Facial emotion expression recognition by children at familial risk for depression: high‐risk boys are oversensitive to sadness (original) (raw)
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Development and Psychopathology, 2014
A vast body of literature shows that maternal depression has long-term adverse consequences for children. However, only very few studies have documented the effect of maternal depression on children's ability to process emotional expressions and even fewer incorporated measures of observed maternal sensitivity to further tease apart whether it is the symptoms per se or the associated impact via maternal sensitivity that affects children's developing emotion-processing abilities. In a large community sample of Dutch preschoolers (N = 770), we examined independent and mediated effects of maternal depressive symptoms and sensitivity on children's ability to recognize emotional expressions using a nonverbal and a verbal task paradigm. Maternal depressive symptoms predicted less accurate emotion labeling in children, while maternal sensitivity was associated with more accurate emotion matching, especially for sadness and anger. Maternal sensitivity did not mediate the observe...
Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 2011
Attentional biases for negative stimuli have been observed in school-age and adolescent children of depressed mothers and may reflect a vulnerability to depression. The direction of these biases and whether they can be identified in early childhood remains unclear. The current study examined attentional biases in 5-7-year-old children of depressed and non-depressed mothers. Following a mood induction, children participated in a dot-probe task assessing biases for sad and happy faces. There was a significant interaction of group and sex: daughters of depressed mothers attended selectively to sad faces, while children of controls and sons of depressed mothers did not exhibit biases. No effects were found for happy stimuli. These findings suggest that attentional biases are discernible in early childhood and may be vulnerability markers for depression. The results also raise the possibility that sex differences in cognitive biases are evident before the emergence of sex differences in the prevalence of depression.
Facial affect processing and depression susceptibility: Cognitive biases and cognitive neuroscience
Psychological Bulletin, 2011
Facial affect processing is essential to social development and functioning, and is particularly relevant to models of depression. Although cognitive and interpersonal theories have long described different pathways to depression, cognitive-interpersonal and evolutionary social risk models of depression focus on the interrelation of interpersonal experience, cognition, and social behavior. We therefore review the burgeoning depressive facial affect processing literature and examine its potential for integrating disciplines, theories, and research. In particular, we evaluate studies that used information processing or cognitive neuroscience paradigms to assess facial affect processing in depressed and depression-susceptible populations. Most studies have assessed and supported cognitive models. This research suggests that depressed and depression vulnerable groups show abnormal facial affect interpretation, attention, and memory, although findings vary based on depression severity, comorbid anxiety, or length of time faces are viewed.
Emotion identification in girls at high risk for depression
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2010
Background: Children of depressed mothers are themselves at elevated risk for developing a depressive disorder. We have little understanding, however, of the specific factors that contribute to this increased risk. This study investigated whether never-disordered daughters whose mothers have experienced recurrent episodes of depression during their daughters' lifetime differ from never-disordered daughters of never-disordered mothers in their processing of facial expressions of emotion. Method: Following a negative mood induction, daughters completed an emotion identification task in which they watched faces slowly change from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expression. We assessed both the intensity that was required to accurately identify the emotion being expressed and errors in emotion identification. Results: Daughters of depressed mothers required greater intensity than did daughters of control mothers to accurately identify sad facial expressions; they also made significantly more errors identifying angry expressions. Conclusion: Cognitive biases may increase vulnerability for the onset of disorders and should be considered in early intervention and prevention efforts.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2010
Cognitive models of psychopathology posit that the content or focus of information-processing biases (e.g., attentional biases) is disorder specific: Depression is hypothesized to be characterized by attentional biases specifically for depression-relevant stimuli (e.g., sad facial expressions), whereas anxiety should relate particularly to attentional biases to threat-relevant stimuli (e.g., angry faces). However, little research has investigated this specificity hypothesis and none with a sample of youths. The present study examined attentional biases to emotional faces (sad, angry, and happy compared with neutral) in groups of pure depressed, pure anxious, comorbid depressed and anxious, and control youths (ages 9 -17 years; N ϭ 161). Consistent with cognitive models, pure depressed and pure anxious youths exhibited attentional biases specifically to sad and angry faces, respectively, whereas comorbid youths exhibited attentional biases to both facial expressions. In addition, control youths exhibited attentional avoidance of sad faces, and comorbid boys avoided happy faces. Overall, findings suggest that cognitive biases and processing of particular emotional information are specific to pure clinical depression and anxiety, and results inform etiological models of potentially specific processes that are associated with internalizing disorders among youths.
Face-memory and emotion: associations with major depression in children and adolescents
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2004
Background: Studies in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD) document abnormalities in both memory and face-emotion processing. The current study used a novel face-memory task to test the hypothesis that adolescent MDD is associated with a deficit in memory for face-emotions. The study also examines the relationship between parental MDD and memory performance in offspring. Methods: Subjects were 152 offspring (ages 9-19) of adults with either MDD, anxiety disorders, both MDD and anxiety, or no disorder. Parents and offspring were assessed for mental disorders. Collection of face-memory data was blind to offspring and parent diagnosis. A computerized task was developed that required rating of facial photographs depicting 'happy,' 'fearful,' or 'angry' emotions followed by a memory recall test. Recall accuracy was examined as a function of face-emotion type. Results: Age and gender independently predicted memory, with better recall in older and female subjects. Controlling for age and gender, offspring with a history of MDD (n ¼ 19) demonstrated significant deficits in memory selectively for fearful faces, but not happy or angry faces. Parental MDD was not associated with face-memory accuracy. Discussion: This study found an association between MDD in childhood or adolescence and perturbed encoding of fearful faces. MDD in young individuals may predispose to subtle anomalies in a neural circuit encompassing the amygdala, a brain region implicated in the processing of fearful facial expressions. These findings suggest that brain imaging studies using similar face-emotion paradigms should test whether deficits in processing of fearful faces relate to amygdala dysfunction in children and adolescents with MDD.
Facial emotion discrimination: II. Behavioral findings in depression
Psychiatry Research, 1992
The facial discrimination tasks described in part I (Erwin et al., 1992) were administered to a sample of 14 patients with depression and 14 normal controls matched for sex (12 women, 2 men) and balanced for age and sociodemographic characteristics. Patients performed more poorly on measures of sensitivity for happy discrimination and specificity for sad discrimination, and had a higher negative bias across tasks. Severity of negative affect was correlated with poorer performance for patients. The results suggest that depression is associated with an impaired ability to recognize facial displays of emotion.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
Processing of emotional facial expressions is of great importance in interpersonal relationships. Aberrant engagement with facial expressions, particularly an engagement with sad faces, loss of engagement with happy faces, and enhanced memory of sadness has been found in depression. Since most studies used adult faces, we here examined if such biases also occur in processing of infant faces in those with depression or depressive symptoms. In study 1, we recruited 25 inpatient women with major depression and 25 matched controls. In study 2, we extracted a sample of expecting parents from the NorBaby study, where 29 reported elevated levels of depressive symptoms, and 29 were matched controls. In both studies, we assessed attentional bias with a dot-probe task using happy, sad and neutral infant faces, and facial memory bias with a recognition task using happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprised, disgusted and neutral infant and adult faces. Participants also completed the Ruminative Respo...