Recognition of facial expressions in obsessive–compulsive disorder

Abstract

Sprengelmeyer et al. [Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A. W., Pundt, I., Sprengelmeyer, A., Calder, A. J., Berrios, G., et al. (1997). Disgust implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 264, 1767-1773] found that patients with OCD showed severely impaired recognition of facial expressions of disgust. This result has potential to provide a unique window into the psychopathology of OCD, but several published attempts to replicate this finding have failed. The current study compared OCD patients to normal controls and panic disorder patients on ability to recognize facial expressions of negative emotions. Overall, the OCD patients were impaired in their ability to recognize disgust expressions, but only 33% of patients showed this deficit. These deficits were related to OCD symptom severity and general functioning, factors that may account for the inconsistent findings observed in different laboratories.

OCD: obsessive–compulsive … disgust? The role of

“…Several studies have reported that when compared with healthy controls and patients with panic disorder and GAD, patients with OCD exhibit impaired recognition of dis gust, but normal recognition of other facial expressions, in cluding fear, 42,43 which has been confirmed in a recent meta analysis. 44 These results are counterintuitive, as one might expect that individuals with OCD would be very good at rec ognizing facial expressions of disgust, especially since they seem to experience disgust more readily than those without the disorder.…”

Disgust Recognition in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Diagnostic Comparisons and Posttreatment Effects

“…About two-thirds of the sample was found to evidence this bias, and bias was not restricted to people with a more severe presentation of OCD or the prima facie speculation of greater involvement with contamination concerns. Corcoran et al 37 also did not observe an association between disgust recognition impairment and obsessive-compulsive symptom subtypes or other clinical factors that could account for within-group variability.…”

“…The administration of the POFA test was in accordance with the standardized procedure as outlined by Sprengelmeyer et al 30 whereby the stimuli were presented statically without alteration. This differs from the procedures used by other investigators (for example, Corcoran et al 37 and Parker et al 35 ), which used morphed facial stimuli expressions. Participants were presented pictures in random order on a Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop computer, with a 12-inch screen.…”

“…However, the PDA (mean 90.67, SD 74.92; t = 0.60, df = 28, P = 0.55) and GSP (mean 91.33, SD 69.61; t = 0.34, df = 23, P = 0.74), as well as the OCD group treated with CBT (mean 92.33, SD 39.38; t = 0.08, df = 24, P = 0.93), produced disgust recognition scores that were equivalent to the normative sample. Following the cutoff criteria of 1.5 SD from the mean employed by Corcoran et al 37 it was found that 67% of the untreated OCD sample was deemed to have disgust recognition impairment.…”

“…In a study that otherwise failed to detect a facial recognition of disgust deficit, Parker et al 35 found that a single severely affected patient in the study produced a marked deficit in disgust recognition. Most recently, Corcoran et al 37 examined disgust recognition deficits in a treatment-seeking sample of OCD patients, all of whom were experiencing clinically significant obsessive-compulsive symptoms at the time of testing. Patients with OCD were found to be equivalent to patients with PDA and nonclinical control subjects on the detection of facial emotions except disgust, with patients in the OCD group scoring significantly lower than comparison groups.…”