Understanding the link between emotional recognition and awareness, therapy, and training : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Therapy is an emotionally laden event, both for individuals seeking therapeutic intervention and the therapists who provide it. While the recognition of emotions in the general population has been a popular topic of research, very little research has been conducted into the emotional competencies, or more specifically, emotion recognition and awareness of therapists. In addition, there are few studies on the effectiveness of emotion recognition training for therapists’ emotional competencies, which is surprising given the innately emotional moments that clients and therapists experience during therapeutic work. This study aimed to address these gaps by investigating the association between emotional recognition, awareness, practice, and training. Fifty five therapists made up of clinical psychologists, counsellors, and a psychotherapist completed an online task that involved completion of a social-emotional orientated questionnaire and an emotion recognition task. Of these 55 participants, 26 completed an emotion recognition training before completing the same task again, two weeks later, while the remainder 29 participants were instructed to participate in no emotion recognition training. The results revealed that, compared to the no treatment condition, those who received emotion recognition training were more accurate in their recognition of emotions and also reported higher use of therapeutic emotional practice. Unexpectedly, participants who completed emotion recognition training reported less emotional awareness than the control group. Related to this, an inverse relationship was found between emotion recognition ability and self-reported emotional awareness, as well as the finding for some support for an inverse relationship between emotion recognition ability and self-reported use of emotional practice. There are two implications of this research; first, emotion recognition training increases therapists’ accuracy in emotion recognition, and second, therapists may need to be provided emotional practice feedback by an alternative form rather than through supervision or client outcome. This is due to an inverse relationship being found between participants’ actual and perceived emotional awareness. Therefore, future research into social-emotional practices and client outcomes will be advised to be considered. The limitations of the study and areas for future research are also discussed

The development of emotion recognition from facial expressions and non-linguistic vocalizations during childhood

Sensitivity to facial and vocal emotion is fundamental to children's social competence. Previous research has focused on children's facial emotion recognition, and few studies have investigated non-linguistic vocal emotion processing in childhood. We compared facial and vocal emotion recognition and processing biases in 4- to 11-year-olds and adults. Eighty-eight 4- to 11-year-olds and 21 adults participated. Participants viewed/listened to faces and voices (angry, happy, and sad) at three intensity levels (50%, 75%, and 100%). Non-linguistic tones were used. For each modality, participants completed an emotion identification task. Accuracy and bias for each emotion and modality were compared across 4- to 5-, 6- to 9- and 10- to 11-year-olds and adults. The results showed that children's emotion recognition improved with age; preschoolers were less accurate than other groups. Facial emotion recognition reached adult levels by 11 years, whereas vocal emotion recognition continued to develop in late childhood. Response bias decreased with age. For both modalities, sadness recognition was delayed across development relative to anger and happiness. The results demonstrate that developmental trajectories of emotion processing differ as a function of emotion type and stimulus modality. In addition, vocal emotion processing showed a more protracted developmental trajectory, compared to facial emotion processing. The results have important implications for programmes aiming to improve children's socio-emotional competence

Facial emotion recognition using min-max similarity classifier

Recognition of human emotions from the imaging templates is useful in a wide variety of human-computer interaction and intelligent systems applications. However, the automatic recognition of facial expressions using image template matching techniques suffer from the natural variability with facial features and recording conditions. In spite of the progress achieved in facial emotion recognition in recent years, the effective and computationally simple feature selection and classification technique for emotion recognition is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient and straightforward facial emotion recognition algorithm to reduce the problem of inter-class pixel mismatch during classification. The proposed method includes the application of pixel normalization to remove intensity offsets followed-up with a Min-Max metric in a nearest neighbor classifier that is capable of suppressing feature outliers. The results indicate an improvement of recognition performance from 92.85% to 98.57% for the proposed Min-Max classification method when tested on JAFFE database. The proposed emotion recognition technique outperforms the existing template matching methods

Damage to Association Fiber Tracts Impairs Recognition of the Facial Expression of Emotion

An array of cortical and subcortical structures have been implicated in the recognition of emotion from facial expressions. It remains unknown how these regions communicate as parts of a system to achieve recognition, but white matter tracts are likely critical to this process. We hypothesized that (1) damage to white matter tracts would be associated with recognition impairment and (2) the degree of disconnection of association fiber tracts [inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and/or inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF)] connecting the visual cortex with emotion-related regions would negatively correlate with recognition performance. One hundred three patients with focal, stable brain lesions mapped onto a reference brain were tested on their recognition of six basic emotional facial expressions. Association fiber tracts from a probabilistic atlas were coregistered to the reference brain. Parameters estimating disconnection were entered in a general linear model to predict emotion recognition impairments, accounting for lesion size and cortical damage. Damage associated with the right IFOF significantly predicted an overall facial emotion recognition impairment and specific impairments for sadness, anger, and fear. One subject had a pure white matter lesion in the location of the right IFOF and ILF. He presented specific, unequivocal emotion recognition impairments. Additional analysis suggested that impairment in fear recognition can result from damage to the IFOF and not the amygdala. Our findings demonstrate the key role of white matter association tracts in the recognition of the facial expression of emotion and identify specific tracts that may be most critical

Emotion recognition abilities and empathy of victims of bullying

Objectives: Bullying is a form of systematic abuse by peers with often serious consequences for victims. Few studies have considered the role of emotion recognition abilities and empathic behaviour for different bullying roles. This study investigated physical and relational bullying involvement in relation to basic emotion recognition abilities, and empathic styles in children. Using the framework of the Social Information Processing model, it was expected that victims would have poor emotion recognition abilities, and that bullies would demonstrate low levels of empathy. Methods: Data was collected from UK children (N = 373) aged 9-11 years who completed a bullying instrument, the Bryant Index of Empathy measurement, and the DANVA (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy) to assess emotion recognition abilities. Children were classified into physical and relational bullying roles (bully, victim, bully/victim neutral) for analytical purposes. Results: While physical victims, bullies and neutrals differed little in their emotion recognition abilities, relational victims were particularly poor in recognising negative emotions of anger and fear in faces. No differences were found in empathy scores, according to bullying roles. Conclusions: Children who are relationally victimised are poorer in understanding emotional information than bullies and non-involved children. In light of previous research that victims of bullying more frequently experience child abuse, future interventions should consider the importance of emotion and social skills training for these vulnerable children