Biomedical subjects

Takahiro Hoshino

Publications and source records attributed to Takahiro Hoshino.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Decline or improvement? Age-related differences in facial expression recognition.

We examined age-related differences in facial expression recognition in association with potentially interfering variables such as general cognitive ability (verbal and visuospatial abilities), face recognition ability, and the experiences of positive and negative emotions. Participants comprised 34 older (aged 62-81 years) and 34 younger (aged 18-25 years) healthy Japanese adults. The results showed not only age-related decline in sadness recognition but also age-related improvement in disgust recognition. Among other variables, visuospatial ability was moderately related to facial expression recognition in general, and the experience of negative emotions was related to sadness recognition. Consequently, age-related decline in sadness recognition was statistically explained by age-related decrease in the experience of negative emotions. On the other hand, age-related improvement in disgust recognition was not explained by the interfering variables, and it reflected a higher tendency in the younger participants to mistake disgust for anger. Possible mechanisms are discussed in terms of neurobiological and socio-environmental factors.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Disgust-specific impairment of facial expression recognition in Parkinson's disease.

There is contradictory evidence regarding whether the impairments of the recognition of emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease are specific to certain emotions such as disgust and fear. Generally, neurological case reports on emotion-specific impairments have been suspected of being confounded with the factor of task difficulty. Using a refined assessment method in which the difficulty factors were controlled by means of mixed facial expressions and item response theory, we attempted to clarify whether Parkinson's disease disproportionately impaired the recognition of specific emotions. We studied 14 patients with Parkinson's disease and 39 healthy controls who were matched in terms of gender, age, years of education and intelligence quotient. Whereas the refined method revealed that the patients with Parkinson's disease displayed significantly lower scores in disgust recognition alone, conventional methods failed to detect this impairment. In addition, control measures including face recognition abilities did not statistically explain the impairment observed in the patients. The results indicate that Parkinson's disease can indeed selectively impair the recognition of facial expressions of disgust; this provides concrete evidence for emotion-specific impairments that sufficiently withstands criticisms regarding the difficulty artefacts. Furthermore, the results support the proposed role of the basal ganglia-insula system in disgust recognition. This study effectively demonstrates the benefits of refining neuropsychological assessment by taking advantage of the modern psychometric theory.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

Measuring individual differences in sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.

The assessment of individual differences in facial expression recognition is normally required to address two major issues: (1) high agreement level (ceiling effect) and (2) differential difficulty levels across emotions. We propose a new assessment method designed to quantify individual differences in the recognition of the six basic emotions, 'sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.' We attempted to address the two major assessment issues by using morphing techniques and item response theory (IRT). We used morphing to create intermediate, mixed facial expression stimuli with various levels of recognition difficulty. Applying IRT enabled us to estimate the individual latent trait levels underlying the recognition of respective emotions (sensitivity scores), unbiased by stimulus properties that constitute difficulty. In a series of two experiments we demonstrated that the sensitivity scores successfully addressed the two major assessment issues and their concomitant individual variability. Intriguingly, correlational analyses of the sensitivity scores to different emotions produced orthogonality between happy and non-happy emotion recognition. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the independence of happiness recognition, unaffected by stimulus difficulty.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

[Stagewise estimation for regression analysis when independent variables are latent variables].

Psychological research often deals with psychological constructs that cannot be directly measured. Thus independent variables of regression analysis for an observable dependent variable are sometimes latent variables (factors) that are defined independently of the dependent variable. In this study we pointed out the problem associated with the use of factor analysis for the combined set of dependent variable and independent variables in such a cases; that is, the derived factors are different from those originally intended, and the true regression parameters cannot be reproduced. We proposed a stagewise estimation method to solve the problem. This method estimates parameters of measurement equation in the first stage, and then estimates parameters of structural equation in the second stage. Our proposed method enables calculation of standard errors of estimators using Bootstrapping method. Numerical studies showed that the proposed method improves the estimation efficiency over the conventional methods, and provides estimates which are robust with respect to misspecification of model.

Analysis of Variance↗