Doctor of Clinical Neuropsychology/Master of Science / Introduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is known to cause detrimental effects to motor function and cognition. The motor effects of the disease in turn impact emotion expression in patients with PD. There is conflicting evidence in research, however, as to whether PD also affects emotion comprehension, and if so, what emotions in particular are affected and across what modalities. This study aimed to investigate the effects of PD on a broad range of skills involved in basic and complex emotion comprehension. Whether these effects extend into other areas associated with emotion processing, such as social cognition and autobiographical memory, was also explored. Methods: Sixteen patients with PD participated in the study along with sixteen control subjects who were matched for age, gender, education level and estimated premorbid intelligence. The PD participants, on average, were in the moderate phase of the disease and taking PD medication, including dopamine. Participants were tested on a range of recognition measures including prototypical and morphed facial expressions with reduced intensity (40 and 80%), emotion prosody, written emotion vignettes, emotional imagery, pictures of emotion, social cognition, and a cued autobiographical memory task. A mood inventory was given, and disease severity and duration were noted. Results: The PD group did not show pervasive deficits in emotion recognition overall. Deficits were demonstrated in prosody recognition, specifically with fearful tones, and in an incongruent prosody task, specifically with angry and neutral tones. The PD group was not able to recognise facial expressions of disgust (mixed intensities) as well as controls, with the result showing a trend toward significance. PD participants were also significantly worse in Theory of Mind (TOM) reasoning but not at another social cognition measure involving recognising social emotions through expressions from the eyes only. There were no differences between the groups across all other tests. Discussion: PD is thought to cause subtle deficits in emotion comprehension which are only elucidated through complex tasks. The effects of PD on complex processing also impact TOM performance, which relies on skills involved in complex emotion recognition. Effects of mood and disease factors on performance were circumscribed. Evidence suggested that the basal ganglia and fronto-striatal connections play a role in emotion comprehension.

Doctor of Clinical Neuropsychology/Master of Science / Introduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is known to cause detrimental effects to motor function and cognition. The motor effects of the disease in turn impact emotion expression in patients with PD. There is conflicting evidence in research, however, as to whether PD also affects emotion comprehension, and if so, what emotions in particular are affected and across what modalities. This study aimed to investigate the effects of PD on a broad range of skills involved in basic and complex emotion comprehension. Whether these effects extend into other areas associated with emotion processing, such as social cognition and autobiographical memory, was also explored. Methods: Sixteen patients with PD participated in the study along with sixteen control subjects who were matched for age, gender, education level and estimated premorbid intelligence. The PD participants, on average, were in the moderate phase of the disease and taking PD medication, including dopamine. Participants were tested on a range of recognition measures including prototypical and morphed facial expressions with reduced intensity (40 and 80%), emotion prosody, written emotion vignettes, emotional imagery, pictures of emotion, social cognition, and a cued autobiographical memory task. A mood inventory was given, and disease severity and duration were noted. Results: The PD group did not show pervasive deficits in emotion recognition overall. Deficits were demonstrated in prosody recognition, specifically with fearful tones, and in an incongruent prosody task, specifically with angry and neutral tones. The PD group was not able to recognise facial expressions of disgust (mixed intensities) as well as controls, with the result showing a trend toward significance. PD participants were also significantly worse in Theory of Mind (TOM) reasoning but not at another social cognition measure involving recognising social emotions through expressions from the eyes only. There were no differences between the groups across all other tests. Discussion: PD is thought to cause subtle deficits in emotion comprehension which are only elucidated through complex tasks. The effects of PD on complex processing also impact TOM performance, which relies on skills involved in complex emotion recognition. Effects of mood and disease factors on performance were circumscribed. Evidence suggested that the basal ganglia and fronto-striatal connections play a role in emotion comprehension.

Traditional conceptualizations of psychopathy highlight the importance of affective features of the syndrome in perpetuating social deviance. However, little research has directly investigated the callousness that psychopathic offenders display toward society and their victims. The current study investigated the roles of empathy and alexithymia in psychopathy among male and female incarcerated offenders, particularly in distinguishing psychopathy from antisocial personality disorder. Gender differences were also investigated. Regarding empathy, as predicted, group differences were largest between psychopathic and non-psychopathic offenders; no reliable differences emerged between psychopathic and APD-only offenders. In contrast, alexithymia robustly distinguished between offenders with prominent psychopathic traits, those with only APD, and those with neither condition. Psychopathic females unexpectedly exhibited slightly higher levels of alexithymia than their male counterparts, while empathic deficits were relatively consistent across genders. These findings are discussed in terms of improving assessment methods for the accurate identification and treatment of offenders with prominent psychopathic features.

Cerebrovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death among persons aged 50 and above and when a stroke does not result in death, it can cause residual cognitive, motor and behavioural disabilities. Emotional effects of brain injury range from reduced quality of life to various neuropsychiatric disturbances and are of great interest in the South African context and throughout the world as they pose a major obstacle to the rehabilitation process. This study explored the relationship between emotion processing, neuropsychiatric symptoms and quality of life specifically, how they operate following a cerebrovascular accident. In order to achieve this, an adult population of high functioning stroke survivors completed the emotion processing scale (EPS), Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-2) and comprehensive quality of life inventory (ComQOL-A5) and a factor analysis provided statistical evidence suggestive of intercorrelations among the variables. The results lent support to this theoretical relationship and determined the structure of this relationship as follows: The satisfaction with quality of life after a stroke that relates to traditional masculine or feminine roles, when not fulfilled, related to neuropsychiatric symptoms of general maladjustment i.e. schizophrenia and psychopathic deviate. The second factor encompassed symptoms of general anxiety both internally and externally directed: Internally directed anxiety included symptoms of hypochondriasis and hysterical conversion, while externally directed anxiety included neuropsychiatric symptoms of paranoia. The third factor was associated with mood modulation in that elevated mood connected to neuropsychiatric symptoms of hypomania and depressed mood connected to symptoms of depression and social introversion. Finally, emotion processing and psychasthenia made up the last principal component, namely emotion modulation. This meant that avoidance of emotional iv content, suppression of emotion, unprocessed emotion etc. related to neuropsychiatric symptoms of obsessions or compulsions. High functioning stroke survivors’ behaviours were thus characterised by general maladjustment, anxiety, and symptoms related to mood and emotion modulation. This study underlies the importance of diagnosing, treating and monitoring stroke survivors’ emotional alterations and suggests the usefulness of its application in clinical settings to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments or more general interventions to improve the neuropsychiatric sequelae and quality of life of stroke survivors. Improved understanding of these constructs from the stroke survivor’s perspective has obvious impact for the therapeutic interventions inherent in stroke rehabilitation and as such, contributes towards the fields of neuropsychology, neuropsychotherapy and the social sciences.

How individuals process different affective cues, as well as how intensely they experience different emotions, may influence how efficient they are at engaging inhibitory control. To date, it is unclear if these influences differ among young adults with and without ADHD. The current study tested the variation in young adults’ inhibitory control to three affective cues (i.e., fear, happy, and neutral) in an Emotion Go/Nogo task. Results suggest better inhibitory control in response to more distinct cues (i.e., fear Nogo/happy Go). The order in which cues were presented also mattered, such that participants displayed enhanced inhibitory control when first presented with expressions that had similar valence. This task order was particularly helpful for inhibitory control engagement among young adults with ADHD. Furthermore, self-report measures suggest that young adults with ADHD were associated with higher levels of affect intensity. However, no additional relations were found in the processing of affective cues, affect intensity, and inhibitory control between young adults with and without ADHD. Results provide evidence for how affective cues and contexts differentially influence behavioral responses in young adults. Individuals with and without ADHD also appear to differ in the intensity with which they experience different emotions. Overall, the current study provides a framework for how to further explore how emotional cues and affect intensity influence inhibitory control.

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Serotonin (5-HT) has long been implicated in the pathophysiology of depression and anxiety, and the therapeutic effect of treatments. Several drugs useful in treatment produce either acute or neuroadaptive changes in 5-HT_2C receptor activity, and there has been growing interest in how alterations in the 5-HT_2C receptor might be important in mediating antidepressant and anxiolytic activity. The neuropsychological hypothesis of drug action implies that the clinical effects of medications active in anxiety and depression are best understood through the effects of these agents on the processing of emotional information. Thus far, however, there has been no systematic attempt to identify the role of the 5-HT_2C receptor in drug-induced changes in emotional processing in humans. The current research therefore investigated the effects of drug treatments with 5-HT_2C blocking properties on neural and behavioural responses to emotional information in healthy volunteers. An fMRI study demonstrated that a single dose of mirtazapine, an antidepressant with action at the 5-HT_2C receptor, reduces activation in regions important in emotional processing, such as the amygdala and the fusiform gyrus, to threat-relevant stimuli. A series of behavioural studies utilized drugs acting, at least in part, as 5-HT_2C antagonists and agonists to show that these drugs are able to alter emotional processing, particularly emotional memory. A seven-day administration of mirtazapine was shown to increase the recall of positive versus negative personality characteristics. A single dose of agomelatine, also an antidepressant with putative action at the 5-HT_2C receptor, did not increase slow wave sleep, suggesting, the drug had no effect of 5-HT_2C blockade in the brain. In Chapter 4, agomelatine and mCPP, a 5-HT_2C agonist, also shown to had no significant effect on emotional processing measures, but there was a statistical trend for agomelatine to increase memory for positive stimuli, and for mCPP to increase memory for negative stimuli. These findings suggest that antidepressants may work by altering the bias in emotional processing. Overall, the results of this exploration of the role of the 5-HT_2C receptor in emotional processing have contributed to the understanding of antidepressant treatment, and raise new possibilities for the continuation of study in this field.

