Roslyn Markham

Alexithymia: A Right Hemisphere Dysfunction Specific to Recognition of Certain Facial Expressions?

The most prominent features of alexithymic people are a demonstrated reduction in the ability to identify and to describe their own feelings. In recent years, these characteristics have been related to a functional disturbance of the right cerebral hemisphere. This should result in a number of other observable effects. The present study investigated whether high and low alexithymics from a nonclinical population differed in the degree of leftward perceptual bias on chimeric tasks. The chimeras consisted of pictures of faces made of up conjoined emotive and nonemotive halves as well as asymmetrically distributed stars. Differences between high and low alexithymics in the recognition of facial expressions of emotion of whole faces were also examined. High scorers on a test of alexithymia showed overall less leftward perceptual bias than low scores on the chimeric tasks and poorer recognition of facial expressions of whole faces. There was little evidence that the reduced left bias was specific to processing of emotional expressions only, or that differences in processing of facial expressions were emotion specific. These results are argued to support the right hemisphere dysfunction model of alexithymia.

The effect of type of task on children's identification of facial expressions

The performance of children at ages 4, 6, and 8 years was compared on the four types of task most often used in facial expression studies with children. We examined whether the order of mastery of emotions at different ages was constant across tasks, or alternatively, if it was task-specific. The relative difficulty of the tasks was also investigated, with the aim of arranging them into a hierarchy of increasing difficulty. The four tasks used were situation discrimination, matching discrimination, forced choice labeling, and free labeling. Accuracy was found to increase with age, but the interaction between age, type of task, and emotion was not significant. These results suggest that conclusions about the ordering of specific emotions from least to most difficult at different ages is not task dependent. Nevertheless, a significant interaction found between task and emotion suggests that such conclusions should specify which type of task generated the pattern. A hierarchy of difficulty for the tasks was only partially supported. Performance on the first three tasks was very similar but performance on free labeling was significantly poorer.

Stress, cognitive factors, and coping resources as predictors of relapse in alcoholics

One hundred alcohol-dependent individuals attending a detoxification unit were assessed on a variety of psychological, social and demographic variables. Sixty-one participants were contacted at follow-up over 1 year later. Alcohol consumption was assessed through self-report and corroborative information. Self-reported levels of stress and social support were also obtained. High self-efficacy predicted low levels of self reported drinking at follow-up. Negative coping predicted higher levels of drinking as reported by the corroborator. High levels of stress in the month prior to follow-up were related to self-reported poor drinking outcomes, while ongoing social support since treatment was associated with favorable drinking outcomes. Overall, higher levels of self-efficacy during detoxification and social support following treatment were the best predictors of a favourable drinking outcome.

Recognition of Emotion by Chinese and Australian Children

The performance of Chinese children in Beijing and Australian children in Sydney was compared on two types of facial expression task. Children of 4, 6, and 8 years of age were presented situation discrimination and situation inference/labeling tasks with both Chinese and Caucasian faces. Some evidence was obtained for an ethnic bias effect in emotion recognition from facial expressions. There was no indication that children from a collectivist culture are poorer at recognizing certain emotions than children from an individualistic society. Overall accuracy increased with age for children from both cultures, but the Chinese children were significantly more accurate than the Australians at all ages. These results are discussed in terms of the possible effects of different socialization practices, demographic factors, and suitability of the testing procedures for the two cultures.

The effects of anxiety on verbal and spatial task performance

Abstract The hypothesis that under ego-threatening conditions highly anxious subjects will be detrimentally affected in verbal reasoning tasks, but not in spatial reasoning tasks, was investigated....

The Development of a Series of Photographs of Chinese Facial Expressions of Emotion

To create a set of Chinese faces expressing emotions, Chinese adults in Beijing were asked to think about a situation and then to pose the facial expression appropriate to that emotional state. The emotions posed were happiness, surprise, disgust, sadness, fear, and anger. The expressions were photographed and a number of the best examples of each expression were selected. In Experiment 1, raters were given six labels and were required to select the one that best fit each emotional expression. In Experiment 2, another group of raters assessed the photographs on the six labels, using a 7-point scale. Sixty-two photographs fulfilled the criteria of 70% agreement in ratings in Experiment 1 and a rank rating of at least 4 in Experiment 2. This resulted in 9 to 12 reliable examples of each emotional expression, a good set of photographs of expressions, useful to those wishing to study emotion in China and cross-cultural settings.

Development of reality monitoring for performed and imagined actions.

Young children are frequently assumed to be poorer than older children at remembering the sources of their memories, although recent studies have shown that this increased confusion may occur only when they have to distinguish between what they did and what they imagined doing. The present study compares children of 6, 9, and 12 years and shows that, over a wide range of action classes, 6-year-olds have more trouble discriminating between memories for performed and imagined actions than older children both when the child is the actor and the imagined actor and when someone else is the actor and the imagined actor. These results suggest that young children have particular difficulty in distinguishing memory sources whenever the same person is involved in actual and imagined actions.

The accuracy–confidence relationship in an eyewitness task: anxiety as a modifier

SUMMARY The present study investigated the role of anxiety as a moderator of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in an eyewitness recall task. Participants selected as high or low anxious on a test anxiety scale viewed a video clip of a crime. One week later they answered verbally a series of questions about the video, rating their confidence in each answer. Observers were shown a video-recording of each participant’s test session and rated how confident they appeared overall. It was argued that people high in test anxiety would appraise their performance to a greater degree than low-anxious people, resulting in a significant correlation between accuracy and subjective confidence for high-anxious but not for lowanxious participants. The results obtained supported this hypothesis, and found similar relationships between accuracy and perceived confidence. Highly anxious participants expressed less overall confidence in their answers than low anxious participants. & 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Judgements of other people's memory reports : Differences in reports as a function of imagery vividness

People reporting vivid imagery may be expected to describe events differently from those with less vivid imagery. The study reported here examined the relationship between imagery vividness and descriptions of an item that had earlier either been seen or its presence suggested. Additional participant/judges were asked to determine the veracity of these descriptions and provide the basis for reaching their decisions. Results showed that the descriptions, for memories based on external and internal sources, given by vivid imagers differed from nonvivid imagers along a number of dimensions. High imagery people included more sensory details of the critical item that low imagers for both memory source conditions. More mention of cognitive processes were made by low imagers than high in the suggested condition but not in the real. Judgements about the veracity of descriptions based on memories that had different sources were found to be affected by imagery vividness of participants; rationales given for these decisions tended to be consistent with the objective ratings, although additional criteria emerged.

Individual Differences in Anxiety Level and Eyewitness Memory

The present study investigated the relationship between individual differences in anxiety and eyewitness performance. Instructions designed to produce evaluative threat were given to anxious and nonanxious subjects at encoding and/or at retrieval. The performance of those subjects who were given anxiety-arousing instructions at encoding and retrieval and who scored high on the Test Anxiety Scale (TAS; Sarason, 1972) was less accurate on an eyewitness task than was that of the subjects who scored low on the scale. This difference in performance was attributable to improvement in the performance of nonanxious subjects, rather than debilitation in the performance of anxious subjects. Faced with the threat of failure, low-anxious subjects appeared to have the potential for increased effort. High-anxious subjects seemed to perform at or near capacity under all the experimental conditions because of their predisposition for task-irrelevant worry, which limited the possibility of an increase in working memory capacity.