Objective: Emotion recognition is an important aspect of emotion processing, which is needed for appropriate social behavior and normal socialization. Previous studies in adults with antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy, in those convicted of criminal behavior, or in children with conduct disorder show impairments in negative emotion recognition. The present study investigated affective facial and prosody recognition in a sample of children at high risk of developing future criminal behavior. Methods: Participants were 8- to 12-year-old children at high risk of developing criminal behavior (N=219, 83.1% boys) and typically developing controls (N=43, 72.1% boys). The high-risk children were recruited through an ongoing early intervention project of the city of Amsterdam, that focuses on the underage siblings or children of delinquents, and those failing to attend school. Facial and vocal recognition of happy, sad, angry, and fear was measured with the Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) test and the prosody test of the Amsterdam Neuropsychological Tasks (ANT), respectively. Results: The high-risk group was significantly worse in facial affect recognition and had particular problems with fear and sadness recognition. No hostile attribution bias was found. The high-risk group did not differ from controls in affective prosody recognition but needed significantly more time to recognize emotions. Conclusions: The emotion-specific deficits found in forensic and clinical populations are already present in a sample of children at high risk of developing future criminal behavior. These findings help us understand a possible underlying mechanism of antisocial behavior that could provide directions for tailored interventions. (JINS, 2019, 25, 57–64)

The ability to integrate information from different sensory channels is a vital process that serves to facilitate perceptual decoding in times of unimodal ambiguity. Despite its relevance to psychosocial functioning, multimodal integration of emotional information across facial and prosodic modes has not been addressed in bipolar disorder (BD). In light of this paucity of research we investigated multimodal processing in a BD cohort using a focused attention paradigm. Fifty BD patients and 52 healthy controls completed a task assessing the cross-modal influence of emotional prosody on facial emotion recognition across congruent and incongruent facial and prosodic conditions, where attention was directed to the facial channel. There were no differences in multi-modal integration between groups at the level of accuracy, but differences were evident at the level of response time; emotional prosody biased facial recognition latencies in the control group only, where a fourfold increase in response times was evident between congruent and incongruent conditions relative to patients. The results of this study indicate that the automatic process of integrating multimodal information from facial and prosodic sensory channels is delayed in BD. Given that interpersonal communication usually occurs in real time, these results have implications for social functioning in the disorder. (JINS, 2014, 20, 1–9)

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the ability to perceive facial and vocal affect in a group of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and to explore the specific emotions that might be troublesome for them. Participants were 25 patients with OCD and 25 healthy controls, matched for age, education, and gender. They were assessed with computerized tests of affect perception using visual faces [Kinney’s Affect Matching Test (KAMT)], visual everyday scenarios [Fantie’s Cartoon Test (FCT)], and prosody [Affective Prosody Test (APT)], as well as a facial recognition test [Kinney’s Identity Matching Test (KIMT)]. Severity of OCD symptoms in the patient group was measured with the Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. Patients with OCD were not impaired in the perception of emotion, in either the visual [still photographs (KAMT) or sketches of everyday scenarios (FCT)] or the vocal (APT) modality, as compared with age-, sex-, and education-matched healthy individuals. Moreover, patients with OCD did not differ from healthy individuals in discriminating facial identity (KIMT). With regard to each emotion type separately, patients performed equally well as healthy individuals in all the emotions examined. Emotion processing of both facial expressions and prosody does not appear to be deficient in patients with OCD (JINS, 2009, 15, 148–153).