Fear and reward learning can occur through direct experience or observation. Both channels can enhance survival or create maladaptive behavior. We used fMRI to isolate neural mechanisms of observational fear and reward learning and investigate whether neural response varied according to individual differences in neuroticism and extraversion.…

A measure of social perception (CASP) was used to assess differences in social perception among typically developing children, children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), and children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Significant between-group differences were found in recognition of emotions in video, with children…

Performance on an emotional labeling task in response to schematic facial patterns representing five basic emotions without the concurrent presentation of a verbal category was investigated in 40 parents of children with autism and 40 matched controls. "Autism fathers" performed worse than "autism mothers," who performed worse than controls in…

The emotion understanding of children with language impairment (LI) was examined in two studies employing emotion-recognition tasks selected to minimize reliance on language skills. Participants consisted of 43 children with LI and 43 typically developing, age-matched peers, sampled from the age ranges of 5 to 8 and 9 to 12 years. In the first…

Global information processing and perception of facial age and emotional expression was studied in children with autism, language disorders, mental retardation, and a clinical control group. Children were given a global-local task and asked to recognize age and emotion in human and canine faces. Children with autism made fewer global responses and…

Two studies used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine neural manifestations of emotion recognition in 7-month-old infants. In the first study, 20 infants were presented with 2 alternating achromatic slides of the same female model posing a happy and a fearful expression. Infants' ERPs revealed a prominent positive component to the happy face…

Deficits in emotion recognition have been linked with aggression. However, the ecological validity of previous studies is limited. In this study we developed new materials to investigate the emotion identification skills of 19 frequently aggressive and 15 nonaggressive adults with mental retardation. The three tasks included photographs of faces,…

A total of 20 abused and 20 nonabused pairs of children of three-seven years and their mothers participated in a facial expression posing task and a facial expression recognition task. Findings suggest that abused children may not observe as often as nonabused children do the easily interpreted voluntary displays of emotion by their mothers. (RH)

The current study was designed to investigate whether reported [J. Learn. Disabil. 31 (1998) 286; J. Psycholinguist. Res. 22 (1993) 445] difficulties in language-impaired children's ability to identify vocal and facial cues to emotion could be explained at least partially by nonparalinguistic factors. Children with specific language impairment…

The purpose of this study was to trace the development of children's understanding of emotions between the ages of 4 and 12. Twenty-four children at each of five age groups (4, 6, 8, 10, and 12), equally divided by sex, served as subjects. Three groups of tasks were administered: (1) the recognition of facial expressions from photographs, (2) the…

In a study of 86 individuals with mental retardation, participants were asked to identify the appropriate facial expression or word that corresponded to the emotional response in a vignette. Results indicated that age correlated negatively with choosing the right word or picture. IQ was a significant predictor of performance. (CR)

The authors examined the effects of suboptimally presented facial expressions on emotional and attentional responses and memory among 39 young adults viewing video (business news) messages from a small screen. Facial electromyography (EMG) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia were used as physiological measures of emotion and attention, respectively.…

This literature review discusses 21 studies on facial emotion recognition by persons with mental retardation in terms of methodological characteristics, stimulus material, salient variables and their relation to recognition tasks, and emotion recognition deficits in mental retardation. A table provides comparative data on all 21 studies. (DB)

Examined influence of nondiscrepance and discrepance between situational and expressive cues on children's emotion recognition. Videotaped episodes in which actors portrayed emotions were presented to four- to eight-year-old girls. Girls' responses to questions regarding the perceived cues reflected a developmental trend from centration to…

Examined visual perception of emotion in typically developing and physically abused children, focusing on the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. Found that physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did typically…