My Research

As I mentioned in my previous post, my research is primarily concerned with testing an emotion recognition training task, a behavioural intervention designed to alter negative cognitive biases affecting the perception of neutral or ambiguous facial expressions. I am especially interested in discovering whether completing this task results in improved mood.

The task works by altering the negative perceptual bias by shifting the perception of neutral or ambiguous faces from negative to more positive. This works as follows: participants are shown a set of 15 faces ranging from Happy to Sad along a continuum, where faces at either end of the continuum are clearly happy or sad and faces closer to the middle of the continuum are more ambiguous. The task consists of three parts. During the first part, participants are shown these faces and asked to determine whether the face is happy or sad by making a keyboard response. Once this part is complete, the task determines where the participant's "balance point" is, the threshold where they start to identify the faces as sad rather than happy. The second, and longest, part of the task manipulates this balance point using feedback. In this part of the task participants receive a message stating "Correct!" or "Incorrect! That face was happy/sad!" after each response. Here, the task shifts the balance point by two images. Therefore, the two images closest to the individual's balance point that they previously classified as sad is now classified as happy by the program. Using feedback, the task attempts to shift's the individual's balance point so they perceive more of the faces in the continuum as happy rather than sad. We can discover whether the training has worked in the final part of the task. In this part, like in the first part, participants are simply presented the images and asked to identify them as happy or sad. By comparing an individual's balance point in the first and last part of the task, we can determine whether training has successfully occurred or not.

Sample of faces from the continuum demonstrating the balance point shift

Thus far my research has primarily focused on the potential application of this task with people suffering from depression, whose perceptual bias causes these individuals to tend to perceive neutral or ambiguous faces as sad. Testing individuals suffering from low mood as an analogue group for depression using fMRI, we recently discovered that completing the emotion recognition training task over a week resulted in increased neural activation to positive faces compared to control participants. That means that people who completed the training task over a week showed more brain activity when presented happy faces than people who completed a version of the task that did not shift their balance point. This is an exciting finding as such an effect is similar to that of an antidepressant medication, while participants in our study simply completed a behavioural task. This is exciting evidence that emotion recognition training indeed has an effect on the perceptions of emotions and hopefully could one day be used alongside traditional treatment to help those who suffer from depression.

Research in my PhD includes assessing individual differences in emotion recognition in the general population as well as the continued development and refinement of the emotion recognition training task. My interest in emotions definitely goes beyond my research and I am always interested in the very special role they play in human interactions. After all, experiencing and conveying emotions are part of the very thing that makes us human!