An Integrative Review of Facial Emotion Information Processing in Depression

Abstract

Background: This study is an integrative review of literatures of research on emotion processing in depression using facial expression stimuli. Methods: For the review, we searched domestic and international research articles over the past 20 years according to the integrative review procedure and selected the final 19 papers. Results: The results of the review revealed that depressed people, compared with those who were not depressed, had the following differences. First, they needed longer time for precise processing of emotion. Second, they managed to recognize positive emotion with high intensity while easily recognized negative emotions with low intensity. Third, they tended to overestimate the intensity of negative emotion. Fourth, they showed a negative interpretation bias to ambiguous or neutral facial expressions. Meanwhile, consistent results across the studies were not found for the variable of accuracy. Conclusions: Our results suggest that it is necessary to develop more elaborate intervention program and design more sophisticated experiment for further coherent understanding of depression.