Visual attention mechanisms in happiness vs. trustworthiness processing of facial expressions

A happy facial expression makes a person look (more) trustworthy. Do perceptions of happiness and trustworthiness rely on the same face regions and visual attention processes? In an eye-tracking study, eye movements and fixations were recorded while participants judged the un/happiness or the un/trustworthiness of dynamic facial expressions in which the eyes and/or the mouth unfolded from neutral to happy or vice versa. A smiling mouth and happy eyes enhanced perceived happiness and trustworthiness similarly, with a greater contribution of the smile relative to the eyes. This comparable judgement output for happiness and trustworthiness was reached through shared as well as distinct attentional mechanisms: (a) entry times and (b) initial fixation thresholds for each face region were equivalent for both judgements, thereby revealing the same attentional orienting in happiness and trustworthiness processing. However, (c) greater and (d) longer fixation density for the mouth region in the happiness task, and for the eye region in the trustworthiness task, demonstrated different selective attentional engagement. Relatedly, (e) mean fixation duration across face regions was longer in the trustworthiness task, thus showing increased attentional intensity or processing effort

Intelligent wristbands for the automatic detection of emotional states for the elderly

Over the last few years, research on computational intelligence is being conducted to detect emotional states of people. This paper proposes the use of intelligent wristbands for the automatic detection of emotional states to develop an application which allows to monitor older people in order to improve their quality of life. The paper describes the hardware design and the cognitive module that allows the recognition of the emotional states. The proposed wristband also integrates a camera that improves the emotion detection.- Programa Operacional Temático Factores de Competitividade(POCI-01-0145-). MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4- 1-R and the FPI grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/201

Mental health problems and resilience in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic in a post-armed conflict area in Colombia.

The impact of COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of adolescents are emerging and require particular attention in settings where challenges like armed conflict, poverty and internal displacement have previously affected their mental wellbeing. This study aimed to determine the prevalence of anxiety symptoms, depressive symptomatology, probable post-traumatic stress disorder and resilience in school-attending adolescents in a post-conflict area of Tolima, Colombia during the COVID-19. A cross-sectional study was carried out with 657 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old, recruited by convenience sampling in 8 public schools in the south of Tolima, Colombia, who completed a self-administered questionnaire. Mental health information was obtained through screening scales for anxiety symptoms (GAD-7), depressive symptomatology (PHQ-8), probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PCL-5) and resilience (CD-RISC-25). The prevalence observed for moderate to severe anxiety symptoms was 18.9% (95% CI 16.0-22.1) and for moderate to severe depressive symptomatology was 30.0% (95% CI 26.5-33.7). A prevalence of probable post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of 22.3% (95% CI 18.1-27.2) was found. The CD-RISC-25 results for resilience had a median score of 54 [IQR 30]. These results suggest that approximately two-thirds of school-attending adolescents in this post-conflict area experienced at least one mental health problem such as anxiety symptoms, depressive symptomatology or probable PTSD during the COVID-19 pandemic. Future studies are of interest to establish the causal relationship between these findings and the impact of the pandemic. These findings highlight the challenge that schools have after pandemic to address the mental health of their students in order to promoting adequate coping strategies and implement prompt multidisciplinary interventions to reduce the burden of mental health problems in adolescents

Food Catches the Eye but Not for Everyone: A BMI–Contingent Attentional Bias in Rapid Detection of Nutriments

An organism's survival depends crucially on its ability to detect and acquire nutriment. Attention circuits interact with cognitive and motivational systems to facilitate detection of salient sensory events in the environment. Here we show that the human attentional system is tuned to detect food targets among nonfood items. In two visual search experiments participants searched for discrepant food targets embedded in an array of nonfood distracters or vice versa. Detection times were faster when targets were food rather than nonfood items, and the detection advantage for food items showed a significant negative correlation with Body Mass Index (BMI). Also, eye tracking during searching within arrays of visually homogenous food and nonfood targets demonstrated that the BMI-contingent attentional bias was due to rapid capturing of the eyes by food items in individuals with low BMI. However, BMI was not associated with decision times after the discrepant food item was fixated. The results suggest that visual attention is biased towards foods, and that individual differences in energy consumption - as indexed by BMI - are associated with differential attentional effects related to foods. We speculate that such differences may constitute an important risk factor for gaining weight

Multiservice capacity and interference statistics of the uplink of high altitude platforms (HAPs) for asynchronous and synchronous WCDMA system

In this work, the capacity and the interference statistics of the uplink of high-altitude platforms (HAPs) for asynchronous and synchronous WCDMA system assuming finite transmission power and imperfect power control are studied. Propagation loss used to calculate the received signal power is due to the distance, shadowing, and wall insertion loss. The uplink capacity for 3- and 3.75-G services is given for different cell radius assuming outdoor and indoor voice users only, data users only and a combination of the two services. For 37 macrocells HAP, the total uplink capacity is 3,034 outdoor voice users or 444 outdoor data users. When one or more than one user is an indoor user, the uplink capacity is 2,923 voice users or 444 data users when the walls entry loss is 10 dB. It is shown that the effect of the adjacent channels interference is very small

