The dominant theory in facial expression research is the dual mode hypothesis. After reviewing the literature pertaining to the dual mode hypothesis within the recognition of facial identities and emotional expressions, seven experiments are reported testing the role of configural processing within the recognition of emotional expressions of faces. The main findings were that the dual mode hypothesis can be supported within the facial recognition of emotional expression. This and other more specific findings are then reviewed within the context of extant literature. Implications for future research and applications within applied psychology are then considered.

Lifespan theories of emotion suggest that the ability to regulate emotion improves with age. The supporting evidence, however, is indirect: older adults pay less attention to negative events, remember less negative information, and report fewer experiences of negative emotion. Few studies directly measure emotion regulation by explicitly instructing older adults to modulate their feelings while exposed to emotion-evoking stimuli. The purpose of this thesis was to directly compare younger and older adults in their ability to modulate feelings to investigate whether aging results in decline, stability, or improvement in emotion regulation and also to examine potential mechanisms underlying regulation skills. The study employed a startle modulation paradigm to measure both emotional reactivity and regulation. Two experimental tasks (Stroop colour-word interference, reversal learning) were also administered to explore the relationship between emotion regulation and two theoretically-relevant processes: (a) cognitive control and (b) modification of learned emotional associations. There were three main findings: (1) emotional reactivity was preserved in older adults. Both age groups showed emotion-modulated startle (negative > neutral) during the pre-regulation viewing period; (2) age-related decline in emotion regulation was evident on an objective measure of emotion regulation (startle eyeblink reflex) but not on a subjective measure (self-ratings). Specifically, for older adults, startle eyeblink was not enhanced or attenuated following increase and decrease instructions, respectively. In contrast, both groups showed similar modulation of valence and arousal ratings by regulation instruction (increase > look > decrease); (3) for older adults, reversal learning performance correlated positively with the degree of reappraisal-related startle attenuation in the decrease condition, suggesting a possible mechanism for impaired down-regulation. These findings suggest that even when emotional reactivity is similar, older adults are less effective at modulating their physiological responses.

Spoken language conveys two forms of information: transactional (content, what is said) and interactional (how it is said). The transactional message shared during spoken communication has been studied extensively in different listening conditions and in people of all ages using standardized tests of speech intelligibility. However, research into interactional aspects of speech has been more limited. One specific aspect of interactional communication that warrants further investigation is the communication of emotion in speech, also called affective prosody. A series of experiments examined how younger and older adults produce affective prosody, recognize emotion in speech, and understand emotional speech in noise. The emotional valence and arousal properties of target words from an existing speech intelligibility test were rated by younger and older adults. New stimuli based on those words were recorded by a younger female and an older female using affective prosody to portray seven emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, pleasant surprise, sadness, neutral). Similar to previous studies, the acoustical parameter that best differentiated the emotions was fundamental frequency (F0). Specifically, discriminant analysis indicated that emotional category membership was best predicted by the mean and range of F0. Overall, recognition of emotion and intelligibility were high. While older listeners made more recognition errors and had poorer intelligibility overall, their patterns of responding did not differ significantly from those of the younger listeners on either measure. Of note, angry and sad emotions were recognized with the highest degree of accuracy, but intelligibility was highest for items spoken to portray fear or pleasant surprise. These results may suggest that there is a complementarity between the acoustic cues used to recognize emotions (how words are said) and those used to understand words (what is said). Alternatively, the effect of emotion on intelligibility may be modulated primarily by attentional rather than acoustical factors, with higher performance associated with alerting emotions.

This study examined whether cortical changes underlying treatment for children with aggressive behaviour problems are related to changes in executive function (EF) performance. Fifty-five 8- to 12-year-old clinically-referred children were tested before and after a 14-week treatment intervention. Performance on four EF tasks varying in affective relevance was assessed at each session. EEG was also used to record peak amplitudes for the “inhibitory” N2, an event-related potential, while the children completed an emotion-induction Go/Nogo task. Results showed that changes in N2 amplitudes significantly predicted changes in performance only for the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) – an affectively relevant task. Subsequent analysis revealed that only children who improved with treatment displayed significant decreases in N2 amplitudes and significant improvement in IGT performance from pre- to post-treatment. These findings suggest that cortical changes underlying successful treatment for children’s aggressive behaviour problems tap improvement in executive functions recruited for emotionally demanding events.

