A recent study published in Scientific Reports studied the association between childhood trauma and emotion recognition.

Their results showed that childhood trauma alone was significantly associated with emotion recognition accuracy when exploring stimuli intensity, modality, and emotion.

Furthermore, when researchers controlled for psychopathy and alexithymia, childhood trauma was significant only when exploring the emotion portrayed.

The Importance of Emotion Recognition

IMPROVE YOUR EMOTION RECOGNITION ABILITY

Emotion recognition refers to the ability of humans to identify emotional states and is crucial in daily interactions and relationships. Expressing emotions forms the core of social interactions, facilitating appropriate responses in social situations.

Research has suggested that individuals who have better emotion recognition skills have better social adjustment, better school performance, and even better workplace success across a wide range of industries and job types.

Past research also suggests that experiences of childhood trauma such as neglect or abuse are one factor that has been associated with poorer emotion recognition skills. However, the breadth of these effects and their relationship with individual differences remain unclear.

What is Alexithymia?

According to Psychology Today, alexithymia, also known as emotional blindness, is a personality feature in which a person has difficulty experiencing, identifying, understanding, and expressing their emotions.

This can be influenced by several factors including genetics, past experiences, and certain medical conditions.

Current research suggests that about 50% of people with autism have alexithymia, compared to 10-13% of the general population. Men tend to experience alexithymia more than women.

Definition of Childhood Trauma

The researchers defined childhood trauma as exposure to actual or threatening behavior, serious injury, or sexual violence, and encompasses both neglect and abuse.

Childhood trauma has been associated with heightened emotional reactivity, low emotional awareness, and difficulties in regulating emotions. Childhood trauma is also associated with differences in recognizing others’ emotions; however, these are not uniform.

Studying Childhood Trauma and Emotion Recognition

In their study entitled “The association between childhood trauma and emotion recognition is reduced or eliminated when controlling for alexithymia and psychopathy traits”, Cooper, H., Jennings, B.J., Kumari, V. et al explored the effects of childhood trauma on emotion recognition ability.

122 participants over the age of 18 were recruited from an online site and an undergraduate course. Variables of individual differences were childhood trauma, psychopathy, and alexithymia.

Participants completed the following questionnaires:

• 28-item childhood trauma questionnaire short-form (CTQ-SF), a widely used retrospective screening tool for childhood maltreatment in adults.
• 29-item self-reported psychopathy scale short-form (SRP-SF), used to measure psychopathic traits
• 20-item Toronto alexithymia questionnaire (TAS-20) that measures difficulty in identifying and describing emotions

Total scores from these questionnaires were standardized and used for analyses.

For emotional tasks, stimuli were selected from a database containing clips of actors expressing six of the seven basic emotions (happy, angry, sad, surprise, disgust, and fear) and a neutral condition across three modalities (audiovisual, face, and voice).

Emotional stimuli were presented at normal or strong intensity. A silent video of actors expressing a neutral or emotional expression was presented in the face modality.

Participants listened to an audio clip in the voice condition, while in the audiovisual condition, a clip with both video and audio was presented. They specified the emotion expressed in the clips.

The experiment was run online in four blocks

1. Personality questionnaire
2. TAS-20 and face task
3. SRP-SF and voice task
4. CTQ-SF and audiovisual task

The effect of childhood trauma alone on emotion recognition ability was examined using generalized mixed models and additionally controlled for psychopathy and alexithymia.

Study Results

In the model with childhood trauma and modality as fixed factors, there was a significant main effect of childhood trauma and modality. However, the effect size was small. The team found that higher childhood trauma was associated with poorer emotion recognition ability.

Accuracy was significantly better for audiovisual emotions than vocal and facial emotions. Interestingly, when controlling for psychopathy and alexithymia, childhood trauma was no longer significant.

The accuracy was significantly different between fear and neutral expressions; expressions of fear had significantly poorer accuracy. Notably, childhood trauma remained significant after controlling for psychopathy and alexithymia, with a significant main effect of emotion portrayed.

No significant interaction was observed between childhood trauma and the emotion portrayed, suggesting no variations in the effect of trauma across emotions.

Study Conclusion

The authors suggest in their paper that the relationship between childhood trauma and emotion recognition accuracy, when exploring intensity, may be significantly influenced by other related factors – in this case alexithymia.

This further enhances our understanding of the relationship between childhood trauma and emotion deficits.

In addition, childhood trauma alone had a significant association with emotion recognition ability when exploring modality, emotion portrayed, and intensity. More experience of childhood trauma was associated with poorer accuracy.

The authors emphasize in their conclusions that when controlling for alexithymia and psychopathy, childhood trauma only had a significant association with poorer accuracy when exploring emotion portrayed. This illustrates the importance of including and controlling for interrelated individual differences.

It may suggest that present theories involving childhood trauma and emotion deficits may need to account for factors such as higher levels of alexithymia and psychopathy traits in the groups being studied.

References

Cooper, H., Jennings, B.J., Kumari, V. et al. The association between childhood trauma and emotion recognition is reduced or eliminated when controlling for alexithymia and psychopathy traits. Sci Rep 14, 3413 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-53421-5

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Recent research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association suggests that repeated bouts of anger could have the potential to increase your risk of cardiovascular health.

