Face Emotion Processing and attention to eye-gaze : typical development and associations with psychopathic and callous unemotional (CU) traits

Abstract

This thesis investigates three aspects of the social processing of faces - recognition of others' facial emotions, arousal to those facial emotions, and shifting of attention to follow others' eye-gaze - that are potentially impaired in individuals with high levels of psychopathic and callous unemotional (CU) traits. The starting motivation for the thesis was to address three competing theories of the etiology of psychopathic and CU traits: a deficit in processing others' emotions that is specific to emotions signaling distress (e.g., fear); a deficit in attending to the eye region of faces; or general differences in attention that produce an abnormally-enhanced ability to tune out unwanted information. For this aim, results showed the following. A meta-analysis of 29 published experiments found psychopathy was associated with impaired recognition of several expressions (i.e., not just fear and sadness), including the positive emotion of happiness. A new empirical study found that higher psychopathic and CU traits in undergraduates were associated with decreased arousal to happy expressions (when stimuli showed emotions that were genuinely-felt by the person displaying the expression). And, another new empirical study of attentional cueing found that high CU traits were associated with decreased shifting of attention to follow left-right directional cues, but that the decrease was of equal magnitude for eye-gaze cues in fearful faces, eye-gaze cues in happy faces, and non-social arrow cues. Together, these results are inconsistent with a specific deficit in processing others' distress emotions. Nor did they suggest that attentional abnormalities are specific to the eyes. Instead, results supported general attention abnormalities in high psychopathic and CU traits. The new empirical studies also produced a number of important results with broader implications for the facial expression literature. In establishing the eye-gaze cueing paradigm, I investigated typical development of social attention in 8-12 year olds compared to adults. Of interest was whether facial expression and context (what the face was looking at) interact to drive social attention and threat bias in children. Results showed interactions emerged from 8 years of age, but were not fully mature even in the oldest children tested. Finally, prior to testing arousal to genuinely-felt happy emotions, I investigated the extent to which currently-available stimulus sets were perceived by observers as showing genuine or faked emotion. Results showed that commonly-used stimuli, including Ekman and Friesans' (1976) Pictures of Facial Affect, were perceived as showing clearly faked emotion for many expressions. I then found that using genuine compared to faked expressions can result in starkly different theoretical conclusions: in the case of psychopathic and CU traits, higher levels of these traits were associated with decreased arousal to genuinely-felt happy expressions, but there was no such relationship for posed happy expressions. Thus, had only posed emotion stimuli been used, results would have appeared to support the distress-specific theory. These results highlight the importance of using ecologically valid stimuli that show faces as they would occur in real world interactions - with contextual information and often signaling genuine emotion.