Differing Amygdala Responses to Facial Expressions in Children and Adults With Bipolar Disorder

Abstract

Objective Bipolar disorder (BD) is highly debilitating in both children and adults. Child and adult BD patients show both behavioral deficits in face emotion processing and abnormal amygdala activation. However, amygdala function in pediatric vs. adult BD patients has never been compared directly. Method This study compared amygdala responses to emotional facial expressions in 74 subjects [pediatric (N=18) and adult (N=17) patients with BD, healthy volunteer (HV) children (N=15) and adults (N=22)]. Subjects performed a gender identification task while viewing fearful, angry, and neutral faces. Results In response to fearful faces, patients with BD across age-groups showed right amygdala hyperactivity relative to healthy volunteers. However, when responses to all facial expressions were combined, pediatric patients exhibited greater right amygdala activation than either adults with BD or HV children. Conclusions Amygdala hyperactivity in response to fearful faces is present in both youths and adults with BD. However, compared to adults with BD or healthy youths, youths with BD show amygdala hyperactivity in response to a broad array of emotional faces. Thus, abnormal amygdala activation during face processing appears to be more pervasive in children than adults with BD.

Widespread white matter tract aberrations in youth with familial risk for bipolar disorder

“…Further, the ILF connects the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex to the occipitotemporal cortices and, pertinent to BD, connects cortical areas involved with the recognition and social emotional processing of faces (Schmahmann and Pandya, 2006). Previous fMRI studies in youth with BD have shown temporal hyperactivation in the amygdala to particular facial expressions when compared to HCs (Kalmar et al, 2009; Kim et al, 2012). The IFOF connects visual and auditory association cortices with the prefrontal cortex and intermingles with the UF (Schmahmann and Pandya, 2006).…”

The bipolar maze: a roadmap through translational psychopathology

“…Functional neuroimaging techniques have revealed consistent findings with the structural neuroimaging studies. Thus, abnormal amygdala activation during face processing appears to be more pervasive in children and adolescents than in adults with bipolar disorder (27), and neurobiological changes in activation patterns involving fronto-limbic circuitry have been reported in relation to different illness phase and mood states. The difficulties to deactivate the default mode network is another consistent finding across mood states (28,29), but might be very unspecific.…”

Developmental Meta-analyses of the Functional Neural Correlates of Bipolar Disorder

“…To our knowledge, only four currently-published task-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have directly compared BD-youths and BD-adults in the same study 16–19 . Specifically, Kim (2012) found that BD-youths had greater amygdala activation during emotional face recognition than BD-adults 16 .…”