Using facial muscular movements to understand young children's emotion regulation and concurrent neural activation

Abstract

Individual differences in young children's frustration responses set the stage for myriad developmental outcomes and represent an area of intense empirical interest. Emotion regulation is hypothesized to comprise the interplay of complex behaviors, such as facial expressions, and activation of concurrent underlying neural systems. At present, however, the literature has mostly examined children's observed emotion regulation behaviors and assumed underlying brain activation through separate investigations, resulting in theoretical gaps in our understanding of how children regulate emotion in vivo. Our goal was to elucidate links between young children's emotion regulation-related neural activation, facial muscular movements, and parent-rated temperamental emotion regulation. Sixty-five children (age 3-7) completed a frustration-inducing computer task while lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) activation and concurrent facial expressions were recorded. Negative facial expressions with eye constriction were inversely associated with both parent-rated temperamental emotion regulation and concurrent LPFC activation. Moreover, we found evidence that positive expressions with eye constriction during frustration may be associated with stronger LPFC activation. Results suggest a correspondence between facial expressions and LPFC activation that may explicate how children regulate emotion in real time.

Figure 1

Examples of negative expressions with (A) and without (B) eye constriction (highlighted in yellow), and positive expressions with (C) and without (D) eye constriction.

Figure 2

Depiction of a Frustration Emotion Task for Children (FETCH) frustration block. Individual trials and emotion rating shown in gray bars, and average hemodynamic activation with standard error shown in red. Hemodynamic activation depicted represents the average of channels that reached significance in the subject-level models. The duration of all trials comprised the FACS coding window and Fetch Lose regressor.

Figure 3

Source-detector pairs comprising the fNIRS probe superimposed on a 3D mesh brain. Red circles denote near infrared sources and blue circles denote near infrared detectors. Lines denote source-detector pairs, or channels, with solid lines indicating significant associations between oxygenated-hemoglobin levels during frustration and frequency of facial expressions during frustration, controlling for child age. Line color denotes the strength and direction of effects.

Figure 4

Scatterplot showing the between-subjects association between the percentage subjects displayed negative (top) and positive (bottom) expressions with eye constriction and hemodynamic activation during frustration. Associations reflect reweighting following autoregressive whitening.