Intro
Evolution has evolved our brains into complex machines capable of computing the most intricate mathematical equations that compose our universe. Yet this highly functioning and introspective device is often subject to disease and injury. Prosopagnosia, or the inability to process facial recognition data, commonly known as “face blindness,” is a complex and highly involved disorder that pertains to multiple bilateral regions of the brain. Correctly identifying facial emotion is imperative for the survival of any sentient being and we continually strive to understand how and why some brains are unable to engage this simple mechanism. This research paper looks at prosopagnosia and its effects on processing facial emotion. It will cover the complexities of this disorder, as well as reviewing other neural abnormalities to illustrate how each part of the brain helps or hinders the processing of input data.
Background on the Brain
Facial perception is processed in three main areas in the occipitotemporal visual extrastriate cortex. Included in this region are the inferior occipital gyri, lateral fusiform gyrus, and the superior temporal sulcus. The lateral fusiform gyrus is involved more with the formation and ideas we associate with identity. The superior temporal sulcus processes changes in the face, such as the position of the mouth to indicate a smile or wrinkling of the forehead to indicate frustration. Researchers pose that the location of the inferior occipital gyri suggests that it provides data to both the lateral fusiform and superior temporal sulcal areas (Haxby & Hoffman 2000). So far, these mechanisms in the brain seem obvious with processing facial recognition input data, but a few other mechanisms that provide cruc...
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...gether in forming a single thought or cohesive image, we also begin to see how the damaged or inoperable regions of the brain affect a persons perception of emotions. In 1999 during a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, M. Streit found that judging emotion from expression elicited a stronger response than simple face detection first in posterior superior temporal cortex and later elicited a response in the right amygdala, providing a direct demonstration of interaction between these regions in the perception of emotions in faces. Patients with face blindness who see a look of fear in another’s face have areas of their amygdala respond, showing that although they are unable to recognize the face they are looking at, they are still able to perceive emotion. These findings continue to illustrate the point that each other of the brain works together to form the idea we
The first section explores the “flat-brain theory of emotions, flat-brain syndrome, and flat-brain tango” (Petersen, 2007, pp. 2-45). All three are interrelated (Petersen, 2007). The flat-brain theory of emotions “demonstrates what’s occurring inside of us when things are going well, and how that changes when they are not” (Petersen, 2007, p. 11). Petersen’s (2007) theory “explains how our emotions, thinking, and relating abilities work and how what goes on inside us comes out in the ways we communicate and act” (p. 8). The “flat-brain syndrome” describes what happens when an individual wears their emotions on their sleeve. This “makes it
Matsumoto, K., Shibata, S., Seiji, S., Mori, C., & Shioe, K. (2010, June). Factors influencing the processing of visual information from non-verbal communications. Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences , 64 (3), pp. 299-308.
Research in this field found preferential differences in an adult when their eye gaze is directed towards an object, as opposed to faces with eye gaze averted from an object, in neonates (Farroni, Csibra, Simion, & Johnson, 2002). Reid and Striano (2005) examined 4-month-old infants looking at adult faces with their eye gaze directed towards an object and averted away from an object. It was found that infants looked substantially shorter at the object that was cued by the eye gaze. They concluded that the cued object was familiar compared with the uncued object which was seen as novel and therefore attracted more attention. Reid, Striano, Kaufman, and Johnson (2004) expanded upon previous research and investigated neural activity using event related potentials to measure an infants’ reaction to direct and averted eye gaze. A positive slow wave measure was adopted and it was found that the amplitude was larger for the averted eye gaze condition compared against the direct eye gaze condition. This increase indicated that the averted eye gaze was seen as novel compared to the direct eye gaze, substantiating what had been found in previous research.
Vasopressin has long been implicated in the memory of faces and is thus useful for research on recall and recognition of faces. Because of the role vasopressin plays in relationships, it is important to consider its value in affecting romantic relationships and perception of romantic partner's faces. In a study by Thompson and colleagues (2004) researchers looked at how vasopressin administration affects responses to happy, angry and neutral faces in terms of attention, and arousal and physiological measures like corrugator supercilii electromyograms (EMG), heart rate and skin conductance (Thompson, Gupta, Miller, Mills, & Orr, 2004). This was based on previous experiments with the effect of oxytocin on facial perception. Neutral faces were found to elicit higher responses in the EMG. They argued that because the faces were ambiguous having been taken from Paul Ekman's series of faces, vasopressin may have lead participants to view those neutral faces in a more aggressive way causing that increased EMG response. This study demonstrates that there is a link between vasopressin and facial recognition responses and further studies have added on to this. In a follow up study in 2006, they looked at vasopressin effects on perception of friendliness for both men and women on pictures of same sex faces. They found that the results of vasopressin depended on the gender as women were friendlier when presented with same sex faces (Thompson, George, Walton, Orr, & Benson, 2006). Interestingly, they did not repeat the study to see the effect of vasopressin between both sexes seeing opposite sex pictures. In men, however, the familiarity of the romantic partner when combined with insecurity would decrease the per...
