RESUMEN

A cross-sectional study was conducted in which level of mood recognition was assessed from early childhood through old age. Asymptotic performance was obtained on facial affect recognitions tasks from ages 3-34 yrs. There was a progressive decline in facial affect recognitions beginning at age 45, with the principal problem that of recognizing angry faces. With respect to auditory prosody, there was an improvement in recognition level from ages 3-12 yrs. Performance remained asymptotic through age 43 and then began to decline increasingly beyond age 45.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Facial affect recognition was studied in groups of mildly retarded subjects, moderately retarded subjects, and nonretarded children. Subjects were tested under five conditions. In Condition 1, they were presented with happy, sad and angry faces simultaneously in each of 18 trials and were prompted with short commands to point to one of the affective faces. Conditions 2 and 3 were the same as the first, except that subjects were prompted with short affective vignettes. In Condition 2, the vignettes were followed by tag lines identifying the moods of the vignettes. There were no tag lines in Condition 3. Conditions 4 and 5 were identical to Conditions 2 and 3, except that the vignettes were longer. The error data were analyzed and results showed that the groups did not differ in response to short commands and vignette prompts produced more errors than short commands. Also, long vignettes gave rise to more mistakes than short vignettes, and vignettes without tag lines resulted in more errors than those with tag lines. Group differences emerged when vignettes were presented, with more errors made as level of retardation and length of vignettes increased. It was concluded that mental retardation is not associated with a disturbance in facial affect recognition.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The level of facial and auditory affect recognition was assessed in depressed and in nondepressed children. There were six conditions. Subjects had to distinguish between and identify happy, sad and angry faces in one set of conditions. They had to do the same for affective voice intonations in another set and for emotional melodies in the remaining two conditions. The errors made to every expression under the six conditions were evaluated for the groups. The findings indicated that the depressed children were not impaired in facial affect recognition. However, there was a disturbance in auditory affect recognition associated with depression, along with a negative bias.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

