Emotional Facial Expression Decoding in Personality Disorders
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The moderating roles of motivation and attention on emotional facial expression decoding in psychopathy
IRAS ID
191671
Contact name
Hedwig Eisenbarth
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Southampton
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 5 months, 30 days
Research summary
Highly psychopathic individuals seem to have trouble with decoding emotion from other people's facial expressions. However, the findings related to emotional facial expression decoding seem to vary across studies, showing higher rates of wrong categorizations for afraid or sad or disgusted facial expressions respectively. These differences cannot sufficiently be explained by methodological variance. Given findings on the moderating role of attention and motivation on emotional reactivity in general, it might rather be attentional and motivational aspects, which moderate the emotion decoding capacities. Investigating the underlying processes of emotional facial expression decoding will not only help us understand the emotion-processing deficit but more importantly provide the basis for intervention strategies, directed either more towards attention direction or change of motivation.
From studies on investigating emotion regulation capacities and neurofeedback interventions we know that highly psychopathic individuals can use the limbic areas in the brain associated with fast emotion processing and can increase activity in those areas if asked to. Thus we assume that the motivation to decode might be crucial for task performance. Furthermore, differences in emotional reactions have been found to vary based on if participants primary attention is dedicated to the emotional stimulus or to a distractor. Thus, the main aim on this project is to test two hypotheses regarding variance in facial expression decoding: 1) We want to compare different types of motivations in the context of emotional facial expression decoding in order to investigate if fast and slow processes of emotion decoding are affected by motivational state. 2) We want to compare two conditions of emotional facial expression decoding, one where the emotional content of the face is task-relevant and one where the emotional content of the face is task-irrelevant. During both tasks we will record eye-movements to investigate attentional aspects by tracking the gaze.REC name
South Central - Oxford A Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/SC/0168
Date of REC Opinion
1 Jun 2016
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion