Subjects: Other Disciplines >> Synthetic discipline submitted time 2023-10-09 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Facial expressions are emotional signals conveyed through muscle movements, such as those in the eyes and mouth. Facial emotion recognition plays a crucial role in infant's social and communicative development. The development of basic facial expression recognition in infants is asynchronous: the recognition of positive expressions occurs earlier than that of negative expressions, and the development of emotion perception is earlier than emotion understanding.Infants recognize positive facial expressions earlier than negative ones. They can distinguish happy expressions when they are 2 months old, and negative expressions when they are 4-6 months old. Infant's ability to perceive emotions develops earlier than their ability to understand emotions. The 7-month-old infant has initially possessed the emotion perception ability. They can not only distinguish the basic facial expressions, but also form a classification perception and master the visual observation strategy similar to that of adults. The development of emotional understanding is relatively lagging behind, and 12-month-old infants cannot accurately understand the emotional meaning conveyed by different the negative valence expressions. Infants' basic facial expression recognition undergoes a shift from positive bias to negative bias. In the first half of infancy, infants show an attentional bias to happy expressions, and from 5 months onwards, infants show an attentional bias to fearful expressions. The development of infant's ability to recognize basic facial expression recognition reflects the process from the activation of basic emotions to the formation of emotional schemas. Basic expressions are a preset system that humans evolved to adapt to the environment, and infants are born with the innate ability to express and recognize them. Once basic emotions are activated by the environment, infants acquire corresponding recognition abilites. Emotional schemas are acquired through postnatal development, and are the result of the dynamic interaction process between emotions and cognition. Both individual cognitive development and environmental stimuli play important roles in the formation of emotional schemas. The experience-expectant mechanism in the human brain enables infants to recognize positive expressions earlier than negative expressions, which helps infants to receive more feedback from adults. From the second half of infancy, infants may develop an attentional bias towards negative expression, which can aid in their better understanding of others's feelings. There may also be a sensitive period during the second half of infancy for the development of the ability to recognize negative emotions. Moreover, the experience-dependent mechanism in the brain determines the plasticity of the brain's emotional neural network. The mother-infant relationship, family, social environment, race, and culture all can affect the development of an infant's ability to recognize facial expressions.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： The nature of cognitive and neurophysiological deficits of dyslexia have been under debate for a long time. Recently, a new hypothesis for developmental dyslexia -- noise exclusion deficit hypothesis, was proposed and was supported by a number of empirical research evidence from alphabetic languages. It has been found that dyslexia exhibited noise exclusion deficits not only in visual domain but also in auditory domain, indicating a multisensory or domain-general noise exclusion deficit. Alternatively, noise exclusion deficit of dyslexia was also argued to be mainly derived from attention deficit. Yet, some critical issues are still required to be addressed in the future, such as whether noise exclusion deficit presents in Chinese developmental dyslexia.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Machine learning is a promising approach for mental disorders. In recent years, machine learning based on T1 weighted imaging and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data has been used to investigate the psychopathology and underlying mechanisms of schizophrenia patients and high-risk population. The findings from the previous literature suggest that structural features of frontal lobe and temporal lobe can improve classification performance. In addition, the combination of behavioural performances and the features of brain structure is superior to the single-modality structural images on classification accuracy. However, the existing empirical studies classifying schizophrenia patients or high-risk population from controls are limited in sample size and generalization ability.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Body size perception refers to how an individual perceives the size, weight and proportions of his/her body. Distorted body size perception can be a mental health problems, and is associated with psychiatric disorders such as eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and certain psychotic disorders. This is an often-ignored research area, with largely inconsistent evidence. The extant literature concerning body size perception in patients with eating disorders generally supports four notions. First, anorexia nervosa (AN) patients and bulimia nervosa (BN) patients both overestimate their body size, but the magnitude of such distorted perception varies with different methods estimating one’s body size. Two commonly-used methods for body size estimation are the ‘depictive method’ and the ‘metric method’. The latter method usually generated a higher degree of overestimation in body size than the former method in patients with eating disorders. Second, the distorted body size perception in AN patients may be confounded by their extremely low body mass index (BMI). Yet, this previous finding is inconsistent due to the ecological validity of the ‘depictive’ and ‘metric’ methods. Third, AN and BN patients have different estimates of body size perception for ＂self＂ versus ＂others＂, and such discrepancy may be related to attitudes towards themselves. However, attitudinal factors and its effect on body size perception are seldom studied and thus remain unclear. Lastly, distorted body size perception in patients with eating disorder is correlated with symptom severity and could indicate prognosis of the illness. Body size perception is also one of the intervention targets for treating eating disorders. The literature remains inconclusive regarding whether healthy people have accurate body size perception, because