Discrepancies in perceived humanness between spatially filtered and unfiltered faces and their associations with uncanny feelings.

Human and artificial features that coexist in certain types of human-like robots create a discrepancy in perceived humanness and evoke uncanny feelings in human observers. However, whether this perceptual mismatch in humanness occurs for all faces, and whether it is related to the uncanny feelings toward them, is unknown. We investigated this by examining perceived humanness for a variety of natural images of robot and human faces with different spatial frequency (SF) information: that is, faces with only low SF, middle SF, and high SF information, and intact (spatially unfiltered) faces. Uncanny feelings elicited by these faces were also measured. The results showed perceptual mismatches that LSF, MSF, and HSF faces were perceived as more human than intact faces. This was particularly true for intact robot faces that looked slightly human, which tended to evoke strong uncanny feelings. Importantly, the mismatch in perceived humanness between the intact and spatially filtered faces was positively correlated with uncanny feelings toward intact faces. Given that the human visual system performs SF analysis when processing faces, the perceptual mismatches observed in this study likely occur in real life for all faces, and as such might be a ubiquitous source of uncanny feelings in real-life situations.

Affinity-based high-resolution analysis of DNA binding by VASCULAR-RELATED NAC-DOMAIN7 via fluorescence correlation spectroscopy.

VASCULAR-RELATED NAC-DOMAIN7 (VND7) is the master transcription factor for vessel element differentiation in Arabidopsis thaliana. To identify the cis-acting sequence(s) bound by VND7, we employed fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) to find VND7-DNA interactions quantitatively. This identified an 18-bp sequence from the promoter of XYLEM CYSTEINE PEPTIDASE1 (XCP1), a direct target of VND7. A quantitative assay for binding affinity between VND7 and the 18-bp sequence revealed the core nucleotides contributing to specific binding between VND7 and the 18-bp sequence. Moreover, by combining the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) technique with known consensus sequences, we defined a motif termed the Ideal Core Structure for binding by VND7 (ICSV). We also used FCS to search for VND7 binding sequences in the promoter regions of other direct targets. Taking these data together, we proposed that VND7 preferentially binds to the ICSV sequence. Additionally, we found that substitutions among the core nucleotides affected transcriptional regulation by VND7 in vivo, indicating that the core nucleotides contribute to vessel-element-specific gene expression. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that FCS is a powerful tool for unveiling the DNA-binding properties of transcription factors.

Generalized tendency to make extreme trait judgements from faces.

People differ in their tendency to infer others' personalities and abilities from their faces. An extreme form of such face-based trait inference (FBTI) is problematic because of its unwarranted impact on real-world decision making. Evolutionary perspectives on FBTI suggest that its inter-individual variation would be trait-specific: e.g. those who make extreme face-based inferences about trustworthiness may not necessarily do so about dominance. However, there are several psychological variables that can increase the FBTI extremity across traits. Here, we show that there is a generalized individual tendency to make extreme FBTI across traits, in support of the latter view. We found that the degrees of extremity of face-based inferences about seven traits had high cross-trait correlations, constituting a general factor. This generalized FBTI extremity had good test-retest reliability and was neither an artefact of extreme nor socially desirable response biases. Moreover, it was positively associated with facial emotion recognition ability and tendencies to believe physiognomy and endorse stereotypes. Our results demonstrate that there are individuals who have a temporally stable disposition to draw extreme conclusions about various traits of others from facial appearance as well as their psychological characteristics.

Do individual differences in face recognition ability moderate the other ethnicity effect?

Individuals are better at recognizing faces from their own ethnic group compared with other ethnicity faces-the other-ethnicity effect (OEE). This finding is said to reflect differences in experience and familiarity to faces from other ethnicities relative to faces corresponding with the viewers' ethnicity. However, own-ethnicity face recognition performance ranges considerably within a population, from very poor to extremely good. In addition, within-population recognition performance on other-ethnicity faces can also vary considerably with some individuals being classed as "other ethnicity face blind" (Wan et al., 2017). Despite evidence for considerable variation in performance within population for faces of both types, it is currently unclear whether the magnitude of the OEE changes as a function of this variability. By recruiting large-scale multinational samples, we investigated the size of the OEE across the full range of own and other ethnicity face performance while considering measures of social contact. We find that the magnitude of the OEE is remarkably consistent across all levels of within-population own- and other-ethnicity face recognition ability, and this pattern was unaffected by social contact measures. These findings suggest that the OEE is a persistent feature of face recognition performance, with consequences for models built around very poor, and very good face recognizers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Reduced neural selectivity increases fMRI adaptation with age during face discrimination.

