Aim: To identify the 3-month incidence of chronic postsurgical pain and long-term opioid use in patients at the Toronto General Hospital. Methods: 200 consecutive patients presenting for elective major surgery completed standardized questionnaires by telephone at 3 months after surgery. Results: 51 patients reported a preoperative chronic pain condition, with 12 taking opioids preoperatively. 3 months after surgery 35% of patients reported having surgical site pain and 13.5% continued to use opioids for postsurgical pain relief. Postoperative opioid use was associated with interference with walking and work, and lower mood. Conclusion: Chronic postsurgical pain and ongoing opioid use are concerns that warrant the implementation of a Transitional Pain Service to modify the pain trajectories and enable effective opioid weaning following major surgery.

Infants’ visual processing of emotion undergoes significant development across the first year of life, yet our knowledge regarding the mechanisms underlying these advances is limited. Additionally, infant emotion processing is commonly examined using static faces, which do not accurately depict real-world emotional displays. The goal of this study was to characterize 7-month-olds’ visual scanning strategies when passively viewing dynamic emotional expressions to examine whether infants modify their scanning patterns depending on the emotion. Eye-tracking measures revealed differential attention towards the critical features (eyes, mouth) of expressions. The eyes captured the greatest attention for angry and neutral faces, and the mouth captured the greatest attention for happy faces. A time-course analysis further elucidated at what point during the trial differential scanning patterns emerged. The current results suggest that 7-month-olds are sensitive to the critical features of emotional expressions and scan them differently depending on the emotion. The scanning patterns presented in this study may serve as a link to understanding how infants begin to differentiate between expressions in the context of emotion recognition.

Emotion recognition is important for social interaction and communication, yet previous research has identified a cross-cultural emotion recognition deficit: Recognition is less accurate for emotions expressed by individuals from a cultural group different than one’s own. The current study examined whether social categorization based on race, in the absence of cultural differences, influences emotion recognition in a diverse context. South Asian and White Canadians in the Greater Toronto Area completed an emotion recognition task that required them to identify the seven basic emotional expressions when posed by members of the same two groups, allowing us to tease apart the contributions of culture and social group membership. Contrary to our hypothesis, there was no mutual in-group advantage in emotion recognition: Participants were not more accurate at recognizing emotions posed by their respective racial in-groups. Both groups were more accurate at recognizing expressions when posed by South Asian faces, and White participants were more accurate overall compared to South Asian participants. These results suggest that in a diverse environment, categorization based on race alone does not lead to the creation of social out-groups in a way that negatively impacts emotion recognition.