Lower Sensitivity to Happy and Angry Facial Emotions in Young Adults with Psychiatric Problems

Abstract

Many psychiatric problem domains have been associated with emotion-specific biases or general deficiencies in facial emotion identification. However, both within and between psychiatric problem domains, large variability exists in the types of emotion identification problems that were reported. Moreover, since the domain-specificity of the findings was often not addressed, it remains unclear whether patterns found for specific problem domains can be better explained by co-occurrence of other psychiatric problems or by more generic characteristics of psychopathology, for example, problem severity. In this study, we aimed to investigate associations between emotion identification biases and five psychiatric problem domains, and to determine the domain-specificity of these biases. Data were collected as part of the ‘No Fun No Glory’ study and involved 2,577 young adults. The study participants completed a dynamic facial emotion identification task involving happy, sad, angry, and fearful faces, and filled in the Adult Self-Report Questionnaire, of which we used the scales depressive problems, anxiety problems, avoidance problems, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) problems and antisocial problems. Our results suggest that participants with antisocial problems were significantly less sensitive to happy facial emotions, participants with ADHD problems were less sensitive to angry emotions, and participants with avoidance problems were less sensitive to both angry and happy emotions. These effects could not be fully explained by co-occurring psychiatric problems. Whereas this seems to indicate domain-specificity, inspection of the overall pattern of effect sizes regardless of statistical significance reveals generic patterns as well, in that for all psychiatric problem domains the effect sizes for happy and angry emotions were larger than the effect sizes for sad and fearful emotions. As happy and angry emotions are strongly associated with approach and avoidance mechanisms in social interaction, these mechanisms may hold the key to understanding the associations between facial emotion identification and a wide range of psychiatric problems.

Dissociating Profiles of Social Cognitive Disturbances Between Mixed Personality and Anxiety Disorder

“…Firstly, patients with MPD demonstrated poorer discrimination of certain emotional facial expressions relative to the HC; this was true for both angry and fearful faces presented within a neutral context, and neutral faces within a prevailing context of happy expressions. This finding both supports and extends previous research into PD: Poorer accuracy in the classification and identification of fearful faces has been reported in patients with Avoidant, Narcissistic, and Borderline PD (Rosenthal et al, 2011;Marissen et al, 2012;Semerari et al, 2014), and a lower sensitivity to anger and happiness has been observed in non-clinical individuals with avoidance problems (Vrijen et al, 2016). In MPD, this impairment in emotion processing appears to go beyond the general response bias toward negatively valenced emotions reported elsewhere (Mitchell et al, 2014;Semerari et al, 2014).…”

Emotion sensitivity and self‐reported symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder across the lifespan: A population‐based sample approach

“…Previous studies have linked ES with higher interpersonal functioning and better quality of life (Davis, ; Mueser et al, ). Because emotion perception is reliant on complex and widespread neuropsychological processes, it can be disrupted both by psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, and by the natural aging process (Adolphs, ; Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Phillips, ; Vrijen et al, ; Zhuang et al, ).…”

“…Because emotion perception is reliant on complex and widespread neuropsychological processes, it can be disrupted both by psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, and by the natural aging process (Adolphs, 2002;Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Phillips, 2008;Vrijen et al, 2016;Zhuang et al, 2018).…”

Spread the Joy: How High and Low Bias for Happy Facial Emotions Translate into Different Daily Life Affect Dynamics

“…We used extreme bias groups rather than the full happy bias continuum because of both conceptual and methodological considerations. First and foremost, the extreme-group approach more closely fitted our supposition that mainly happy biases in the extremes of the distribution distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive affective mechanisms [29]. Second, a particular strength of network analyses is that these can be used to explore group differences in overall patterns of affect dynamics rather than investigating single effects only.…”

“…The participants had to press the spacebar as soon as they identified the emotion the neutral face turned into. For a more detailed description of the morph task, which was a shortened version of a task developed at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands [30], see Section 1 of the Supplementary Material or Vrijen et al [29]. For each participant, the mean reaction time (RT) of correctly identified trials was calculated per emotion, resulting in RT Happy, RT Sad, RT Angry, and RT Fearful.…”