. Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) using the same facial movements by virtue of their biological and evolutionary origins [Susskind JM, et al. (2008) Nat Neurosci 11:843–850]. Here, we refute this assumed universality. Using a unique computer graphics platform that combines generative grammars [Chomsky N (1965) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] with visual perception, we accessed the mind’s eye of 30 Western and Eastern culture individuals and reconstructed their mental representations of the six basic facial expressions of emotion. Cross-cultural comparisons of the mental representations challenge universality on two separate counts. First, whereas Westerners represent each of the six basic emotions with a distinct set of facial movements common to the group, Easterners do not. Second, Easterners represent emotional intensity with distinctive dynamic eye activity. By refuting the long-standing universality hypothesis, our data highlight the powerful influence of culture on shaping basic behaviors once considered biologically hardwired. Consequently, our data open a unique nature–nurture debate across broad fields from evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience to social networking via digital avatars.

Facial theory of politics

I wanted to pass on this piece by Leonard Mlodinow to continue the thread started in previous posts (also, click on 'faces' in the blog categories in the left column).  He points to work suggesting that voters, regardless of issues and ideology, unconsciously favor the candidate that seems to radiate competence and most 'looks the part.'

A face only an investor could love...

Here is a quirky item, a bit of a stretch but curious. Given that psychological traits are thought to relate to effective leadership, Wong et al. ask whether any simple physical traits in a leader might correlate with a firms financial performance. They determined the the face width to height ratio of male leaders of 55 Fortune 500 organizations that formed part of the sample of a larger study examining the relationships among CEO characteristics, top-management-team1 processes, and organizational outcomes between 1996 and 2002:

Researchers have theorized that innate personal traits are related to leadership success. Although links between psychological characteristics and leadership success have been well established, research has yet to identify any objective physical traits of leaders that predict organizational performance. In the research reported here, we identified leaders’ facial structure as a specific physical trait that correlates with organizational performance. Specifically, we found that firms whose male CEOs have wider faces (relative to facial height) achieve superior financial performance. Decision-making dynamics within a firm’s leadership team moderate this effect, such that the relationship between a given CEO’s facial measurements and his firm’s financial performance is stronger in firms with cognitively simple leadership teams.

Figure - Industry-adjusted return on assets (ROA) as a function of the cognitive complexity of firms’ top management teams (TMTs) and CEOs’ facial width-to-height ratio (WHR). The slopes illustrated in this graph were calculated using the minimum (low) and maximum (high) values for cognitive complexity and CEO facial WHR. USD = U.S. dollars.

Our mindreading of another person depends on how much skin we see!

This interesting piece in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology makes observations on how our mindreading, or inferring someone's nature, depends on how much of them we are seeing. From the introduction:

Do people’s mental capacities fundamentally change when they remove a sweater? This seems absurd: How could removing a piece of clothing change one’s capacity for acting or feeling? In six studies, however, we show that taking off a sweater—or otherwise revealing flesh—can significantly change the way a mind is perceived. In this article, we suggest that the kind of mind ascribed to another person depends on the relative salience of his or her body—that the perceived capacity for both pain and planned action depends on whether someone wears a sweater or tank-top.

The abstract:

According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's body reduces perceptions of agency (self-control and action) but increases perceptions of experience (emotion and sensation). These effects were found in three experiments when comparing targets represented by both revealing versus nonrevealing pictures or by simply directing attention toward physical characteristics. In two further experiments he effect of a body focus on mind perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients). These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads to a redistribution of perceived mind.

Our biological immune system activates our behavioral immune system.

Viewing disease cues (skin lesions, someone sneezing) leads people to display a heightened biological immune response (for example, stimulated production of cytokine interleukin-6). Miller and Maner now provide evidence for the converse: Activation of the biological immune system promotes activation of the behavioral immune system. Their abstract:

Activation of the behavioral immune system has been shown to promote activation of the biological immune system. The current research tested the hypothesis that activation of the biological immune system (as a result of recent illness) promotes activation of the behavioral immune system. Participants who had recently been ill, and had therefore recently experienced activation of their biological immune system, in one study displayed heightened attention to disfigured individuals, and in a second study showed avoidance — cognitive and behavioral processes reflecting activation of the behavioral immune system. These findings shed light on the interactive nature of biological and psychological mechanisms designed to help people overcome the threat of disease.

A gene that makes you appear to be kinder...

