A transdiagnostic approach to emotion recognition in children: Behavioural and neural markers

Gezer, Ozge 2024. A transdiagnostic approach to emotion recognition in children: Behavioural and neural markers. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates how body context influences facial expression recognition in children with emotional, cognitive, and/or behavioural difficulties, and examines the neural markers supporting emotion recognition in these children. Recent research has suggested that facial expression recognition ability drives the influence of body posture on facial expression judgments, however it is unclear whether similar principles govern the integration of body context and facial expression in children with facial expression recognition difficulties. Additionally, it is unclear what common underlying structural and functional brain mechanisms are linked to emotion recognition abilities regardless of children’s wider behavioural profile. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated that typically developing children aged 4 to 10 years exhibit an association between proficiency in recognising isolated facial expressions and a bias towards body expressions in making facial expression judgments, parallel to prior studies. Chapter 4 extended this investigation to a transdiagnostic sub-clinical sample of children with emotional, cognitive, and/or behavioural difficulties, showing that they too, exhibit this pattern of integration despite their difficulties in recognising isolated facial expressions. Chapter 5 explores the neural markers of emotion processing among these at-risk children, identifying a gray matter covariance network linked to facial expression recognition ability in regions such as the middle temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and middle frontal gyrus, which are associated with social cognition and emotion processing. Chapter 6 examines brain activation synchrony in response to an emotional movie, finding that at-risk children with lower negative facial expression recognition abilities have higher synchrony in inferior parietal and frontal regions, whereas those with higher abilities show greater synchrony in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Overall, this thesis contributes to the understanding of facial and body expression integration among typically developing and at-risk children, and identifies potential neural markers linked to their emotion processing abilities that transcend diagnostic profiles. This thesis highlights the benefits of adopting transdiagnostic, dimensional approaches to improve our understanding of emotion recognition abilities.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Psychology
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 November 2024
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2024 11:16
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/173603

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