Ventral-visual activity in older adults has been characterized by dedifferentiation, or reduced distinctiveness, of responses to different categories of visual stimuli such as faces and houses, that typically elicit highly specialized responses in the fusiform and parahippocampal brain regions respectively in young adults (Park et al., 2004). In the present study, we demonstrate that age-related neural dedifferentiation applies to within-category stimuli (different types of faces) as well, such that older adults process less distinctive representations for individual faces than young adults. We performed a functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation experiment while young and older participants made same-different judgments to serially presented face-pairs that were Identical, Moderate in similarity through morphing, or Different. As expected, older adults showed adaptation in the fusiform face area (FFA), during the Identical as well as the Moderate conditions relative to the Different condition. Young adults showed adaptation during the Identical condition, but minimal adaptation to the Moderate condition. These results indicate that older adults' FFA treated the morphed faces as Identical faces, reflecting decreased fidelity of neural representation of faces with age.

Age-related differences in the activation of the mentalizing- and reward-related brain regions during the learning of others' true trustworthiness.

Behavioral studies suggest that older adults may be less adept than younger adults at remembering information contradicting their first impressions about others' trustworthiness. To identify the neural bases associated with such age-related differences, we measured the brain activity of older and younger participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they processed feedback on whether their initial trustworthiness impressions of stimulus persons, whose true trustworthiness had been predetermined, were right or wrong. Of special interest was the activation in mentalizing- (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex) and reward-related brain regions (e.g., striatum), which are known to be involved in impression formation and feedback learning, respectively. The reduction in the striatal responses to impression-contradicting versus impression-confirming feedback was greater in older than in younger participants. The activation of some mentalizing-related regions (medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus) was lower in older than younger participants; however, it was not modulated by impression-feedback congruency. The results suggest that age-related differences in the striatum engagement may underlie older adults' inefficiency in learning impression-incongruent information about others' trustworthiness.

Persistent Reliance on Facial Appearance Among Older Adults When Judging Someone's Trustworthiness.

Objectives: When judging someone's trustworthiness, facial appearance is a salient but nondiagnostic cue. Such judgments should ideally be based on the memory of that person's past behaviors during social interaction. Aging may impair memory-based decision making, predicting an age-related decline in individuals' adjustment of trustworthiness judgment using such behavioral information. However, aging may also facilitate the use of diagnostic information for social inference, predicting an age-related improvement. I tested these competing predictions to obtain insight into the effects of aging on fraud victimization. Method: Thirty-six older adults (OAs) and 36 younger adults (YAs) played four rounds of a trust game wherein they were the truster and had to learn the distinction between "good" and "bad" trustees who always cooperated with and cheated participants, respectively. The trustee's facial appearance (trustworthy- and untrustworthy looking) and character (good and bad) were manipulated orthogonally. Results: A memory test of the trustees' characters revealed that even after four rounds of the game, OAs, but not YAs, were biased to guess that trustworthy-looking persons were good trustees. Discussion: Persistent reliance on facial trustworthiness could increase one's risk of repeated fraud victimization among OAs, because fraudulent people can pretend to look trustworthy to acquire another's trust.

East Asian Young and Older Adult Perceptions of Emotional Faces From an Age- and Sex-Fair East Asian Facial Expression Database.

