Sensitivity to posed and genuine facial expressions of emotion in severe depression (original) (raw)
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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.
How do depressed and healthy adults interpret nuanced facial expressions?
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2010
This study investigates the discrimination accuracy of emotional stimuli in subjects with major depression compared with healthy controls using photographs of facial expressions of varying emotional intensities. The sample included 88 unmedicated male and female subjects, aged 18-56 years, with major depressive disorder (n = 44) or no psychiatric illness (n = 44), who judged the emotion of 200 facial pictures displaying an expression between 10% (90% neutral) and 80% (nuanced) emotion. Stimuli were presented in 10% increments to generate a range of intensities, each presented for a 500-ms duration. Compared with healthy volunteers, depressed subjects showed very good recognition accuracy for sad faces but impaired recognition accuracy for other emotions (e.g., harsh, surprise, and sad expressions) of subtle emotional intensity. Recognition accuracy improved for both groups as a function of increased intensity on all emotions. Finally, as depressive symptoms increased, recognition accuracy increased for sad faces, but decreased for surprised faces. Moreover, depressed subjects showed an impaired ability to accurately identify subtle facial expressions, indicating that depressive symptoms influence accuracy of emotional recognition.
Processing of facial emotion expression in major depression: a review
Australian and New …, 2010
Processing of facial expressions of emotion is central to human interaction, and has important effects on behaviour and affective state. A range of methods and paradigms have been used to investigate various aspects of abnormal processing of facial expressions in major depression, including emotion specifi c defi cits in recognition accuracy, response biases and attentional biases. The aim of this review is to examine and interpret data from studies of facial emotion processing in major depression, in the context of current knowledge about the neural correlates of facial expression processing of primary emotions. The review also discusses the methodologies used to examine facial expression processing. Studies of facial emotion processing and facial emotion recognition were identifi ed up to December 2009 utilizing MEDLINE and Web of Science.
[Associations between symptom severity and emotion recognition in depressed patients]
Psychiatria Hungarica : A Magyar Pszichiátriai Társaság tudományos folyóirata, 2009
In this study we tried to explore whether there are any associations between symptom severity and emotional facial expression recognition. Based on the literature and our earlier findings, we believe that the impairments of overall (not emotion specific) facial expression recognition is associated with a more general, non-specific psychiatric distress. Thus, first it was hypothesized that overall facial expression recognition would be correlated negatively with SCL-90 global severity index (GSI). Our second hypothesis was that the severity of the impairment in facial expression recognition would be correlated with symptom severity measured by the BECK Depression Inventory (BDI). One hundred and six depressed subjects participated in the study. We used a 'Virtual Human' for presenting the 35 emotional and neutral facial expressions. Subjects filled in the BDI and SCL-90 questionnaires after the facial expression recognition task. Significant negative association was found bet...
State-dependent alteration in face emotion recognition in depression
The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2011
Background Negative biases in emotional processing are well recognised in people who are currently depressed but are less well described in those with a history of depression, where such biases may contribute to vulnerability to relapse. Aims To compare accuracy, discrimination and bias in face emotion recognition in those with current and remitted depression. Method The sample comprised a control group (n = 101), a currently depressed group (n = 30) and a remitted depression group (n = 99). Participants provided valid data after receiving a computerised face emotion recognition task following standardised assessment of diagnosis and mood symptoms. Results In the control group women were more accurate in recognising emotions than men owing to greater discrimination. Among participants with depression, those in remission correctly identified more emotions than controls owing to increased response bias, whereas those currently depressed recognised fewer emotions owing to decreased dis...
Depression biases the recognition of emotionally neutral faces
Psychiatry Research, 2004
Functional abnormalities in emotion-related brain systems have been implicated in depression, and depressed patients may therefore attribute emotional valence to stimuli that are normally interpreted as emotionally neutral. The present study examined this hypothesis by comparing recognition of different facial expressions in patients with moderate to severe depression. Eighteen depressed patients and 18 matched healthy controls made a forced-choice response to briefly presented neutral, happy, and sad faces. Recognition accuracy and response time were measured. Twelve patients were retested after showing signs of symptom remission. Depressed patients and controls were equally accurate at recognizing happy and sad faces. Controls also recognized neutral faces as accurately as happy and sad faces, but depressed patients recognized neutral faces less accurately than either happy or sad faces. Depressed patients were also particularly slow to recognize neutral faces. The impairment in processing of neutral faces was still evident after symptom remission. Error analyses showed that depressed patients attributed not only sadness, but also happiness (in remission), to neutral faces. These results suggest that, unlike healthy subjects, depression-prone individuals do not seem to perceive neutral faces as unambiguous signals of emotional neutrality.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2006
The present study was designed to examine the operation of depression-specific biases in the identification or labeling of facial expression of emotions. Participants diagnosed with major depression and social phobia and control participants were presented with faces that expressed increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expression. The authors assessed individual differences in the intensity of facial expression of emotion that was required for the participants to accurately identify the emotion being expressed. The depressed participants required significantly greater intensity of emotion than did the social phobic and the control participants to correctly identify happy expressions and less intensity to identify sad than angry expressions. In contrast, social phobic participants needed less intensity to correctly identify the angry expressions than did the depressed and control participants and less intensity to identify angry than sad expressions. Implications of these results for interpersonal functioning in depression and social phobia are discussed.
Biases in processing of mood-congruent facial expressions in depression
Psychiatry Research, 2019
Cognitive models of depression suggest that depressed individuals exhibit a tendency to attribute negative meaning to neutral stimuli, and enhanced processing of mood-congruent stimuli. However, evidence thus far has been inconsistent. In this study, we sought to identify both differential interpretation of neutral information and emotion processing biases associated with depression. Fifty adult participants completed standardized mood-related questionnaires, a novel immediate mood scale questionnaire (IMS-12), and a novel task, Emotion Matcher, in which participants were required to indicate whether pairs of emotional faces show the same expression or not. We found that overall success rate and reaction time did not differ as a function of level of depression. However, more depressed participants had significantly worse performance when presented with sad-neutral pairs, as well as increased reaction times to happy-happy pairs. In addition, accuracy of the sad-neutral pairs was found to be significantly associated with depression severity in a regression model. Our study provides partial support to the mood-congruent *
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2009
A forced-choice intensity judgment task was used to investigate biases in the processing of subtle expressions of emotion in participants with major depressive disorder (MDD). Participants were presented with 2 pictures of the same actor side by side, either depicting a neutral and a subtle emotional expression or depicting a subtle positive and a subtle negative expression. Participants were asked to indicate which of the 2 pictures showed the stronger emotion. Compared with participants with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and with never-disordered controls (CTLs), participants with MDD were less likely to judge subtle happy expressions as more intense than neutral expressions. In addition, compared with the CTL participants, participants who had MDD and participants who had SAD were less likely to judge subtle happy expressions to be more intense than negative expressions. Biases in the judgment of the intensity of subtle expressions of positive affect could play an important role in the interpersonal difficulties that are associated with depression.
Impaired Attribution of Emotion to Facial Expressions in Anxiety and Major Depression
PLoS ONE, 2010
Background: Recognition of others' emotions is an important aspect of interpersonal communication. In major depression, a significant emotion recognition impairment has been reported. It remains unclear whether the ability to recognize emotion from facial expressions is also impaired in anxiety disorders. There is a need to review and integrate the published literature on emotional expression recognition in anxiety disorders and major depression.