Slow identification of facial happiness in early adolescence predicts onset of depression during 8 years of follow-up

Abstract

Adolescent onset depression places a high burden on those who suffer from it, and is difficult to treat. An improved understanding of mechanisms underlying susceptibility to adolescent depression may be useful in early detection and as target in treatment. Facial emotion identification bias has been suggested as trait marker for depression, but results have been inconclusive. To explore whether facial emotion identification biases may be trait markers for depression, we tested whether the speed with which young adolescents identified happy, sad, angry and fearful facial emotions predicted the onset of depression during an eight-year follow-up period. We hypothesized that facial emotion identification speed predicts depression in a symptom-congruent way and differentially predicts symptoms of anhedonia and sadness. Data were collected as part of the TRacking Adolescents’ Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS), and involved 1840 adolescents who participated in a facial emotion identification test at age 11 and were subjected to the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) at age 19. In a multi-emotion model, slow identification of happy facial emotions tentatively predicted onset of depressive disorder within the follow-up period. Slow identification of happy emotions and fast identification of sad emotions predicted symptoms of anhedonia, but not symptoms of sadness. Our results suggest that the relative speed of identification of happiness in relation to the identification of sadness is a better predictor of depression than the identification of either facial emotion alone. A possible mechanism underlying the predictive role of facial emotion identification may be a less reactive reward system.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00787-016-0846-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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

“…In the perspective of recent calls for a revision of the categorical DSM system into a more dimensional approach to psychiatry (Kendler, 2012), it may be more beneficial to focus on smaller units of psychopathology, for example symptoms or clusters of symptoms. In support of this, we previously found that facial emotion identification was a stronger predictor of symptoms of anhedonia than of depression itself (Vrijen et al, 2016). Additionally, a potentially viable way to proceed would be to use facial emotion identification biases or deficiencies rather than psychiatric diagnoses or symptoms as the starting point, and from this perspective investigate associations between extreme emotion identification biases or deficiencies and psychiatric symptoms.…”

“…All analyses consisted of two steps: first, for each problem domain the effects of the RTs for happy, sad, angry, and fearful emotions were tested separately, adjusted for gender and age (i.e., single-emotion models). Because of tentative evidence that identification patterns across multiple emotions may be more relevant to psychiatric problems than identification of individual emotions (Wright et al, 2009; Oldehinkel et al, 2015; Vrijen et al, 2016), in a second step for each problem domain full emotion models were tested including the RTs for all facial emotions (i.e., multi-emotion models), again adjusted for gender and age. Since the dependent variables (i.e., ASR DSM problem scores) and residuals were not normally distributed, we estimated p -values from 10,000 bootstrap samples to assure the robustness of our results.…”

Deficits in emotion recognition are associated with depressive symptoms in youth with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder

“…Nevertheless, our longitudinal analysis showed that regardless of current depressive symptoms, emotion recognition deficits in youth with DMDD—who mostly had low depressive symptoms at baseline—were predictive of more depressive symptoms at follow‐up. This finding should be interpreted with caution, because levels of attrition were high, but it might suggest that emotion recognition deficits act as a risk factor for depression in youth with DMDD, as such deficits do in healthy youth (Vrijen et al., ). Regardless, our longitudinal findings need replication in a larger sample.…”

“…Indeed, several studies conducted in people at risk for depression suggest that impaired emotional processing might be an endophenotype of depression (Chan, Norbury, Goodwin, & Harmer, ; Joormann, Talbot, & Gotlib, ; Mannie, Taylor, Harmer, Cowen, & Norbury, ; Monk et al., ). Moreover, these deficits are predictive of depression and depressive symptoms in longitudinal studies (Beevers & Carver, ; Vrijen, Hartman, & Oldehinkel, ). Since irritability is a strong predictor of depression, it is plausible to think that a deficit in emotion recognition in children with severe irritability contributes to increase the risk for depression.…”

“…Indeed, several studies conducted in people at risk for depression suggest that impaired emotional processing might be an endophenotype of depression (Chan, Norbury, Goodwin, & Harmer, 2009;Joormann, Talbot, & Gotlib, 2007;Mannie, Taylor, Harmer, Cowen, & Norbury, 2011;Monk et al, 2008). Moreover, these deficits are predictive of depression and depressive symptoms in longitudinal studies (Beevers & Carver, 2003;Vrijen, Hartman, & Oldehinkel, 2016).…”