This study was designed to investigate the abilities of individuals with mental retardation to recognize and match emotional facial expressions from a series of photographs depicting various facial expressions.
Previous research has found that infants can distinguish diverse emotional expressions and match emotional faces with their voices (e.g., Field, et al., 1982; Soderstrom, et al., 2015; Soken & Pick, 1999; Walker-Andrews, 1997).
But throughout the writing process the music is changed here and there to match emotional fluctuations within the lyrics as they come.
In the original study by McKenna and Sharma [ 22], in order to eliminate the possibility that the repeating sequences of words (1 7) might be more salient or surprising because of the categorical nature of the emotional stimuli, a neutral semantically-related category word type (transport-related words, i.e., airplane, ferry, bus) was created to match emotional words in word position 1.
Furthermore, when children with autism were shown vignettes depicting other children experiencing various emotions, they reported less emotional empathy (matching emotional states) with the characters depicted in the vignettes (Yirmiya et al., 1992).
We are traveling with matching emotional baggage.
The results indicated that only the bilateral insula, the left putamen and the left thalamus showed greater activation for mismatching than matching emotional displays (Figure 4), while no region of interest showed greater activation for the matching than the mismatching.
The ROI analysis performed on the areas detected in Experiment 1 indicated that the bilateral insula, the left thalamus and the left putamen had a greater response to mismatching than matching emotional displays.
For instance, it has been observed that patients with apathy show deficits in matching emotional responses to social situations [ 51, 52].
Simmons and colleagues observed greater activation in the insula for young adults with high anxiety (nontreatment-seeking) when matching emotional faces (Stein, Simmons, Feinstein, & Paulus, 2007) and during anticipation of a negative image (Simmons, Strigo, Matthews, Paulus, & Stein, 2006).
High levels of anxiety and worry (e.g. in GAD) are characterized by selective attention to threatening cues matching emotional concerns (Mathews & MacLeod, 2005), or internally generated representations, such as bodily sensations, mental images or worrisome thoughts (Hayes, Hirsch, & Mathews, 2010; Krebs, Hirsch, & Mathews, 2010; Mathews, 1990).
