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Karen Hoang

Karen

PhD Student

Email: karen.hoang@qmul.ac.uk

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Project Title: Development of affective functioning in adolescents and its relationship to mental health

Summary: Humans have the incredible ability to identify emotions through faces to gather information about the mental state of others and to understand what they might be thinking or feeling. Analysing and interpreting facial expressions enables social interactions and allows a person to respond appropriately to situations. In common psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety individuals fail to interpret emotional facial expressions which may hinder their ability to socialise (Demenescu et al., 2010). This is particularly important in adolescents a period where psychiatric disorders emerge as young people undergo developmental, behavioural, cognitive and biological changes (Steinberg, 2005; Kessler et al., 2013; Copeland et al., 2015).

Although it is unclear what exactly makes these individuals especially vulnerable during this period. Studying this period of heightened sensitivity will allow us to observe differences in visual perception and behavioural responses which may reflect atypical processing. Exploring the developmental trajectory of facial emotion recognition across adolescents may provide insights into the mechanisms of affective functioning.

In this project will use a genetic algorithm (GA) tool in a psychophysical task which requires subjects to create a facial expression for a given emotion. Through selecting preferred faces that they believe corresponds to four emotions portraying happy, sad, anger and fear. The GA task can explore large, multidimensional space of expressions and encoding facial recognition of emotion. There is potential to sample a dataset of expression space which will allow us to analyse multiple domains that reflect variation in perception. This method of quantifying individual variation may provide insight into typical and atypical processing. 

Adolescents can be thought of as a sensitive period for the reorganisation of neural processes which encode the interaction of emotion and behaviour. Although it is difficult to draw conclusions from current literature in adolescent emotion recognition as there are conflicting methods and inconsistencies in sampling. We will address how developmental changes in emotion recognition impacts the emergence of social cognition and perhaps gain insights to why individuals are vulnerable to mental health disorder and the underlying mechanisms.

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