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder characterized by social dysfunction. People with schizophrenia misinterpret social information and it is suggested that this difficulty may result from visual processing deficits. As faces are one of the most important sources of social information it is hypothesized that people suffering from the disorder have impairments in the visual face processing system. It is unclear which mechanism of the face processing system is impaired but two types of deficits are most often proposed: a deficit in face perception in general (i.e., processing of facial features as such) and a deficit in facial emotion processing (i.e., recognition of emotional facial expressions). Due to the contradictory evidence from behavioural, electrophysiological as well as neuroimaging studies offering support for the involvement of one or the other deficit in schizophrenia it is early to make any conclusive statements as to the nature and level of impairment. Further studies are needed for a better understanding of the key mechanism and abnormalities underlying social dysfunction in schizophrenia.

Emotion processing involves specialised brain regions allowing for effective evaluation of the social environment and for the acquisition of social skills that emerge over childhood. In humans, an important aspect of normal development is the ability to understand the facial expressions of others that signal the nature and safety of the environment. Existing functional data, however, have not characterised the developmental trajectories associated with the differing neural and cognitive-behavioural development. The current thesis investigates the functional specialisation and development of the spatial and temporal patterns in neural activities during implicit processing of facial emotions from early childhood through adulthood. The first study identified brain regions engaged in implicit processing of emotional expressions using a simple emotion-processing paradigm (target detection task) with fourteen healthy adults using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings. Participants responded to a non-face target (a scrambled pattern) while ignoring the emotional face presented in a different hemifield. Results showed ACC and right-lateralised amygdala activations in early latencies in response to the unattended emotional faces related to rapid and implicit attention to the task-irrelevant facial emotions, specifically during the processing of the fearful emotion. Based on the findings in the first study, the second study investigated the developmental patterns and age-related differences in brain activities associated with the rapid and automatic processing of the emotional expressions in MEG with twelve children 7 – 10 years old, twelve adolescents 12 – 15 years old and twelve young adults (mean age 24.4 years) using the same paradigm. The results showed that emotion processing developed early in childhood in the amygdalae, whereas the processing of fear had later maturation engaging the ACC. The results further demonstrated an age-correlated increase in development in ACC activity and an age-related laterality shift in the amygdalae related to fear processing. The present thesis provides new evidence contributing to the understanding of the protracted but differing normal development in the emotional brain over the childhood into adulthood, and offers critical insights into understanding possible dysfunctions of these brain regions during development.

Emotion processing involves specialised brain regions allowing for effective evaluation of the social environment and for the acquisition of social skills that emerge over childhood. In humans, an important aspect of normal development is the ability to understand the facial expressions of others that signal the nature and safety of the environment. Existing functional data, however, have not characterised the developmental trajectories associated with the differing neural and cognitive-behavioural development. The current thesis investigates the functional specialisation and development of the spatial and temporal patterns in neural activities during implicit processing of facial emotions from early childhood through adulthood. The first study identified brain regions engaged in implicit processing of emotional expressions using a simple emotion-processing paradigm (target detection task) with fourteen healthy adults using magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings. Participants responded to a non-face target (a scrambled pattern) while ignoring the emotional face presented in a different hemifield. Results showed ACC and right-lateralised amygdala activations in early latencies in response to the unattended emotional faces related to rapid and implicit attention to the task-irrelevant facial emotions, specifically during the processing of the fearful emotion. Based on the findings in the first study, the second study investigated the developmental patterns and age-related differences in brain activities associated with the rapid and automatic processing of the emotional expressions in MEG with twelve children 7 – 10 years old, twelve adolescents 12 – 15 years old and twelve young adults (mean age 24.4 years) using the same paradigm. The results showed that emotion processing developed early in childhood in the amygdalae, whereas the processing of fear had later maturation engaging the ACC. The results further demonstrated an age-correlated increase in development in ACC activity and an age-related laterality shift in the amygdalae related to fear processing. The present thesis provides new evidence contributing to the understanding of the protracted but differing normal development in the emotional brain over the childhood into adulthood, and offers critical insights into understanding possible dysfunctions of these brain regions during development.