Figure 1
Group comparisons of facial affect recognition performance. As shown in the two graphs at the top, CDIs recognized significantly fewer facial expressions depicting fear (a) and anger (b) compared with their non-drug-using healthy peers. To identify the neural correlates of fear and anger recognition impairments in the cocaine group, we used PLS analysis to identify gray matter networks that co-vary with participants’ recognition performance of fearful and angry faces, respectively. PLS determines covariance between brain voxels and recognition accuracy across the entire brain and computes from the summary of all the voxels of the network for each participant a brain score, which indicates how well the identified network reflects behavioral performance. The two graphs at the bottom show that CDIs’ brain scores for both fear (c) and anger (d) were significantly lower compared with those of their healthy peers, indicating that CDIs ability to recognize fearful and angry faces is less well explained by the identified gray matter networks. CDI, cocaine-dependent individual; PLS, partial least squares method.
