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Facial Emotion Recognition Facial emotion recognition (FER) is the ability to identify an emotion based solely on an individuals’ facial expressions, not including their body language or speech. The ability to do this plays an integral part to human social interaction as it is often used as an indicator of how to respond to situation. Emotions are expressed on a humans’ face through the movement of facial muscles and individuals’ eyes; these expressions are then processed by different areas of the brain. There are a variety of factors that can influence an individuals’ accuracy when it comes to facial emotion recognition.

Neurological Basis
Facial emotion recognition holds a neurological basis as the emotion that an individual recognises from a face is determined by how their brain processes the face presented to them. In terms of processing the emotions displayed on a face, several studies have found evidence that the right hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere via the use of neuroimaging techniques. There is evidence that suggests both hemispheres are involved in emotional processing but that each hemisphere is specialised to processing different emotions; positive emotions in the left hemisphere and negative emotions in the right hemisphere. A study by Gur et al. (2002) found evidence that when discriminating emotions, limbic regions including the amygdala, hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus and minimally the cingulate gyrus, were responsive. There were also responses shown from the fusiform gyrus, thalamus, inferior cortex, and the occipital region – non limbic areas- when completing the emotion discrimination task. When comparing the limbic to non-limbic regions responses, the limbic regions showed a greater response and there was a greater response in the right hemisphere. The amygdala is an area of the brain that has been identified as playing a key role in the recognition and processing of emotions. Through a task on emotion identification using fMRI, it was found that when matching angry or scared expressions there was increased bilateral activity of the amygdala. When damage to the amygdala is present, when recognising and processing emotions, fear is the emotion that is most effected. Thus, indicating that the amygdala plays more of a role in processing and recognising fear than other emotions.

Age
Research has found that there is a difference in facial emotion recognition when considering the factor of age. It has been proposed that the development of the capability to process configural properties plays a role in the recognition of facial emotions. Meaning that the position of features in relation other features, detailed spatial information and features of a unique composition are thought to underly the recognition of facial emotions. There is conflicting evidence over what age configural processing can be utilised from. Carey and Diamond (1977) proposed that it is only from the age of 10 that children start to use configural processing, however, Brace and colleagues’ (2001) present evidence that implies configural processing can be used from as young as 5 years old. Typically developing children can accurately verbally label most basic emotions by the age of 4. Between the ages of 6-16 years, the ability to recognise the facial emotions of sadness and anger do not improve in accuracy indicating that at an early age, children are near adult competency levels at recognising these facial emotions. The reason for the early accuracy in recognising these facial emotions has been attributed to the evolutionary need to recognise when we are in danger as soon as possible, because the emotions of happiness and surprise were all found to improve over the period of 6-16 years. Studies have shown that younger adults are significantly better at recognising facial emotion, particularly the emotions of anger, sadness and fear than older adults. However, studies have also shown that the factor of age in facial emotion recognition it limited to very low intensity expressions, there was no significant difference with high intensity expressions, indicating that older adults aren’t as proficient in recognising more subtle emotional facial expressions as younger adults.

Other
Women have been found to be better at recognising less intense facial emotions then men. Individuals with Bipolar Disorder have less accuracy than healthy counterparts when recognising the facial emotions of anger disgust and neutrality. Deaf children were found to have a delay in recognising the emotions of disgust, surprise and fear compared to hearing children, but not in the emotions of sadness, happiness and anger. Individuals with Parkinson’s disease have been found to have deficits in recognising emotional facial expressions compared to healthy counterparts.

Schizophrenia
Those with schizophrenia have been found to recognise facial emotions differently in comparison to typically developed controls. Individuals with schizophrenia have been found to be less accurate when recognising facial emotions compared to typically developed individuals, but their accuracy in recognising facial emotions did increase when the facial expressions were at the extreme level compared to the mild level Kohler et al., 2003). However, this increase in accuracy was less than the increase the typically developed controls experienced. Impairment in facial emotion recognition in schizophrenics has been found to be emotion specific, particularly to sadness, surprise, disgust, and anger. The volume of the amygdala in both brain hemispheres was reduced in schizophrenics compared to typically developed individuals (Namiki, et al. 2007). Schizophrenic individuals have been found to have less activation of or failure to recruit, limbic regions when discriminating between facial emotions compared to typically developed individuals (Phillips et al., 1999, Gur et al., 2002b). Individuals with schizophrenia were found to have abnormalities in several temporal lobe regions - fusiform, superior temporal, middle temporal, amygdala, and hippocampus - when compared to healthy controls. When volumes of these regions were measured and compared to healthy individuals, schizophrenic individuals had less volume of the left fusiform grey matter, middle temporal, and hippocampus (Goghari, et al. 2010). There was a relationship found between reduced temporal lobe grey matter and poor facial emotion recognition in schizophrenic individuals.

Autism Spectrum Disorder
Facial emotion recognition studies that focus on individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have found conflicting results.

Children and Adolescents
One study found that in children aged between 5-7 years, those who were diagnosed with autism performed worse in an emotion recognition test compared to typically developed children. However, the same study found that when the experiment was repeated with three other age groups (8-12, 13-17 and adults) those with autism performed similar to the controls in all of the age groups. Another study conducted on children required them to identify the odd expression, in this task the children with autism performed significantly worse than the children without autism. Rosset et al. (2008) found no difference in children with ASD and TD children in the accuracy of facial emotion recognition, when there was a mix of high and low functioning ASD children that were matched with TD children based on IQ. Overall, the evidence is mixed in terms of the facial emotion recognition ability of children with ASD.

Adults
Adult males with ASD performed worse in an emotion recognition task when compared to typically developed adult males, but only in recognising the basic negative emotions. It has also been found that individuals with ASD perform more poorly than their typically developing counterparts at recognising the emotion of anger. Contradicting these findings, researchers have also found evidence that those with ASD don’t perform any worse than typically developed individuals in the recognition of basic facial emotions. Impairments in recognising facial emotions in adults with ASD have been attributed to co-occurring alexithymia by multiple researchers. A meta-analysis that was performed on a large pool of studies that focus on facial emotion recognition in those with ASD presented the finding that overall, those with ASD do have impairments in facial emotion recognition.