Brief Report: Reduced Prioritization of Facial Threat in Adults with Autism.

Typically-developing (TD) adults detect angry faces more efficiently within a crowd than non-threatening faces. Prior studies of this social threat superiority effect (TSE) in ASD using tasks consisting of schematic faces and homogeneous crowds have produced mixed results. Here, we employ a more ecologically-valid test of the social TSE and find evidence of a reduced social TSE in adults with ASD (n = 21) relative to TD controls (n = 28). Unlike TD participants, the ASD group failed to show the normative advantage for detecting angry faces faster than happy faces, either within crowds of neutral or emotional faces. These findings parallel prior work indicating a reduced sensitivity in ASD to facial cues of untrustworthiness, and may reflect a vulnerability for evaluating social harm.

Intact implicit processing of facial threat cues in schizophrenia.

An emerging body of research suggests that people with schizophrenia retain the ability to implicitly perceive facial affect, despite well-documented difficulty explicitly identifying emotional expressions. It remains unclear, however, whether such functional implicit processing extends beyond emotion to other socially relevant facial cues. Here, we constructed two novel versions of the Affect Misattribution Procedure, a paradigm in which affective responses to primes are projected onto neutral targets. The first version included three face primes previously validated to elicit varying inferences of threat from healthy individuals via emotion-independent structural modification (e.g., nose and eye size). The second version included the threat-relevant emotional primes of angry, neutral, and happy faces. Data from 126 participants with schizophrenia and 84 healthy controls revealed that although performing more poorly on an assessment of explicit emotion recognition, patients showed normative implicit threat processing for both non-emotional and emotional facial cues. Collectively, these results support recent hypotheses postulating that the initial perception of salient facial information remains intact in schizophrenia, but that deficits arise at subsequent stages of contextual integration and appraisal. Such a breakdown in the stream of face processing has important implications for mechanistic models of social cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and treatment strategies aiming to improve functional outcome.

A detection advantage for facial threat in the absence of anger.

Quickly and accurately perceiving the potential for aggression in others is adaptive and beneficial for self-protection. Superior detection of facial threat is demonstrated by studies in which transient threat indices (i.e., angry expressions) are identified more efficiently than are transient approach indices (i.e., happy expressions). Not all signs of facial threat are temporary, however: Persistent, biologically based craniofacial attributes (e.g., low eyebrow ridge) are also associated with a perceived propensity for aggression. It remains unclear whether such static properties of the face elicit comparable attentional biases. We used a novel visual search task of faces for the present study that lacked explicit displays of emotion, but varied on perceived threat via manipulated craniofacial structure. A search advantage for threatening facial elements surfaced, suggesting that efficient detection of threat is not limited to the perception of anger, but rather extends to more latent facial signals of aggressive potential. Although all stimuli were primarily identified as emotionally neutral, thus confirming that the effect does not require emotional content, individual variation in the perception of structurally threatening faces as angry was associated with a greater detection advantage. These results indicate that attributing anger to objectively emotionless faces may serve as a mechanism for their heightened salience and influence important facets of social perception and interaction.

Eye tracking the face in the crowd task: why are angry faces found more quickly?

Among a crowd of distractor faces, threatening or angry target faces are identified more quickly and accurately than are nonthreatening or happy target faces, a finding known as the "face in the crowd effect." Two perceptual explanations of the effect have been proposed: (1) the "target orienting" hypothesis (i.e., threatening targets orient attention more quickly than do nonthreatening targets and (2) the "distractor processing" hypothesis (i.e., nonthreatening distractors paired with a threatening target are processed more efficiently than vice versa, leading to quicker detection of threatening targets). Using a task, with real faces and multiple identities, the current study replicated the face in the crowd effect and then, via eye tracking, found greater support for the target orienting hypothesis. Across both the classical search asymmetry paradigm (i.e., one happy target in a crowd of angry distractors vs. one angry target in a crowd of happy distractors) and the constant distractor paradigm (i.e., one happy target in a crowd of neutral distractors vs. one angry target in a crowd of neutral distractors), fewer distractors were fixated before first fixating angry targets relative to happy targets, with no difference in the processing efficiency of distractors. These results suggest that the face in the crowd effect on this task is supported to a greater degree by attentional patterns associated with properties of target rather those of the crowd.