Kogan and colleagues at the Univ. of Toronto have examined some behavioral consequences of variations of the gene that codes for the receptor for the hormone oxytocin, since high levels of oxytocin are believed to make people more sociable. Volunteers (116) were asked to watch 23 brief silent videos that showed people with GG, GA, or AA versions of the gene responding to their partner telling them a story of personal suffering, and rate how kind and trustworthy the person in the video appeared to be. Those with the homozygous GG version of the oxytocin receptor gene were judged to be kinder than those with GA or AA versions, apparently because those with GG variations used significantly more non-verbal empathetic gestures in their storytelling such as smiling and nodding. Here is the abstract:

Individuals who are homozygous for the G allele of the rs53576 SNP of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene tend to be more prosocial than carriers of the A allele. However, little is known about how these differences manifest behaviorally and whether they are readily detectable by outside observers, both critical questions in theoretical accounts of prosociality. In the present study, we used thin-slicing methodology to test the hypotheses that (i) individual differences in rs53576 genotype predict how prosocial observers judge target individuals to be on the basis of brief observations of behavior, and (ii) that variation in targets’ nonverbal displays of affiliative cues would account for these judgment differences. In line with predictions, we found that individuals homozygous for the G allele were judged to be more prosocial than carriers of the A allele. These differences were completely accounted for by variations in the expression of affiliative cues. Thus, individual differences in rs53576 are associated with behavioral manifestations of prosociality, which ultimately guide the judgments others make about the individual.

Mimicry can foster both rapport and threat.

Liu does experiments that illustrate two aspects of mimicry. Mimicry can bond people by fostering rapport and liking, but appears to have the opposite effect if participants in an interaction are primed by reminders of money. Money-primed participants liked a mimicking interaction partner less than they liked a nonmimicking partner, an effect that appears to have been due to enhanced feelings of threat. Their observations are consonant with studies that have shown that reminders of money elicit a self-sufficient state characterized by two tendencies: First, eagerness to pursue personal goals and freedom, persisting longer than others on difficult tasks and hesitating to ask for help; and second, acting more insensitive to others, desiring solo versus activities and showing more indifference to social exclusion.

The visual impact of gossip

Here is an interesting bit from Anderson et al. Apparently hearing negative gossip about someone apparently activates top down brain filtering mechanisms that make it more likely that we will notice their face among conflicting stimuli:

Gossip is a form of affective information about who is friend and who is foe. We show that gossip does not influence only how a face is evaluated—it affects whether a face is seen in the first place. In two experiments, neutral faces were paired with negative, positive, or neutral gossip and were then presented alone in a binocular rivalry paradigm (faces were presented to one eye, houses to the other). In both studies, faces previously paired with negative (but not positive or neutral) gossip dominated longer in visual consciousness. These findings demonstrate that gossip, as a potent form of social affective learning, can influence vision in a completely top-down manner, independent of the basic structural features of a face.

Our social brain - what are smiles for?

In this past Tuesday's NYTimes science section, Carl Zimmer offers a brief review of some of the many social functions served by our smiling at each other (signaling happiness, social bonding, embarrassment, dominance, etc.). He focuses on the work of Paula Niedenthal. I found this particular bit interesting:

In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them....Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.

The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile...In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing...But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren’t. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.

Is the face alive? - the eyes tell us.

Looser and Wheatley do a nice study, reported in Psychological Science, on how we determine whether a face is dead or alive. A review of the work in Science Now has some nice videos of morphing faces along a gradient of animacy. The authors paired doll faces with a similar-looking human faces and used morphing software to blend the two, ending up with a spectrum of pictures that ranged from fully human to part human-part doll to purely doll. Volunteers consistently looked mainly at the eyes, and selected as the dividing point those faces that were about two-thirds along the continuum, closer to the human end. They also attributed the capability of thought to those faces.

Influence of language on perception

Landau et al. show that hearing recorded sentences describing faces (versus places) enhances a subsequent electrophysiological marker of brain responses to pictures of faces, while seeing pictures of faces diminishes the subsequent responses. This shows that language influences early stages of visual processing.

We examined the effect of linguistic comprehension on early perceptual encoding in a series of electrophysiological and behavioral studies on humans. Using the fact that pictures of faces elicit a robust and reliable evoked response that peaks at ~170 ms after stimulus onset (N170), we measured the N170 to faces that were preceded by primes that referred to either faces or scenes. When the primes were auditory sentences, the magnitude of the N170 was larger when the face stimuli were preceded by sentences describing faces compared to sentences describing scenes. In contrast, when the primes were visual, the N170 was smaller after visual primes of faces compared to visual primes of scenes. Similar opposing effects of linguistic and visual primes were also observed in a reaction time experiment in which participants judged the gender of faces. These results provide novel evidence of the influence of language on early perceptual processes and suggest a surprising mechanistic description of this interaction: linguistic primes produce content-specific interference on subsequent visual processing. This interference may be a consequence of the natural statistics of language and vision given that linguistic content is generally uncorrelated with the contents of perception.

Listening to your heart

Dunn et al. try to evaluate how sensing feedback from the body influences thought and feeling. Some edited clips of background, and their results:

Some metaphorical expressions that are used daily, such as “brokenhearted” or “gut feelings,” reflect the common belief that feelings and cognitions are partly grounded in bodily responses. This idea is reflected in early philosophical writings about embodiment (e.g., Descartes, 1649/1989) and was introduced to experimental psychology by William James (1884), who asserted that perception of changes in the body “as they occur is the emotion” (pp. 189–190). Since then, there has been considerable debate about the extent to which feelings and cognitions are in fact embodied. Much of this discussion has focused on emotion experience and decision making. Schachter and Singer modified Jamesian theory to argue that emotion experience is a product of the cognitive appraisal of bodily arousal. The somatic marker hypothesis of Damasio proposes that emotional biasing signals emerging from the body influence intuitive decision making. These models remain controversial, and critics argue that bodily responses occur relatively late in the information-processing chain and are therefore best viewed as a consequence, rather than the cause, of cognitive-affective activity.