previous findings vary with different designs in measuring body size perception, sample characteristics (demographics and geographical-cultural aspects). Yet in general, healthy people tend to perceive others’ body size consistently, with overestimation for others with low BMIs, and underestimation for others with high BMIs. Three cognitive mechanisms underlying distorted body size perception have been proposed, namely contraction bias, adaptive after-effect and serial dependence. These putative mechanisms operate in health people and patients with eating disorders. In view of the above-mentioned review of the literature, we recommended three useful approaches for research in body size perception. First, it is necessary to distinguish two different methods for estimating body size perception, namely the ‘recognition technique’ (which involves the use of a visual analogue as reference in measurements) and the ‘recall technique” (which does not involve any visual analogue). It is likely that the two methods will yield different estimates from subjects, and may partly account for the inconsistent finding in the literature. Second, the problems of unclear definition of “overestimation” in previous studies should be addressed, by developing operational criteria and a standardized definition across different paradigms. Third, male subjects should be included in future study, because this gender has been under-represented in previous research. Lastly, in view of the growing incidence of eating disorders, body size perception is a worthy topic for research in China.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Empathy refers to understanding, inferring and sharing others’ emotional states, which can be divided into affective and cognitive components. Although empathy contributes to prosocial behaviors and harmonious interpersonal relationships, it also increases an individual’s negative emotional experiences and affect distress. Emotion regulation, the psychological process of managing one’s own emotions, has been found to be closely associated with empathy. Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression are two commonly used strategies to regulate emotions, of which cognitive reappraisal is effective in reducing negative emotional experiences while expressive suppression is usually correlated with more affective distress. However, the roles of emotion regulation strategies in the empathic response are still unclear. We conducted two studies to investigate the roles of emotion regulation on the negative affect related to empathy using self-report questionnaires and experimental task respectively. Study 1 administered the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE), the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21) to 442 college students. The moderating effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the association between empathy and negative affect were examined separately. Study 2 adopted the Chinese version of the Empathic Accuracy Task (EAT) to further examine the effect of emotion regulation (i.e. cognitive reappraisal) on cognitive empathy and affective responses. The EAT requires participants to continuously rate targets’ emotional valence in video clips as a second person and rate emotional valence and arousal of both targets and themselves after each video. Seventy-five participants (33 for experiment 1 and 42 for experiment 2) were recruited to perform the EAT under two conditions, i.e., naturally viewing without any instructions and applying cognitive reappraisal while viewing the scenarios. Paired sample t tests and repeated-measure ANOVA were performed to examine the effect of cognitive reappraisal on task performance. Findings from Study 1 showed that affective empathy was significantly correlated with higher levels of anxiety and stress, while empathic concern was correlated with less anxiety, stress and depression. However, when participants endorsed cognitive reappraisal more frequently, such positive association between affective empathy and stress was reduced, while the negative association between empathic concern and anxiety was strengthened. Cognitive empathy was significantly correlated with reduced depression. Expressive suppression strengthened the negative association between cognitive empathy and depression. Moreover, negative correlations between cognitive empathy and anxiety as well as stress emerged for participants endorsing cognitive reappraisal more frequently. Findings from Study 2 showed that task performances of the EAT were significantly improved when participants endorsed cognitive reappraisal strategy compared to the condition of naturally viewing. Specifically, under the cognitive reappraisal condition participants scored higher empathic accuracy, experienced less negative affect in reaction to others’ affect distress, and experienced more positive affect in reaction to others’ positive emotions. Taken together, the findings from these two studies suggested that both cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression play a protective role in the associations between empathy and negative affect, and the endorsement of cognitive reappraisal would improve task performance on both cognitive and affective empathy. Our findings shed light on the psychological mechanisms of empathy and provide new approach for improving individuals’ social cognitive ability, especially for early intervention in clinical and subclinical populations.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Educational Psychology submitted time 2022-06-30
Abstract：
The nature of deficits of dyslexia has been under debate for a long time. A large number of studies have revealed that the dyslexics suffer from impaired audiovisual temporal integration. However, these studies only examined the overall performance of audiovisual temporal integration, and neglected to explore its dynamic process over time. Audiovisual temporal recalibration is an indicator describing the dynamic process of audiovisual temporal integration. Difficulty in recalibrating the differences between internal temporal representations and sensory inputs leads to impaired multisensory integration. Given that developmental dyslexics have deficits in recalibration-related abilities, the essence of the deficit in audiovisual temporal integration in developmental dyslexia may be impaired audiovisual temporal recalibration. Future studies could examine the specific performances of audiovisual temporal recalibration in developmental dyslexia, as well as its cognitive and neural mechanisms.
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