Emotion-Related Visual Mismatch Responses in Schizophrenia: Impairments and Correlations with Emotion Recognition.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES:Mismatch negativity (MMN) is an event-related potential (ERP) measure of preattentional sensory processing. While deficits in the auditory MMN are robust electrophysiological findings in schizophrenia, little is known about visual mismatch response and its association with social cognitive functions such as emotion recognition in schizophrenia. Our aim was to study the potential deficit in the visual mismatch response to unexpected facial emotions in schizophrenia and its association with emotion recognition impairments, and to localize the sources of the mismatch signals. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN:The sample comprised 24 patients with schizophrenia and 24 healthy control subjects. Controls were matched individually to patients by gender, age, and education. ERPs were recorded using a high-density 128-channel BioSemi amplifier. Mismatch responses to happy and fearful faces were determined in 2 time windows over six regions of interest (ROIs). Emotion recognition performance and its association with the mismatch response were also investigated. PRINCIPAL OBSERVATIONS:Mismatch signals to both emotional conditions were significantly attenuated in patients compared to controls in central and temporal ROIs. Controls recognized emotions significantly better than patients. The association between overall emotion recognition performance and mismatch response to the happy condition was significant in the 250-360 ms time window in the central ROI. The estimated sources of the mismatch responses for both emotional conditions were localized in frontal regions, where patients showed significantly lower activity. CONCLUSIONS:Impaired generation of mismatch signals indicate insufficient automatic processing of emotions in patients with schizophrenia, which correlates strongly with decreased emotion recognition

Interpretation of ambiguous situations: evidence for a dissociation between social and physical threat in Williams syndrome

There is increasing evidence that Williams syndrome (WS) is associated with elevated anxiety that is non-social in nature, including generalised anxiety and fears. To date very little research has examined the cognitive processes associated with this anxiety. In the present research, attentional bias for non-social threatening images in WS was examined using a dot-probe paradigm. Participants were 16 individuals with WS aged between 13 and 34 years and two groups of typically developing controls matched to the WS group on chronological age and attentional control ability respectively. The WS group exhibited a significant attention bias towards threatening images. In contrast, no bias was found for group matched on attentional control and a slight bias away from threat was found in the chronological age matched group. The results are contrasted with recent findings suggesting that individuals with WS do not show an attention bias for threatening faces and discussed in relation to neuroimaging research showing elevated amygdala activation in response to threatening non-social scenes in WS

Emotional Facial Expression Detection in the Peripheral Visual Field

BACKGROUND: In everyday life, signals of danger, such as aversive facial expressions, usually appear in the peripheral visual field. Although facial expression processing in central vision has been extensively studied, this processing in peripheral vision has been poorly studied. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Using behavioral measures, we explored the human ability to detect fear and disgust vs. neutral expressions and compared it to the ability to discriminate between genders at eccentricities up to 40°. Responses were faster for the detection of emotion compared to gender. Emotion was detected from fearful faces up to 40° of eccentricity. CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate the human ability to detect facial expressions presented in the far periphery up to 40° of eccentricity. The increasing advantage of emotion compared to gender processing with increasing eccentricity might reflect a major implication of the magnocellular visual pathway in facial expression processing. This advantage may suggest that emotion detection, relative to gender identification, is less impacted by visual acuity and within-face crowding in the periphery. These results are consistent with specific and automatic processing of danger-related information, which may drive attention to those messages and allow for a fast behavioral reaction

Mapping gene associations in human mitochondria using clinical disease phenotypes

Nuclear genes encode most mitochondrial proteins, and their mutations cause diverse and debilitating clinical disorders. To date, 1,200 of these mitochondrial genes have been recorded, while no standardized catalog exists of the associated clinical phenotypes. Such a catalog would be useful to develop methods to analyze human phenotypic data, to determine genotype-phenotype relations among many genes and diseases, and to support the clinical diagnosis of mitochondrial disorders. Here we establish a clinical phenotype catalog of 174 mitochondrial disease genes and study associations of diseases and genes. Phenotypic features such as clinical signs and symptoms were manually annotated from full-text medical articles and classified based on the hierarchical MeSH ontology. This classification of phenotypic features of each gene allowed for the comparison of diseases between different genes. In turn, we were then able to measure the phenotypic associations of disease genes for which we calculated a quantitative value that is based on their shared phenotypic features. The results showed that genes sharing more similar phenotypes have a stronger tendency for functional interactions, proving the usefulness of phenotype similarity values in disease gene network analysis. We then constructed a functional network of mitochondrial genes and discovered a higher connectivity for non-disease than for disease genes, and a tendency of disease genes to interact with each other. Utilizing these differences, we propose 168 candidate genes that resemble the characteristic interaction patterns of mitochondrial disease genes. Through their network associations, the candidates are further prioritized for the study of specific disorders such as optic neuropathies and Parkinson disease. Most mitochondrial disease phenotypes involve several clinical categories including neurologic, metabolic, and gastrointestinal disorders, which might indicate the effects of gene defects within the mitochondrial system. The accompanying knowledgebase (http://www.mitophenome.org/) supports the study of clinical diseases and associated genes