The study entitled “Translational research of the acute effects of negative emotions on vascular endothelial health: finding from a randomized controlled study” was published in May of 2024 and led by Dr. Daichi Shimbo, a Cardiologist and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Shimbo and his team examined the acute effects of provoked anger, and secondarily, anxiety and sadness on endothelial cell health, which is an overall indicator of vascular health.

Heart Study Methodology and Results

The study included 280 healthy adult participants who were randomized to an 8‐minute anger recall task, a depressed mood recall task, an anxiety recall task, or an emotionally neutral condition.

Following the session, researchers used a combination of serological markers to assess endothelial cell health.

Additionally, they tested for reactive hyperemia, or how quickly blood vessels are able to expand and facilitate blood flow after an occlusion.

Researchers found that anger negatively affected endothelial cell health by impairing the blood vessels’ ability to dilate, restricting blood flow.

This impaired state persisted up to forty minutes after the recall exercise, before returning to baseline. These findings were not identified for the other emotional states.

“Our data suggest that maybe the mechanisms that explain anxiety and sadness in heart disease risk are different than those that explain anger. So it tells us: be careful about lumping different negative emotions in the same bucket,” said Shimbo.

Anger and Heart Attack Risk

This is not the first study to suggest that the emotion of anger could affect your health.

A study published in The European Heart Journal Acute Cardiovascular Care suggests that having an episode of intense anger was associated with an 8.5 times greater risk of having a heart attack during the following 2 hours.

The study looked at 313 people who were being treated in a hospital for a heart attack. The men and women were asked to fill out a questionnaire about the level of anger they experienced in the last 48 hours based on a number scale from 1-7.

Level 1 was being “calm” and level 7 was “enraged, out of control, throwing objects and hurting yourself or others”. For study purposes, the threshold of acute anger was defined by level 5 – “very angry, body tense, maybe fists clenched, ready to burst”.

An anger level greater than 5 was reported among seven of the people in the study in the two hours prior to their heart attack, and up to four hours prior for one person.

An anger level of 4 was reported among two people within the the two hours before heart attack symptoms, and among four hours before for three people.

According to the researchers, the results come to a 8.5-fold increase in relative risk of a heart attack in the two hours following severe anger. People who reported high levels of anxiety, also had a higher risk.

Another Perspective on Understanding Anger

When we think about potentially destructive emotions, we often think about anger. And for good reason.

Anger is probably the most common emotion that we have that leads to feelings of regret later. Dr. Matsumoto doesn’t believe anger is inherently a “bad” emotion; getting angry can result in some good in our lives and in society. Anger, and all other basic emotions, exist for a reason.

In our evolutionary history, being angry (and disgusted and afraid and sad, etc.) was functional for us. That is, anger, as all other basic emotions, helped us deal with problems in our lives and in our environments in order to survive.

In our evolutionary past, emotions like anger were important in order to deal with many life struggles. All our emotions allowed us to handle incredibly difficult events that required us to think with minimal conscious awareness.

Emotions have helped us deal with birth, death, finding food, fighting for mates and resources, and everything else required for living for eons.

Anger, and all other emotions, have helped us deal with all these problems of living. Put another way, if we didn’t have anger (and the other emotions), we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

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Humintell Director David Matsumoto recently appeared on the Social-Engineer Podcast: The Doctor Is In Series – where they discuss understandings and developments in the field of psychology.

In their latest episode, Social Engineer CEO Chris Hadnagy and Director of Education Dr. Abbie Marono interview Dr. Matsumoto on the topics of emotion and nonverbal communication.

The Origins of Human Emotion

They began the podcast by speaking about the origins of human emotion where he addressed claims that facial expressions of emotion are not innate or universal in nature.

Dr. Matsumoto points out that the thought that emotions are not innate and entirely constructed is actually a minority thought or concept within the field itself, although it gets a lot of traction.

Matsumoto’s Olympic Study

They discuss Dr. Matsumoto’s famous Olympic Judo Study entitled Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion of Congenitally and Noncongenitally Blind Individuals.

This study was conducted at the 2004 Athens Olympic and Paralympic Games where photographs were taken during medal matches in the judo competition.

From these images, Dr. Matsumoto and his team were able to study the first reactions of these judo athletes when they won or lost a medal match.

The results of this study of 84 athletes from 34 countries, showed that winners were immediately smiling. Losers generally showed sadness or disgust or anger. Importantly, there were no cultural differences in these reactions.

Additional images were taken of Paralympic athletes, many of them who were congenitally blind from birth. Researchers compared the images of the sighted and non-sighted athletes and found an amazing amount of similarity between them.

This research (and many others like it) suggests that the capacity to have emotions and facial expressions of emotion is biologically innate.

Behavioral Indicators of Mal-Intent

The conversation then shifted to discussing behavioral indicators of malicious intent.

Dr. Matsumoto emphasizes that much of his research and work has focused on immediate threats and is relevant for those who work at security checkpoints or in harm’s way. He delved into some of the research he’s conducted and their results.

A Writer’s Obligation

They discuss the anonymity and human factors that affect behavior as well as Dr. Matsumoto’s 7th Edition of his book Culture and Psychology.

He emphasizes that he now wants to focus his energy and knowledge on helping others.

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