Biomedical subjects

Elisa Frigerio

Publications and source records attributed to Elisa Frigerio.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Is everybody always my friend? Perception of approachability in Williams syndrome.

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) are well known for their friendly behaviour and tendency to approach strangers indiscriminately as if everybody were their friend. This tendency to approach strangers is mirrored in their ratings of unfamiliar face stimuli. Here we examined their perception of unfamiliar expressive faces and found that individuals with WS do not always see faces as being highly approachable. Happy faces were rated as more approachable by individuals with WS than by controls. In contrast, the other less approachable face stimuli were rated lower on approachability by individuals with WS than by controls. Thus, it appears that although individuals with WS will discriminate people in terms of approachability, they have difficulty inhibiting their strong compulsion towards social interaction. The form of this strong pro-social compulsion is discussed both in terms of friendliness and in terms of the heightened salience of social stimuli (social stimulus attraction).

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Perception of facial expressions of emotion in bipolar disorder.

OBJECTIVES: Some studies have reported deficits in the perception of facial expressions among depressed individuals compared with healthy controls, while others have reported negative biases in expression perception. We examined whether altered perception of emotion reflects an underlying trait-like effect in affective disorder by examining facial expression perception in euthymic bipolar patients. METHODS: Sensitivity to six different facial expressions, as well as accuracy of emotion recognition, was examined among 17 euthymic bipolar patients and 17 healthy controls using an interactive computer program. RESULTS: No differences were found between euthymic bipolar patients and controls in terms of sensitivity to any particular emotion. Although initial analysis of the data suggested impairment in the recognition of fear among the patients, identification of this emotion was not relatively impaired compared with that of the other emotions. CONCLUSIONS: The study did not find any conclusive evidence for trait-like deficits in the perception of facially conveyed emotions in bipolar disorder. Altered perception of facial expressions that has been found to accompany depressed mood may instead reflect mood-congruent biases.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Facial expression recognition in Williams syndrome.

Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) excel in face recognition and show both a remarkable concern for social stimuli and a linguistic capacity for, in particular, emotionally referenced language. The animated full facial expression comprehension test (AFFECT), a new test of emotional expression perception, was used to compare participants with WS with both chronological and mental age-matched controls. It was found that expression recognition in WS was worse than that of chronologically age-matched controls but indistinguishable from that of mental age controls. Different processing strategies are thought to underlie the similar performance of individuals with WS and mental age controls. The expression recognition performance of individuals with WS did not correlate with age, but was instead found to correlate with IQ. This is compared to earlier findings, replicated here, that face recognition performance on the Benton test correlates with age and not IQ. The results of the Benton test have been explained in terms of individuals with WS being good at face recognition; since a piecemeal strategy can be used, this strategy is improved with practice which would explain the correlation with age. We propose that poor expression recognition of the individuals with WS is due to a lack of configural ability since changes in the configuration of the face are an important part of expressions. Furthermore, these reduced configural abilities may be due to abnormal neuronal development and are thus fixed from an early age.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2002

Facial affect perception in alcoholics.

Satisfactory interpersonal interaction involves understanding others' facial expressions. Alcoholic individuals often have severe interpersonal difficulties that may relate to poor and distorted perception of facial expressions. The importance of attention direction has been highlighted by the finding, in recent primate studies, of neurons responsible for the detection of attention direction. Studies on humans suggest that expression perception is modulated by attention direction (whether the expression is directed towards or away from the observer). Here, for the first time, the relationship between attention direction and perception of expression (anger, sadness, happiness and disgust) in alcoholic and control subjects is investigated. We used animated facial stimuli depicting different emotions to give measures of recognition accuracy and of perceptual sensitivity. Our study demonstrated that alcoholics made more errors than control subjects in recognising expressions generally and had a tendency to mis-label sad expressions directed towards them as being hostile (angry/disgusted). When asked to select the point when they started to see the expression, alcoholics, especially female alcoholics, chose higher expression intensities. This study highlights the importance of investigating the modulating effects of attention direction when studying the perception of expressions and provides an indication of how alcoholics' inappropriate social reactions may be triggered.

Adult↗