Gamer, M., Schmitz, A. K., Tittgemeyer, M., & Schilbach, L. (2013). The human amygdala drives reflexive orienting towards facial features. Current Biology, 23(20), R917-R918. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.09.008
The eye is an extremely diverse organ, ranging in complexity across and within animal phyla. Here, a comparative approach is taken to outlining the diversity of the eye forms within vertebrates and invertebrates. The eye morphology of a variety of organisms was examined. Eye function, and placement on the body was also considered. Here, variation in eye form is discussed in relation to the environment the organism is adapted to. It is shown that an organisms eye morphology functions optimally for the ecological niche it occupies. Evolutionary analysis is used to account for the emergence of the different eyes. Convergent evolution is used to justify the similarities in eye types seen in organisms of different species. This analysis begins with the simplest of eye forms composes of single cells, present in the zooplankton larvae. Such primitive forms are identified in mollucs, annelids, cnidarians, and are then compared to more advanced eye forms contain lenses. This comparative approach provides a breadth of examples of vertebrates and invertebrates, making visible, the diversity of eye morphology within the animal kingdom.
Visual agnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize familiar objects (Farah, 1990). Object recognition is the ability to place an object in a category of meaning. Most cases of visual agnosia are brought about through cerebral vascular accidents or traumatic brain injury typically inhibiting sufficient amounts of oxygen from reaching vital body tissues (Zoltan, 1996). There are a vast array of impaired abilities and deficits associated with individuals diagnosed with visual agnosia. These impairments vary considerably from individual to individual (Farah, 1990). Some patients cannot recognize pictures of things such as trees and birds, despite being able to describe such objects or recognize them through other senses such as sound and touch. Other patients demonstrate an inability to recognize faces of friends and family members (Goodale, 1995). The functional impairments experienced as a r...
...atic without autonomic responses to familiar faces: differential components of covert face recognition in a case of Capgras delusion. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry 5, 255–269.
In Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence,” he dives into the science behind the brain and how emotions can affect a person’s decision making process. The human brain consists of two main parts: the neocortex, or the thinking brain, and the amygdala, the emotional brain. The neocortex is the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thoughts. “It contains the centers that put together and comprehend what the senses perceive” (Goleman 11). Contrasting the neocortex is the amygdala, which “acts as a storehouse of emotional memory; life without the amygdala is a life stripped of personal meanings” (Goleman 15). According to Goleman, one man, whose amygdala was surgically removed, became completely uninterested in people, preferring to sit in isolation with no human contact. “Without an amygdala he seemed to have lost all recognition of feeling, as well as any feeling about feelings” (Goleman 15). The amygdala has its own circuitry attaching it to the pre-frontal cortex, which is the center for the brain for working memory. If this circuitry was cut, a person’s decision making process would be greatly affected. However, if this connection was broken, a person’s score on an IQ test would not be affected at all. This is true because the emotional aspect of the brain, which is used in making decisions, would be affected but the rational thinking portion would not be affected. The amygdala
One famous pioneer in this area is Ekman (1973 in Shiraev & Levy, 2007, 2004) who classified six basic facial expressions as being universal and reflecting most emotional states. They are happy, sad, anger, disgust, surprised and fearful. Ekman (1973) proposed that the universality of emotions allows individuals to empathise with others and enables us to read other’s feelings therefore emotions must serve an adaptive purpose hence supporting the claim that they are universal (Darwin, 1972 in John, Ype, Poortinga, Marshall & Pierre 2002). Moreover, emotions are widely accepted to accompany...
Many scientists have argued vehemently against mirror neurons both in their existence and their role in humans and monkeys. For example, an Oxford researcher argues that the mirror neuron system is not an evolutionary adaptation for action-understanding, but a byproduct of social interaction (Heyes, 2009). A neurophilosopher, Patricia Churchland, expresses concern over the role of the function of mirror neurons. She explains that intentions are more than individual neuron recordings. Intentions, she argues, are at a much more complex level of neural activity (Churchland, 2011). Taking into account the many doubts associated with the mirror neuron system, the importance of mirror neurons should not be overestimated and caution should be used. At the same, the mirror neuron research related to empathy, understanding intentions, and autism should not be overlooked.
Fox, E. Russo, R. Georgiou, G. . (2005). Anxiety Modulates the Degree of Attentive Resources Required to Process Emotional Faces. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. 5 (4), p396-404.
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory
The amygdala is responsible for the perception of the emotions of fear, sadness, aggression, and anger. This brain structure stores memories of events and the emotions affiliated to them, so the person can recognize a similar event in the future. An example of this is, a person is burnt by a hot stove top, the next time around a hot stove they will be more fearful of the pain and be cautious next time. The amygdala can also process emotions of arousal and pleasure (The Amygdala, N.d).
One scientist, Damasio, provided an explanation how emotions can be felt in humans biologically. Damasio suggested, “Various brain structures map both the organism and external objects to create what he calls a second order representation. This mapping of the organism and the object most likely occurs in the thalamus and cingulate cortices. A sense of self in the act of knowing is created, and the individual knows “to whom this is happening.” The “seer” and the “seen,” the “thought” and the “thinker” are one in the same.” By mapping the brain scientists can have a better understandi...