There is increasing interest in clarifying how different face emotion expressions are perceived by people from different cultures, of different ages and sex. However, scant availability of well-controlled emotional face stimuli from non-Western populations limit the evaluation of cultural differences in face emotion perception and how this might be modulated by age and sex differences. We present a database of East Asian face expression stimuli, enacted by young and older, male and female, Taiwanese using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Combined with a prior database, this present database consists of 90 identities with happy, sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, surprised and neutral expressions amounting to 628 photographs. Twenty young and 24 older East Asian raters scored the photographs for intensities of multiple-dimensions of emotions and induced affect. Multivariate analyses characterized the dimensionality of perceived emotions and quantified effects of age and sex. We also applied commercial software to extract computer-based metrics of emotions in photographs. Taiwanese raters perceived happy faces as one category, sad, angry, and disgusted expressions as one category, and fearful and surprised expressions as one category. Younger females were more sensitive to face emotions than younger males. Whereas, older males showed reduced face emotion sensitivity, older female sensitivity was similar or accentuated relative to young females. Commercial software dissociated six emotions according to the FACS demonstrating that defining visual features were present. Our findings show that East Asians perceive a different dimensionality of emotions than Western-based definitions in face recognition software, regardless of age and sex. Critically, stimuli with detailed cultural norms are indispensable in interpreting neural and behavioral responses involving human facial expression processing. To this end, we add to the tools, which are available upon request, for conducting such research.

Identification of 5'-untranslated regions that function as effective translational enhancers in monocotyledonous plant cells using a novel method of genome-wide analysis.

High expression of a transgene is often necessary to produce useful substances in plants. The efficiency of mRNA translation is an important determinant of the level of transgene expression. In dicotyledonous plants, the 5'UTR of certain mRNAs act as translational enhancers, dramatically improving transgene expression levels. On the other hand, translation enhancers derived from dicotyledonous plants are not so much effective in monocotyledonous plants, which are important as industrial crops and as hosts for production of useful substances. In this study, we evaluated the polysome association on a large scale with high resolution for each 5'UTR variant from multiple transcription start site in normal and heat-stressed Oryza sativa suspension cultures. Translational enhancer candidates were selected from the resultant large-scale data set, and their enhancer activities were evaluated by transient expression assay. In this manner, we obtained several translational enhancers with significantly higher activities than previously reported enhancers. Their activities were confirmed in a different monocotyledonous plant, Secale cereale, and using a different reporter gene. In addition, enhancer activities of tested 5'UTRs were different between monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, suggesting that the enhancer activities were not compatible between them. Overall, we demonstrate these useful 5'UTRs as enhancer sequence for transgene expression in monocotyledonous plants.

Disgust-specific impairment of facial expression recognition in Parkinson's disease.

There is contradictory evidence regarding whether the impairments of the recognition of emotional facial expressions in Parkinson's disease are specific to certain emotions such as disgust and fear. Generally, neurological case reports on emotion-specific impairments have been suspected of being confounded with the factor of task difficulty. Using a refined assessment method in which the difficulty factors were controlled by means of mixed facial expressions and item response theory, we attempted to clarify whether Parkinson's disease disproportionately impaired the recognition of specific emotions. We studied 14 patients with Parkinson's disease and 39 healthy controls who were matched in terms of gender, age, years of education and intelligence quotient. Whereas the refined method revealed that the patients with Parkinson's disease displayed significantly lower scores in disgust recognition alone, conventional methods failed to detect this impairment. In addition, control measures including face recognition abilities did not statistically explain the impairment observed in the patients. The results indicate that Parkinson's disease can indeed selectively impair the recognition of facial expressions of disgust; this provides concrete evidence for emotion-specific impairments that sufficiently withstands criticisms regarding the difficulty artefacts. Furthermore, the results support the proposed role of the basal ganglia-insula system in disgust recognition. This study effectively demonstrates the benefits of refining neuropsychological assessment by taking advantage of the modern psychometric theory.

Decline or improvement? Age-related differences in facial expression recognition.

We examined age-related differences in facial expression recognition in association with potentially interfering variables such as general cognitive ability (verbal and visuospatial abilities), face recognition ability, and the experiences of positive and negative emotions. Participants comprised 34 older (aged 62-81 years) and 34 younger (aged 18-25 years) healthy Japanese adults. The results showed not only age-related decline in sadness recognition but also age-related improvement in disgust recognition. Among other variables, visuospatial ability was moderately related to facial expression recognition in general, and the experience of negative emotions was related to sadness recognition. Consequently, age-related decline in sadness recognition was statistically explained by age-related decrease in the experience of negative emotions. On the other hand, age-related improvement in disgust recognition was not explained by the interfering variables, and it reflected a higher tendency in the younger participants to mistake disgust for anger. Possible mechanisms are discussed in terms of neurobiological and socio-environmental factors.

Measuring individual differences in sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.

The assessment of individual differences in facial expression recognition is normally required to address two major issues: (1) high agreement level (ceiling effect) and (2) differential difficulty levels across emotions. We propose a new assessment method designed to quantify individual differences in the recognition of the six basic emotions, 'sensitivities to basic emotions in faces.' We attempted to address the two major assessment issues by using morphing techniques and item response theory (IRT). We used morphing to create intermediate, mixed facial expression stimuli with various levels of recognition difficulty. Applying IRT enabled us to estimate the individual latent trait levels underlying the recognition of respective emotions (sensitivity scores), unbiased by stimulus properties that constitute difficulty. In a series of two experiments we demonstrated that the sensitivity scores successfully addressed the two major assessment issues and their concomitant individual variability. Intriguingly, correlational analyses of the sensitivity scores to different emotions produced orthogonality between happy and non-happy emotion recognition. To our knowledge, this is the first report of the independence of happiness recognition, unaffected by stimulus difficulty.

Is the genetic structure of human personality universal? A cross-cultural twin study from North America, Europe, and Asia.

This study examined whether universality of the 5-factor model (FFM) of personality operationalized by the Revised NEO Personality Inventory is due to genetic influences that are invariant across diverse nations. Factor analyses were conducted on matrices of phenotypic, genetic, and environmental correlations estimated in a sample of 1,209 monozygotic and 701 dizygotic twin pairs from Canada, Germany, and Japan. Five genetic and environmental factors were extracted for each sample. High congruence coefficients were observed when phenotypic, genetic, and environmental factors were compared in each sample as well as when each factor was compared across samples. These results suggest that the FFM has a solid biological basis and may represent a common heritage of the human species.

Involvement of the Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Learning Others' Bad Reputations and Indelible Distrust.

A bad reputation can persistently affect judgments of an individual even when it turns out to be invalid and ought to be disregarded. Such indelible distrust may reflect that the negative evaluation elicited by a bad reputation transfers to a person. Consequently, the person him/herself may come to activate this negative evaluation irrespective of the accuracy of the reputation. If this theoretical model is correct, an evaluation-related brain region will be activated when witnessing a person whose bad reputation one has learned about, regardless of whether the reputation is deemed valid or not. Here, we tested this neural hypothesis with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants memorized faces paired with either a good or a bad reputation. Next, they viewed the faces alone and inferred whether each person was likely to cooperate, first while retrieving the reputations, and then while trying to disregard them as false. A region of the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), which may be involved in negative evaluation, was activated by faces previously paired with bad reputations, irrespective of whether participants attempted to retrieve or disregard these reputations. Furthermore, participants showing greater activity of the left ventrolateral prefrontal region in response to the faces with bad reputations were more likely to infer that these individuals would not cooperate. Thus, once associated with a bad reputation, a person may elicit evaluation-related brain responses on their own, thereby evoking distrust independently of their reputation.

Application of the somatic marker hypothesis to individual differences in decision making.

The somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1991) is a controversial theory asserting that somatic activities implicitly bias human behavior. In this study, we examined the relationship between choice behaviors in the Iowa Gambling Task and patterns of skin conductance responses (SCRs) within a healthy population. Results showed that low SCRs for appraising the monetary outcome of risky decisions were related to persistence in risky choices. Such adherence to risky decisions was not related to poor explicit knowledge about the task. On the other hand, anticipatory SCRs and the effect of them on performance were not confirmed. Our findings suggest that a variation in covert physiological appraisal underlies individual differences in decision making.

Genetic and environmental structure of Cloninger's temperament and character dimensions.

The multivariate genetic and environmental structure of Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) was investigated in a sample of 617 pairs of adolescent and young adult twins from Japan. Additive genetic factors accounted for 22% to 49% of the variability on all TCI temperament scales. Although the theory predicts lower heritability for the character scales, all character subscales had a substantial genetic contribution, and nonshared environmental influences accounted for the remainder. Multivariate genetic analyses showed that several subscales used to define one dimension shared a common genetic basis with subscales defining others. Using the degree of shared genetic influence as the basis to rearrange the TCI subscales into new dimensions, it was possible to create genetically independent scales. The implications for personality measurement, theory, and molecular genetic research are discussed.

Cognitive aging explains age-related differences in face-based recognition of basic emotions except for anger and disgust.

