Relationship between perception of facial emotions and anxiety in clinical depression: does anxiety-related perception predict persistence of depression?

Facial emotion discrimination across the menstrual cycle in women with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD) and controls

“…Interestingly, performance in our study was not related to severity of mood measures in either patients or controls. While correlations between performance on the FDT and measures of either depression or anxiety (Bouhuys et al, 1997) have been reported previously, so has the absence of relationship to either mood measure (Elliott et al, 2002;Lawrence et al, 2004).…”

“…One such probe that has been useful in studies of depression is the facial emotional discrimination task. Abnormalities in the identification of affects in facial expression have been repeatedly described in depressed patients and take two forms, either impaired performance (recognition errors) (George et al, 1998;Gur et al, 1992;Marcel et al, 1993;Mikhailova et al, 1996;Rubinow et al, 1992;Suslow et al, 2001) or negative bias (identification of more sadness in facial expressions) (Bouhuys et al, 1997;David et al, 1990;Gur et al, 1992;Hale, III 1998). It is the bias toward identifying faces as sad that is more commonly seen in major depression (versus bipolar depression) (Phillips et al, 2003), and this mood-congruent bias in the processing of emotions in faces has both contributed to hypotheses about the generation and perpetuation of depression and led to the use of affective recognition tasks to map out the areas of the facial detection circuitry that are dysfunctional in depression (Elliott et al, 2002;Lawrence et al, 2004;Phillips et al, 2003).…”

Systematic review of the neural basis of social cognition in patients with mood disorders

“…127,129,[134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][142] Enhanced recognition of sad facial expressions has also been consistently reported in acutely depressed patients. 73,[143][144][145][146][147][148] Other studies have reported evidence of a negative bias during facial expression recognition and detection tasks, 138,140,[149][150][151][152][153][154][155][156] including a tendency to identify neutral faces as sad in patients with moderate to severe depressive symptoms compared with healthy controls. [157][158][159] This bias is accompanied by selective attention to negatively valenced faces depicting sadness 134,147,155,160 and anger.…”

How Major Depressive Disorder Affects the Ability to Decode Multimodal Dynamic Emotional Stimuli

“…-to further investigate depressive disorder's effects on the emotional information processing by increasing the number of participants; -to investigate whether and which dysfunctional cognitive patterns are associated with depression; -to check for anxiety effects, since depression is often associated with anxiety (Belzer and Schneier, 2004;Hranov, 2007) and anxiety may affect the decoding of emotional expressions (Bouhuys et al, 1997); and -to test for antidepressant effects, since antidepressants may influence the emotional information processing (Bhagwagar et al, 2004;Harmer et al, 2009). …”