Facial emotion discrimination: II. Behavioral findings in depression.
The facial discrimination tasks described in part I (Erwin et al., 1992) were administered to a sample of 14 patients with depression and 14 normal controls matched for sex (12 women, 2 men) and balanced for age and sociodemographic characteristics. Patients performed more poorly on measures of sensitivity for happy discrimination and specificity for sad discrimination, and had a higher negative bias across tasks. Severity of negative affect was correlated with poorer performance for patients. The results suggest that depression is associated with an impaired ability to recognize facial displays of emotion.
Gur
R C
RC
Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104-4283.
Erwin
R J
RJ
Gur
R E
RE
Zwil
A S
AS
Heimberg
C
C
Kraemer
H C
HC
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001288:Attention; D001714:Bipolar Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000523:psychology*; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010552:Personality Assessment