Evolutionary accounts of empathy often focus on the ways in which empathy-motivated helping can give rise to indirect fitness benefits. These accounts posit that empathy is adaptive insofar as it motivates strategic helping behavior, but they neglect a key feature of the empathic process – it can prepare one to act effectively within a shared environment. In particular, adopting the affective and motivational states of others provides a rapid and automatic way to avoid danger and threat, which play a disproportionately large role in shaping behavior. Based on the idea that empathic processes facilitate adaptive reactions to threat, I conducted four experiments to test the hypothesis that empathic reactions reflect withdrawal motivation. In the first experiment I used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure baseline right-frontal cortical asymmetry, a reliable neural correlate of withdrawal motivation. I then assessed empathic reactions to images of children ostensibly taken from a charity campaign. Participants who showed greater right-frontal cortical asymmetry also showed stronger empathic reactions to the images. In the second study I used self-report measures fear and anger to assess dispositional withdrawal- and approach-motivation, respectively. This time, participants indicated their empathic reactions to targets experiencing happiness and targets experiencing sadness. Empathy for both types of targets was positively related to fear and negatively related to physical aggression, again supporting a link between empathy and withdrawal motivation. In the third study I measured state withdrawal motivation by using facial electromyography (EMG) to assess disgust expressions towards charity images. These expressions were positively correlated with empathic reactions, demonstrating that state withdrawal motivation is also positively related to empathy. In the final study I manipulated approach and withdrawal emotions by having participants make emotional facial expressions. Focusing on fear and anger, I found that participants were more empathic when making fearful faces than when making angry faces, although these results must be interpreted with caution, as the manipulation may not have had the intended effects on emotional state. Taken together, these four studies provide converging evidence of an association between withdrawal motivation and empathy, supporting the idea that empathy plays a role in the adaptive response to threat.

This study examined whether cortical changes underlying treatment for children with aggressive behaviour problems are related to changes in executive function (EF) performance. Fifty-five 8- to 12-year-old clinically-referred children were tested before and after a 14-week treatment intervention. Performance on four EF tasks varying in affective relevance was assessed at each session. EEG was also used to record peak amplitudes for the “inhibitory” N2, an event-related potential, while the children completed an emotion-induction Go/Nogo task. Results showed that changes in N2 amplitudes significantly predicted changes in performance only for the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) – an affectively relevant task. Subsequent analysis revealed that only children who improved with treatment displayed significant decreases in N2 amplitudes and significant improvement in IGT performance from pre- to post-treatment. These findings suggest that cortical changes underlying successful treatment for children’s aggressive behaviour problems tap improvement in executive functions recruited for emotionally demanding events.

The emotional experience of products can have enormous impact on the overall product experience: someone who is feeling positive is more likely to be accepting of novel products or to be more tolerant of unexpected or unusual interface behaviours. Being able to improve users’ emotions through product interaction has clear benefits and is currently the focus of designers all over the world. The extent to which touch-based information can affect a user’s experience and observable behaviour has been given relatively little attention in haptic technology or other touch-based products where research has tended to focus on psychophysics relating to technical development, in the case of the former, and usability in the case of the latter. The objective of this research was therefore to begin to explore generalizable and useful relationship(s) between design parameters specific to the sense of touch and the emotional response to tactile experiences. To this end, a theoretical ’touch-emotion model’ was developed that incorporates stages from existing information and emotion processing models, and a subset of pathways (the ‘Affective’, ‘Cognitive’, and ‘Behaviour Pathways’) was explored. Four experiments were performed to examine how changes in various touch factors, such as surface roughness and availability of haptic (that is, touch-based) information during exploration, impacted user emotional experience and behaviour in the context of the model’s framework. These experiments also manipulated factors related to the experience of touch in real-world situations, such as the availability of visual information and product context. Exploration of the different pathways of the touch-emotion model guided the analysis of the experiments. In exploring the Affective Pathway, a robust relationship was found between increasing roughness and decreasing emotional valence (n = 36, p < 0.005), regardless of the availability of haptic or visual information. This finding expands earlier research that focused on the effect of tactile stimuli on user preference. The impact of texture on the Cognitive Pathway was examined by priming participants to think of the stimuli as objects varying in emotional commitment, such as a common mug (lower) or a personal cell phone (higher). Emotional response again decreased as roughness increased, regardless of primed context (n = 27, p < 0.002) and the primed contexts marginally appeared to generally improve or reduce emotional response (n = 27, p < 0.08). Finally, the exploration of the Behaviour Pathway considered the ability of roughness-evoked emotion to act as a mediator between physical stimuli and observable behaviour, revealing that, contrary to the hypothesis that increased emotional valence would increase time spent reflecting on the stimuli, increased emotion magnitude (regardless of the positive or negative valence of the emotion) was associated with increased time spent in reflection (n = 33, p < 0.002). Results relating to the Behaviour Pathway suggested that the portion of the touch-emotion model that included the last stages of information processing, observable behaviour, may need to be revised. However, the insights of the Affective and Cognitive Pathway analyses are consistent with the information processing stages within those pathways and give support to the related portions of the touch-emotion model. The analysis of demographics data collected from all four experiments also revealed interesting findings which are anticipated to have application in customizing haptic technology for individual users. For example, correlations were found between self-reported tactual importance (measured with a questionnaire) and age (n = 79, r = 0.28, p < 0.03) and between self-reported tactual importance and sensitivity to increased roughness (n = 79, r = -0.27, p < 0.04). Higher response times were also observed with increased age (rIT = 0.49, rRT = 0.48; p < 0.01). This research contributes to the understanding of how emotion and emotionevoked behaviour may be impacted by changing touch factors using the exemplar of roughness as the touch factor of interest, experienced multimodally and in varying situations. If a design goal is to contribute to user emotional experience of a product, then the findings of this work have the potential to impact design decisions relating to surface texture components of hand-held products as well as for virtual surface textures generated by haptic technology. Further, the touchemotion model may provide a guide for the systematic exploration of the relationships between surface texture, cognitive processing, and emotional response.