A group of young adults, normal elderly, and senile people were tested for the recognition of facial, auditory and musical affect, as well as nonemotional voice inflections. With respect to the affect recognition tasks, the musical stimuli generated the greatest number of errors and the facial stimuli the fewest. The senile group performed significantly more poorly than the other two groups and the normal elderly made reliably more mistakes than the young adults to affective voice tones and melodies. Also, the normal elderly made more mistakes than the young people to nonemotional voice tones. The senile group responded at chance level to these stimuli. The number of errors to emotional and nonemotional voice tones did not differ within the young and normal elderly groups. However, the senile people responded with significantly greater accuracy to the affective voice inflections. It was concluded that aging is a factor that negatively affects the recognition of tonal inflections, be they vocal or musical. In addition, the recognition of emotional and nonemotional voice inflections are independent of one another.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Five groups were tested for facial and postural affect recognition by use of word and tonal prompts. Group 1 contained normal young children. Groups 2 and 3 were moderately retarded and Groups 4 and 5 were severely retarded. Retardation was complicated by autism in Groups 3 and 5. There were eight conditions. In Condition 1, happy, sad and angry faces were displayed simultaneously in each of 18 trials, with the subjects prompted verbally to point to one of the affects (e.g., the angry face) in a given trial. In Condition 2, full figures (with facial features omitted) were used instead of the faces, and emotion was conveyed by use of body position and muscle tone. The same procedure was followed as before. Conditions 3 and 4 were repeated of 1 and 2, except that descriptive word prompts were used (e.g., point to the yelling picture). Conditions 5 and 6 were the same as 1 and 2, except that affective voice intonations were used instead of word prompts. The subjects had to identify the voice tones by using affective words (e.g., happy) in Condition 7, and descriptive words (e.g., laughing) in Condition 8. An analysis of the error data indicated that retarded subjects had particular difficulty recognizing angry stimuli with both affective and descriptive word prompting. In addition, they tended to confuse happy with angry voice tones.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Senile patients were compared to normal elderly people for visual and auditory affect recognition. The study consisted of eight conditions, with the subjects prompted verbally to point to happy, sad and angry pictures in the first five. The pictures consisted of expressive faces, expressive postures with blank faces and matching facial and postural expressions in Conditions 1-3, respectively. The facial and postural expressions conflicted in Conditions 4 and 5, with the facial expressions redundant in Condition 4 and the postures redundant in Condition 5. Conditions 6 and 7 were the same as the first two, except that the subjects were prompted by use of taped, affective voice intonations. In Condition 8, the subjects were requested to identify each of the affectively intoned prompts. The findings revealed a consistent level difference between the groups, with the senile elderly demonstrating both visual and auditory affective agnosia. These impairments in emotional recognition were affect-specific and they tended to confound one another. Finally, there was a subgroup of normals that was somewhat deficient in visual and auditory affect recognition.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Facial- and postural-effect recognition was assessed in two groups of normal children (average ages of 5 yr., 3 mo. 5 yrs., 9 mo.) and three groups of retarded subjects (mild, moderate and severe). All subjects were tested under five separate conditions, in an attempt to determine if there was an impairment in affect recognition which varied directly as a function of the degree of mental handicap. In the first condition, subjects were presented with a smiling, pouting and a frowning face on each of 18 trials. They were given one prompt per trial, being instructed to point to the happy, sad or angry stimulus. Expressive postural stimuli devoid of facial features were used in Condition 2, and the same prompting procedure was followed. In the remaining three conditions facial and postural expressions were combined in different ways, so that they either agreed or disagreed. The resulting error data were evaluated by use of an analysis of variance. The principal findings showed that the severely retarded performed very poorly in all conditions. The remaining groups performed relatively well and failed to differ significantly from one another in facial-affect recognition. However, the moderately retarded group was significantly more impaired in postural-affect recognition than were the mildly handicapped and normals.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Sixteen senile geriatric inpatients were tested for visual affect recognition under four conditions. In the first three conditions, they were presented with different sets of happy, sad and angry facial stimuli. In the fourth condition, postural sketches were used to express the three emotions. The subjects were tested by means of verbal prompting, i.e., they were directed to point to either the happy, sad or angry facial and bodily expressions over a series of trials. Significantly more errors were made to the angry expressions than to the happy and sad ones which, in turn, did not differ from one another. In addition, significantly more errors were generated by the facial stimuli than by the postural representations. These findings suggested a mechanism underlying prosopo-affective agnosia.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The performance of senile elderly persons and of young children was compared on an identical facial affect recognition test. The senile persons were disoriented with impaired recent memory. However, their neurological functioning in visual, perceptual, verbal, and motor processing required for the testing was intact. The children were divided into age groups of 3, 3 1/2, 4, 4 1/2, and 5. Pictures of happy, sad, and angry faces were shown and the subjects were tested for their ability to discriminate between the emotions by the use of prompting and oddity procedures. The very young children (ages 3 and 3 1/2) were found to be at a deficit in recognizing facial expressions, particularly with regard to the recognition of sad faces. The children's recognition level improved as a function of age. The senile persons were found to be significantly more impaired than even the youngest group of children, particularly with regard to the recognition of angry faces. While the children attempted to distinguish between the stimuli on the basis of affect, the seniles tended to "feature-detect", because their facial feature recognition ability remained relatively intact. Thus the impairment of facial affect recognition in senility was quite unlike that of younger children. The extensive deterioration of senile patients in facial affect recognition ability is remarkable and has important therapeutic implications. Since these patients still maintain high level of verbal comprehension, clear verbal expression of our feelings toward them is essential.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Two experiments were conducted in which senile demented patients were shown pictures of happy, sad, and angry faces, and tested for their ability to recognize these emotional expressions. Their affect recognition was obviously impaired, as they tended to respond to the line or feature characteristics of the faces, instead of the affective meaning that was suggested by the facial expressions. This impairment was somewhat overcome either by adding verbal cues which created an affective set, or by making feature detection irrelevant to the recognition process. It was shown that if the tendency to detect features is defeated, senile people can extract emotional meaning from facial stimuli. The data suggested that the mechanism underlying facial-affect agnosia is an impairment in the associative connections between the visual impression of facial expression and affective meaning.

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)

Asunto(s)