This study aimed at a detailed understanding of the possible dissociable influences of cognitive aging on the recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions (happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness). The participants were 36 older and 36 young adults. They viewed 96 pictures of facial expressions and were asked to choose one emotion that best described each. Four cognitive tasks measuring the speed of processing and fluid intelligence were also administered, the scores of which were used to compute a composite measure of general cognitive ability. A series of hierarchical regression analyses revealed that age-related deficits in identifying happiness, surprise, fear, and sadness were statistically explained by general cognitive ability, while the differences in anger and disgust were not. This provides clear evidence that age-related cognitive impairment remarkably and differentially affects the recognition of basic emotions, contrary to the common view that cognitive aging has a uniformly minor effect.

Indelible distrust: memory bias toward cheaters revealed as high persistence against extinction.

Our ability to learn about the reputations of others-that is, who is likely to cooperate versus cheat-contributes greatly to cooperativeness in society. There has been recent debate whether humans employ memory bias favoring cheaters (i.e., there is an evolved module for the detection of cheaters) or whether no such bias exists (i.e., reputation learning is flexibly modulated by contextual factors). We report 3 experiments that address this issue by comparing persistence against extinction-which is a reliable measure of prepared fear learning (Öhman & Mineka, 2001)-between memories regarding cheaters and cooperators. In all experiments, participants learned to classify unfamiliar persons as either cooperators or cheaters, and, then, they were instructed to disregard those learned associations and told that they had been determined arbitrarily, which simulated a verbal extinction procedure in the fear conditioning paradigm (Hugdahl & Öhman, 1977). The results indicated that while postlearning changes in perceived trustworthiness were modulated by a contextual factor (appearance of the facial stimulus), the persistence of learning exhibited a cheater advantage: Cheaters remained perceived as untrustworthy to a greater extent than cooperators as trustworthy at the extinction period. Thus, there exists a cheater bias in human reputation learning, the proximate and ultimate mechanisms of which warrant further study.

[Emotional functions of the insula].

This paper reviews theories and research pertaining to emotional functions of the insula--a cortical area that is located deep in the lateral sulcus and has been included in the limbic lobe because of its intimate connections with the cingulate, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex. The insula is known to contain the primary gustatory cortex across mammalian species, and thus, earlier studies have focused on its special role in disgust, which is an emotion closely associated with the sensation of bad taste. In recent years, more emphasis has been placed on the insular contribution to conscious experience of emotion in general. Emotional experience has been known to depend on both the perception of bodily reactions to emotion-provoking objects and the cognitive appraisal of contexts. The insula is theoretically suited for representing such emotional experience because it receives interoceptive inputs from the whole body, and its connections with the prefrontal regions can provide contextual information. In fact, many studies have shown that the activation of the insula, particularly its anterior part, covaries with subjective feelings, which reflect not only physical stimulus intensity but also cognitive factors such as prediction. Such insular activation seems to work as a so-called "as if" somatic marker that inclines us to approach or avoid the stimulus; in addictive disorders, insular activation is proposed to be the neural basis for intense urges. In addition, the insula also represents "simulated" emotional experience, including empathy with others, which may play an important role in social learning. Thus, further investigations into the emotional functions of the insula would help elucidate the still unknown role of conscious experience in regulating cognitive processes and behavior.

Extensive stimulus repetition leads older adults to show delayed functional magnetic resonance imaging adaptation.

We investigated whether extensive repetition can diminish age-related differences between younger and older adults in functional magnetic resonance adaptation (fMR-A). Datasets were obtained from 26 younger and 24 older healthy adults presented with two scenes that repeated 20 times amongst other novel scenes during fMRI scanning. The average cortical responses to the first eight (Repetitions 1-7) and the last eight (Repetitions 12-19) presentations out of 20 were compared within each group. Younger adults showed similar levels of fMR-A in both repetition sets. Conversely, older adults did not show reliable fMR-A in Repetitions 1-7, but they did in Repetitions 12-19; subtracting the latter from the former revealed a significant effect within left inferior occipital, left lingual, and the posterior part of fusiform gyrus. We concluded that cortical responsiveness in older adults are compromised, but extensive repetition can lead older adults to show a delayed but closer level of fMR-A compared to younger adults.