Rumination has been shown to be an influential part of the depressive experience, impacting on various cognitive processes including memory and attention. However, there is a dearth of studies examining the relationship between rumination and emotion recognition, deficits or biases in which have been closely linked to a depressive mood state. In Study 1, participants (N = 89) received either a rumination or distraction induction prior to completing three variants of an emotion recognition task assessing decoding accuracy or biases. Results demonstrated that greater levels of dysphoria were associated with poorer facial emotion recognition accuracy, but only when participants were induced to ruminate (as opposed to being induced to distract). The aim of Study 2 (N = 172) was to examine a possible mechanism, namely cognitive load, by which rumination affects emotion recognition. Results from this study indicated that participants endorsing greater levels of dysphoria were less accurate on an emotion recognition task when they received either a rumination induction or a cognitive load task compared to their counterparts who received a distraction induction. Importantly, the performance of those in the cognitive load and rumination conditions did not differ from each other. In summary, these findings suggest that the confluence of dysphoria and rumination can influence individuals’ accuracy in identifying emotional content portrayed in facial expressions. Furthermore, rumination, by definition an effortful process, might negatively impact emotion recognition via the strain it places on cognitive resources.

本論文主旨在探討自閉症病患對於情緒節律(emotional prosody)在聽覺上的區辨(discrimination)、理解(comprehension)及在口語上的表達(production)能力。結果顯示，聽覺區辨並非自閉症患者在處理情緒語音上的問題所在。其在情緒語音的聽覺理解及口語表達上則呈現顯著障礙。經由聲學分析，自閉症患者情緒語音表達的平均基礎頻率(mean fundamental frequency)、基礎頻率範圍(fundamental frequency range)及時長(duration)除了在覆述生氣的情緒語音外，並未隨情緒情境的轉換而呈現顯著的起伏變化。一般聽眾亦難由自閉症患者的情緒語音表達中，判斷其情緒狀態。Baron-Cohen (1995)所提出的自閉症成因－"心智閱讀障" (mindblindness)和情緒理解及表達間的關連性在文中將進行檢視。此外，本文亦自語言發展(language development)及語言歷程(language processing)的觀點探討自閉症患者在超音段(suprasegmental)上理解與表達異常的徵結所在。 / This study investigated the autistic children's ability to discriminate, comprehend, and produce emotional (features of anger, happy, and sad) speech prosody based on tasks involving behavioral (linguistic/emotional) as well as structural (acoustic) features. The preliminary results indicate that the discrimination of acoustic features might not be the main problem of autistic deficiency in processing emotional prosody. Subjects' utterances were subjected to acoustic analysis to examine the variations of mean Fo, Fo range and duration under specific emotional condition. The results revealed that the autistic subjects tended to produce various emotional prosody with less Fo variations. The autistic subjects were also less reliable than normal subjects at transmitting emotional contrasts when judged from the listener's perspective. To understand the nature of this clinical deficiency, autistic patients' impairment in integrating relevant pragmatic information and their " mindblindness (deficiency in mindreading, Baron-Cohen, 1995)" have to be taken into consideration as well. These clinical cases pose fundamental questions in language development and models of language processing (comprehension and production).

Facial expression has been used as a measure of pain in clinical and experimental studies. The Sociocommunications Model of Pain (T. Hadjistavropoulos, K. Craig, & S. Fuchs-Lacelle, 2004) characterizes facial movements during pain as both expressions of inner experience and communications to other people that must be considered in the social contexts in which they occur. While research demonstrates that specific facial movements may be outward manifestations of pain states, less attention has been paid to the extent to which contextual factors influence facial movements during pain. Experimenters are an inevitable feature of research studies on facial expression during pain and study of their social impact is merited. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of experimenter presence on participants’ facial expressions during pain. Healthy young adults (60 males, 60 females) underwent painful stimulation induced by a cold pressor in three social contexts: alone; alone with knowledge of an experimenter watching through a one-way mirror; and face-to-face with an experimenter. Participants provided verbal self-report ratings of pain. Facial behaviours during pain were coded with the Facial Action Coding System (P. Ekman, W. Friesen, & J. Hager, 2002) and rated by naïve judges. Participants’ facial expressions of pain varied with the context of the pain experience condition but not with verbally self-reported levels of pain. Participants who were alone were more likely to display facial actions typically associated with pain than participants who were being observed by an experimenter who was in another room or sitting across from them. Naïve judges appeared to be influenced by these facial expressions as, on average, they rated the participants who were alone as experiencing more pain than those who were observed. Facial expressions shown by people experiencing pain can communicate the fact that they are feeling pain. However, facial expressions can be influenced by factors in the social context such as the presence of an experimenter. The results suggest that facial expressions during pain made by adults should be viewed at least in part as communications, subject to intrapersonal and interpersonal influences, rather than direct read-outs of experience.