Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions.

The ability to recognize how another is feeling is a critical skill, with profound implications for social adaptation. Training programs designed to improve social functioning typically attempt to direct attention toward or away from certain facial configurations, or to improve discrimination between emotions by categorizing faces. However, emotion recognition involves processes in addition to attentional orienting or categorical labeling. The intensity with which someone is experiencing an emotion is also influential; knowing whether someone is annoyed or enraged will guide an observer's response. Here, we systematically examined a novel paradigm designed to improve ratings of facial information communicating emotion intensity in a sample of 492 participants across a series of 8 studies. In Study 1, participants improved precision in recognizing the intensity of facial cues through personalized corrective feedback. These initial findings were replicated in a randomized-control trial comparing training with feedback to viewing and rating faces without feedback. Studies 2 and 3 revealed that these effects generalize to identities and facial configurations not included in the training. Study 4 indicated that the effects were sustained beyond the training session. These findings suggest that individualized, corrective feedback is effective for reducing error in rating the intensity of facial cues. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Youths' processing of emotion information: Responses to chronic and video-based laboratory stress.

Integrating multiple sources of information about others' emotional states is critical to making accurate emotional inferences. There is evidence that both acute and chronic stress influence how individuals perceive emotional information. However, there is little research examining how acute and chronic stress interact to impact these processes. The current study examined whether acute and chronic stress interact to influence how children make emotional inferences. Eighty-nine youths (aged 11-15 years) underwent a novel video-based social stressor. Children completed an emotion recognition task prior to and after the stressor in which they saw integrated displays of facial expressions and contexts depicting congruent or incongruent emotional information. Eye tracking assessed changes in attention to the stimuli. Children became more likely to use and attended more to facial information than contextual information when labeling emotions following exposure to acute stress. Moreover, the effect of acute stress on use of facial information to label emotions was stronger for children who experienced higher levels of chronic stress. These data suggest that acute stress shifts attention towards facial information while suppressing processing of other sources of emotional information, and that youths with a history of chronic stress are more susceptible to these effects.

Can't Take My Eyes Off of You: Eye Tracking Reveals How Ruminating Young Adolescents Get Stuck.

Rumination, a cognitive process that involves passively, repetitively focusing on negative feelings and their meaning, is a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. Research with adults has suggested that attentional control difficulties may underlie rumination, but questions remain about the nature of these processes. Furthermore, the relationship between attentional control and rumination in youth has received little empirical examination. In the present study, 92 youth (ages 9-14; 72% girls; 74% Caucasian) reported on their trait rumination and internalizing symptoms. They also completed a 1,500 ms emotional-faces dot-probe task while their eye movements were measured to examine overt visual attention with high temporal precision. Youth's rumination was associated with greater dwell on emotional faces but not with initial orientation. These findings suggest that rumination is associated with increased attention to emotional information during the later stages of selective attention rather than earlier orienting to emotional cues. Implications for prevention and treatment of psychopathology are discussed.

Developmental changes in the primacy of facial cues for emotion recognition.

There have been long-standing differences of opinion regarding the influence of the face relative to that of contextual information on how individuals process and judge facial expressions of emotion. However, developmental changes in how individuals use such information have remained largely unexplored and could be informative in attempting to reconcile these opposing views. The current study tested for age-related differences in how individuals prioritize viewing emotional faces versus contexts when making emotion judgments. To do so, we asked 4-, 8-, and 12-year-old children as well as college students to categorize facial expressions of emotion that were presented with scenes that were either congruent or incongruent with the facial displays. During this time, we recorded participants' gaze patterns via eye tracking. College students directed their visual attention primarily to the face, regardless of contextual information. Children, however, divided their attention between both the face and the context as sources of emotional information depending on the valence of the context. These findings reveal a developmental shift in how individuals process and integrate emotional cues.

Maltreated youth display a blunted blood pressure response to an acute interpersonal stressor.

Although there is much evidence of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysfunction among individuals who have experienced child maltreatment, dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) has received less attention. Understanding the role of the ANS in maltreated children may help clarify how these children respond to subsequent life stress. We explored ANS reactivity among 111 youth (ages 9-14), 34 of whom had experienced verified child maltreatment. ANS activity was assessed via blood pressure-a convenient, noninvasive physiological index-while youth underwent a social stress task. Blood pressure and subjective mood ratings were obtained prior to and following the task. Nonmaltreated youth experienced an increase in systolic blood pressure following the stressor, whereas maltreated youth did not. Self-reported subjective mood worsened for both groups. The current data suggest that children who experienced early stress exposure demonstrate blunted ANS reactivity. Results are discussed in terms of children's healthy adaptations to transient social stressors. In addition, we discuss the cost-effectiveness and benefits of physiological measures such as blood pressure for understanding risk for psychopathology.

Cognitive Control and Rumination in Youth: The Importance of Emotion.

Rumination involves the tendency to passively dwell on negative emotions along with their meanings and consequences. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema demonstrated the role of rumination in the development of several forms of psychopathology and suggested that cognitive control may be one factor that makes some individuals more prone to ruminate than others. Studies with adults have consistently found that rumination is associated with cognitive control difficulties, especially related to switching and inhibiting emotional information. Because rumination predicts psychopathology by adolescence, the present study examined whether ruminating youth would show similar cognitive control difficulties. Fifty-two adolescents completed two tasks from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery and reported on their depressive symptoms and tendency to ruminate. There was no effect of rumination on a task measuring general cognitive flexibility. However, rumination was associated with difficulty inhibiting negative information when switching from negative to positive blocks on an Affective Go/No-go task. Results suggest both similarities and differences compared to adult studies and are discussed in terms of clinical implications for the prevention and treatment of psychopathology.