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Background: Childhood maltreatment profoundly influences social and emotional development, increasing psychiatric risk. Alterations in the implicit processing of threatrelated cues following early abuse and neglect represent a marker of mental health vulnerability. Less is known about how early adversity influences the perception of positive social cues, despite their central role in establishing and maintaining social interactions and their association with better mental health outcomes. Methods: The sample consisted of 42 children and adolescents with substantiated childhood maltreatment experiences and 32 peers (mean age 13.3), matched on age, pubertal status, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and cognitive ability. A computerised experimental task assessed the perceived emotional intensity of positive (happy) and negative (fearful) facial expressions. Mental health symptoms were measured via self- and parental reports, and perceived social support was self-reported. Results: The experience of abuse and neglect was associated with heightened perceived intensity of positive facial cues. Cross-sectional post-hoc moderation and mediation analyses, employing a model-building approach, revealed that in maltreatment-exposed participants: (i) their increased response to positive facial cues was associated with lower symptoms; (ii) the presence of social support accounted for their heightened perceived intensity of positive facial cues; (iii) the presence of social support putatively contributed to lower symptoms by increasing the perceived intensity of positive facial cues. No group differences in perceived intensity of negative expressions were observed. Conclusions: These findings provide fresh insight into how positive faces are processed following maltreatment experience in childhood. Maltreatment experience was found to be associated with heightened perceived intensity of happy faces, which in turn was associated with better mental health and greater levels of social support. This suggests that heightened saliency of positive emotions acts protectively in children with maltreatment experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El propósito del presente estudio fue evaluar un grupo de pacientes con Trauma Craneoencefálico (TCE) en una tarea de reconocimiento emocional. Para ello, se examinó el rol de la intensidad emocional en el desempeño y se compararon las puntuaciones de los pacientes con TCE con las del grupo control. Tras realizar una prueba piloto con individuos sanos, se procedió a presentar 42 imágenes, categorizadas por emoción (alegría, asco, ira, miedo, sorpresa, tristeza y neutralidad) e intensidad emocional (alta, media, baja), a un grupo de 10 pacientes con antecedentes de trauma craneoencefálico (TCE). Al hacer la comparación, se identificaron diferencias estadísticamente significativas en el número de aciertos por parte del grupo de pacientes en la tarea de reconocimiento emocional (p

Differences between men and women in the recognition of emotions could be due to the greater sensitivity of women to the subtle signals of emotional facial expressions. The objective of this research was to analyze gender differences in the assessment of changes in the emotional intensity of facial expressions of happiness and sadness. The sample comprised 222 participants (77.5% women) aged between 18 and 30 years. Ambiguous facial expressions were presented with different percentages of happiness and sadness (high ambiguity: 50% -50%; medium ambiguity: 25% -75%; low ambiguity: 0% -100%). The participants rated the degree to which an ambiguous expression reflected greater emotional intensity (happiness or sadness) than a neutral expression. Under conditions of medium ambiguity (25% sadness - 75% happiness), greater emotional intensity in expressions of happiness was perceived by women than men. Also under medium ambiguity, women perceived greater affective intensity in expressions of happiness (25% sadness - 75% happiness) than in expressions of sadness (75% sadness - 25% happiness). The results are discussed from the perspective of social role theory, and their implications are analyzed within the complex social context in which human beings interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cognitive correlates of affect intensity, together with the relationships between this variable and socio-demographic and outcome variables such as, respectively, age and anxiety remain understudied. This work analyzes age differences in affect intensity and in two types of cognitive coping strategies in threatening situations: vigilance and distraction. Also, the relationship between this two variables and their association with the level of anxiety is explored. Fifty five younger and 51 older subjects (aged 60 and more) participated in the study. The results revealed significant age differences in the assessed variables, as well as differential interrelationships between them in the 2 age groups. Also, affect intensity and cognitive coping appear to be more related to anxiety in the older subjects group. The relevance of age in the analysis of the relationships between psychological construct is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]