Ardizzi Martina, Evangelista Valentina, Ferroni Francesca, Umiltà Maria A, Ravera Roberto, Gallese Vittorio
Department of Medicine and Surgery, Unit of Neuroscience, University of ParmaParma, Italy.
Ravera Children Rehabilitation CentreFreetown, Sierra Leone.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jun 23;8:1026. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01026. eCollection 2017.
One of the crucial features defining basic emotions and their prototypical facial expressions is their value for survival. Childhood traumatic experiences affect the effective recognition of facial expressions of negative emotions, normally allowing the recruitment of adequate behavioral responses to environmental threats. Specifically, anger becomes an extraordinarily salient stimulus unbalancing victims' recognition of negative emotions. Despite the plethora of studies on this topic, to date, it is not clear whether this phenomenon reflects an overall response tendency toward anger recognition or a selective proneness to the salience of specific facial expressive cues of anger after trauma exposure. To address this issue, a group of underage Sierra Leonean Ebola virus disease survivors (mean age 15.40 years, SE 0.35; years of schooling 8.8 years, SE 0.46; 14 males) and a control group (mean age 14.55, SE 0.30; years of schooling 8.07 years, SE 0.30, 15 males) performed a forced-choice chimeric facial expressions recognition task. The chimeric facial expressions were obtained pairing upper and lower half faces of two different negative emotions (selected from anger, fear and sadness for a total of six different combinations). Overall, results showed that upper facial expressive cues were more salient than lower facial expressive cues. This priority was lost among Ebola virus disease survivors for the chimeric facial expressions of anger. In this case, differently from controls, Ebola virus disease survivors recognized anger regardless of the upper or lower position of the facial expressive cues of this emotion. The present results demonstrate that victims' performance in the recognition of the facial expression of anger does not reflect an overall response tendency toward anger recognition, but rather the specific greater salience of facial expressive cues of anger. Furthermore, the present results show that traumatic experiences deeply modify the perceptual analysis of philogenetically old behavioral patterns like the facial expressions of emotions.
定义基本情绪及其典型面部表情的关键特征之一是它们对生存的价值。童年创伤经历会影响对负面情绪面部表情的有效识别，而正常情况下这种识别能让人对环境威胁做出适当的行为反应。具体而言，愤怒会成为一种格外突出的刺激因素，扰乱受害者对负面情绪的识别。尽管关于这个主题已有大量研究，但到目前为止，尚不清楚这种现象是反映了对愤怒识别的整体反应倾向，还是创伤暴露后对愤怒特定面部表达线索显著性的选择性倾向。为了解决这个问题，一组未成年的塞拉利昂埃博拉病毒病幸存者（平均年龄15.40岁，标准误0.35；受教育年限8.8年，标准误0.46；14名男性）和一个对照组（平均年龄14.55岁，标准误0.30；受教育年限8.07年，标准误0.30，15名男性）进行了一项强制选择嵌合面部表情识别任务。嵌合面部表情是通过将两种不同负面情绪（从愤怒、恐惧和悲伤中选取，共六种不同组合）的上半脸和下半脸配对得到的。总体而言，结果表明上半面部表达线索比下半面部表达线索更显著。对于愤怒的嵌合面部表情，这种优先级在埃博拉病毒病幸存者中消失了。在这种情况下，与对照组不同，埃博拉病毒病幸存者识别愤怒时，无论这种情绪的面部表达线索在上半脸还是下半脸。目前的结果表明，受害者在愤怒面部表情识别中的表现并非反映了对愤怒识别的整体反应倾向，而是愤怒面部表达线索的特定更高显著性。此外，目前的结果表明，创伤经历深刻地改变了对诸如情绪面部表情等系统发育古老的行为模式的感知分析。
