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Face facts: BD patients show impairments in emotion processing

Tamsyn E. Van Rheenen1, 2*, Susan L. Rossell1, 2 and Greg Murray1
  • 1 Swinburne University, Brain and Psychological Sciences Research Centre, Australia
  • 2 Monash University, Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre, Australia

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Patients with Bipolar Disorder (BD) have difficulty in processing emotions but the specificity or generalizability of deficits across emotions is less clear. Moreover, preliminary evidence indicates that BD samples require greater expressive intensity to correctly identify facial emotions yet there has been little examination of where the intensity threshold for interpreting emotional information actually differs from controls (e.g., Lembke and Ketter, 2002;Getz et al., 2003;Guyer et al., 2007;Vederman et al., 2011). To address these limitations we conducted two experiments to examine a) the specificity of emotion labelling impairments and b) facial emotion processing sensitivity in a BD sample.

METHODS: 50 BD patients and 51 healthy controls completed a series of emotion processing tasks assessing emotion perception accuracy for the labeling and discrimination of static and dynamic facial emotions. All patients’ met criteria for a DSM-IV diagnosis of BD, with diagnoses confirmed with the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview.

RESULTS: Results from experiment one indicated a 7.5 – 8.5% reduction in patient’s ability to recognize fear across both static and dynamic tasks. Results from experiment two indicated that patients performed worse than controls on emotion labeling overall, but there was no specific deficit at any given level of intensity other than for the labeling of fear (impaired at both high and medium intensity). The patient group did however show reduced emotion discrimination accuracy; while discrimination at 100% intensity was intact there was a ~5.74% reduction in accurately discriminating emotions at 75% intensity and a strong trend for a ~4.43% reduction in discrimination accuracy at 50% intensity.

CONCLUSIONS: In addition to demonstrating subtle impairments for the discrimination of emotions at lower levels of intensity, BD patients are also impaired in their ability to recognize fear. This is evident across task types and differing stimulus intensity and may be linked to an inappropriate allocation of visual attention and/or reduced use of second order configural information.

References

Getz, G.E., Shear, P.K., and Strakowski, S.M. (2003). Facial affect recognition deficits in bipolar disorder. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 9, 623-632.
Guyer, A.E., Mcclure, E.B., Adler, A.D., Brotman, M.A., Rich, B.A., Kimes, A.S., Pine, D.S., Ernst, M., and Leibenluft, E. (2007). Specificity of facial expression labeling deficits in childhood psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 48, 863-871.
Lembke, A., and Ketter, T.A. (2002). Impaired Recognition of Facial Emotion in Mania. American Journal of Psychiatry 159, 302-304.
Vederman, A.C., Weisenbach, S.L., Rapport, L.J., Leon, H.M., Haase, B.D., Franti, L.M., Schallmo, M.-P., Saunders, E.F.H., Kamali, M.M., Zubieta, J.-K., Langenecker, S.A., and Mcinnis, M.G. (2011). Modality-specific alterations in the perception of emotional stimuli in Bipolar Disorder compared to Healthy Controls and Major Depressive Disorder. Cortex In Press, Corrected Proof.

Keywords: face processing, Bipolar Disorder, emotion recognition, emotion discrimination, configural face processing, social cognition

Conference: ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.

Presentation Type: Oral Presentation

Topic: Emotion and Social

Citation: Van Rheenen TE, Rossell SL and Murray G (2012). Face facts: BD patients show impairments in emotion processing. Conference Abstract: ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00167

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Received: 25 Oct 2012; Published Online: 17 Nov 2012.

* Correspondence: Miss. Tamsyn E Van Rheenen, Swinburne University, Brain and Psychological Sciences Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia, tvanrheenen@swin.edu.au