Understanding individual differences in facial emotion perception and their association with psychiatric risk indicators

我们用面部表情来表达我们的情感，但人们对这些表情的反应有很大的差异。在最严重的情况下，未能对情绪表达做出适当反应与许多临床状况有关。例如，高度焦虑的人经常报告说，其他人认为中性的表达对他们来说是威胁。重要的是，这些表情对某些人来说看起来不同的原因仍然未知。如果没有这些知识，就很难为患有焦虑或其他疾病的人开发有针对性的有效疗法。该项目的目的是了解为什么有些人无法正确地回应或识别特定的情绪表达，以及这与精神病风险指标的关系。我们最近创建了一个独特的工具包，使我们能够衡量不同人的情感表达。我们将使用我们的工具包，让个人创建他们与特定情绪相关联的面部表情。这些个性化的情绪表达将使我们能够理解情绪表达感知的个体差异的基础，以及它们如何与精神病风险指标相关联。我们将使用标准的、预先验证的任务来确定这些进化的表达是否改善了当前的临床和临床前的“情绪处理”测试。这项工作的结果将是一个更好的理解如何解释情绪表达在典型和非典型人群，新的工具，更好地表征个人的精神疾病的风险，因此，更精确的诊断和治疗这些疾病的潜力。

We use facial expressions to communicate our emotions but there are large differences in how people react to these expressions. At its most severe, failures to respond appropriately to emotional expressions are associated with many clinical conditions. For example, people with high anxiety often report that what other people perceive as neutral expressions appear threatening to them. Critically, the reason why these expressions look different to certain individuals remains unknown. Without this knowledge, it is very difficult to develop targeted and effective therapies for people suffering, for example, from anxiety or other disorders. The aim of this project is to understand why some people are unable to correctly respond to, or identify, particular emotional expressions, and how this relates to indicators of psychiatric risk. We have recently created a unique toolkit that allows us to measure how emotional expressions look to different people. We will use our toolkit to allow individuals to create the facial expressions that they associate with particular emotions. These individualised emotional expressions will allow us to understand the basis of individual differences in emotional expression perception and how they are associated with psychiatric risk indicators. We will establish if these evolved expressions improve current clinical and pre-clinical tests of "emotional processing" using standard, pre-validated tasks. The result of this work will be an improved understanding of how emotional expressions are interpreted in typical and atypical populations, new tools for better characterization of individuals at risk of psychiatric disorders, and therefore the potential for more precise diagnosis and treatment of these disorders.