Kessels Roy P C, Montagne Barbara, Hendriks Angelique W, Perrett David I, de Haan Edward H F
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Department of Medical Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, The Netherlands; Vincent van Gogh Institute for Psychiatry, Korsakoff clinic, Venray, The Netherlands.
J Neuropsychol. 2014 Mar;8(1):75-93. doi: 10.1111/jnp.12009. Epub 2013 Feb 14.
The ability to recognize and label emotional facial expressions is an important aspect of social cognition. However, existing paradigms to examine this ability present only static facial expressions, suffer from ceiling effects or have limited or no norms. A computerized test, the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT), was developed to overcome these difficulties. In this study, we examined the effects of age, sex, and intellectual ability on emotion perception using the ERT. In this test, emotional facial expressions are presented as morphs gradually expressing one of the six basic emotions from neutral to four levels of intensity (40%, 60%, 80%, and 100%). The task was administered in 373 healthy participants aged 8-75. In children aged 8-17, only small developmental effects were found for the emotions anger and happiness, in contrast to adults who showed age-related decline on anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. Sex differences were present predominantly in the adult participants. IQ only minimally affected the perception of disgust in the children, while years of education were correlated with all emotions but surprise and disgust in the adult participants. A regression-based approach was adopted to present age- and education- or IQ-adjusted normative data for use in clinical practice. Previous studies using the ERT have demonstrated selective impairments on specific emotions in a variety of psychiatric, neurologic, or neurodegenerative patient groups, making the ERT a valuable addition to existing paradigms for the assessment of emotion perception.
识别和标注面部表情的能力是社会认知的一个重要方面。然而，现有的用于检验这种能力的范式仅呈现静态面部表情，存在天花板效应，或者规范有限甚至没有规范。为克服这些困难，开发了一种计算机化测试——情绪识别任务（ERT）。在本研究中，我们使用ERT检验了年龄、性别和智力对情绪感知的影响。在该测试中，面部表情以形态变化的形式呈现，逐渐从中性表情表达出六种基本情绪之一，强度分为四个等级（40%、60%、80%和100%）。对373名年龄在8至75岁的健康参与者进行了该任务测试。在8至17岁的儿童中，仅发现愤怒和快乐情绪有微小的发育影响，而成年人在愤怒、恐惧、快乐和悲伤情绪方面表现出与年龄相关的下降。性别差异主要出现在成年参与者中。智商对儿童厌恶情绪的感知影响极小，而在成年参与者中，受教育年限与除惊讶和厌恶之外的所有情绪都相关。采用基于回归的方法呈现年龄和教育或智商调整后的规范数据，以供临床实践使用。此前使用ERT的研究已证明，在各种精神疾病、神经疾病或神经退行性疾病患者群体中，特定情绪存在选择性损伤，这使得ERT成为现有情绪感知评估范式的一个有价值的补充。