...A central but untested prediction of many of these proposals is that how well individuals can perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) determines the strength of the relationship between bodily reactions and cognitive-affective processing. In a first study we demonstrated that the more accurately participants could track their heartbeat, the stronger the observed link between their heart rate reactions and their subjective arousal (but not valence) ratings of emotional images. (In other words, the more strongly these autonomic changes are felt, the more they are associated with arousal experience.) These results offer strong support for Jamesian bodily feedback theories.

In a second study, we found that increasing interoception ability either helped or hindered adaptive intuitive decision making, depending on whether the anticipatory bodily signals generated favored advantageous or disadvantageous choices. These findings identify both the generation and the perception of bodily responses as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to “following the heart.” Our findings agree with those of other studies showing that an absence of emotion following frontal head injury can in some circumstances lead to superior decision making and with claims that elevated interoceptive awareness may maintain conditions such as anxiety.

Our bias towards negative interpretation of ambiguous faces

Neta and Whalen make some interesting observations (on the usual cadre of undergraduate psychology students usually involved in such studies), showing that we have a 'better be safe than sorry' strategy in responding to ambiguous expressions of surprise that could signal either a negative or positive situation.  We pick the negative interpretation, and our background bias towards being positive or negative biases this effect.:

Low-spatial-frequency (LSF) visual information is processed in an elemental fashion before a finer analysis of high-spatial-frequency information. Further, the amygdala is particularly responsive to LSF information contained within negative (e.g., fearful) facial expressions. In a separate line of research, it has been shown that surprised facial expressions are ambiguous in that they can be interpreted as either negatively or positively valenced. More negative interpretations of surprise are associated with increased ventral amygdala activity. In this report, we show that LSF presentations of surprised expressions bias the interpretation of surprised expressions in a negative direction, a finding suggesting that negative interpretations are first and fast during the resolution of ambiguous valence.

Nuturing robots

A recent article by Benedict Carey suggests we may be heading towards a future in which instructional and emotional needs of those not able to obtain appropriate human contact are met through presentation of changing robotic emotional expressions that activate the same brain areas as normal human gestures. A report by Chaminade et al., however, on a multi-national collaboration involving the humanoid robot WE4-RII - which expresses emotions by using facial expressions and the movement of the upper-half of the body including neck, shoulders, trunk, waist, as well as arms and hands - suggests that we have some way to go:

...activity in cortical areas endowed with mirror properties, like left Broca's area for the perception of speech, and in the processing of emotions like the left anterior insula for the perception of disgust and the orbitofrontal cortex for the perception of anger, is reduced for robot stimuli, suggesting lesser resonance with the mechanical agent. Finally, instructions to explicitly attend to the emotion significantly increased response to robot, but not human facial expressions in the anterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus, a neural marker of motor resonance.

The Carey article reviews a number of different robotic instructional studies that show, in spite of the attenuated effectiveness of robotic versus human emotions, that robots can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, in the case of autistic children, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.

The benefits of 'losing it'

Benedict Carey does an interesting article on the personal and social utility of letting out, expressing, strong spontaneous emotional reactions.   President Obama's failure to do this has led people to question his sincerity or commitment to fixing financial institutions or oil spills. This is line with Pinker's argument that emotions evolved as guarantors or our authenticity.  Such authenticity is the issue in Obama's failure to emote. A few clips:

...people develop a variety of psychological tools to manage what they express in social situations, and those techniques often become subconscious, affecting interactions in unintended ways. The better that people understand their own patterns, the more likely they are to see why some emotionally charged interactions go awry — whether from too little control or, in the president’s case, perhaps too much.

Psychologists divide regulation strategies into two broad categories: pre-emptive, occurring before an emotion is fully felt; and responsive, coming afterward... Suppression, while clearly valuable in some situations (no laughing at funerals, please), has social costs that are all too familiar to those who know its cold touch.

Pre-emptive techniques can work in more subtle ways. One of these is simple diversion, reflexively focusing on the good and ignoring the bad — rereading the praise in an evaluation and ignoring or dismissing any criticism. A 2009 study...found that people over 55 were much more likely than those aged 25 and under to focus on positive images when in a bad mood — thereby buoying their spirits. The younger group was more likely to focus on negative images when feeling angry or down... older people were twice as likely as younger ones to be “rapid regulators” — people whose mood bounced back quickly, sometimes within minutes, after ruminating on depressing memories...older people tend to regulate their emotions faster, and are not as motivated to explore negative information, to engage negative images, as younger people are...And it makes some sense that younger adults would explore the negative side of things, that they need to and maybe want to experience them to experience life as they develop their own strategies to regulate...the ability to shrug off feelings of disgust or outrage may suit an older group but strike younger people as inauthentic, even callous.