title: Reduced facial emotion recognition in overweight and obese children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Emotional problems often co-occur in overweight or obese children. However, questions of whether emotion recognition deficits are present and how they are reflected have only been sparsely investigated to date.
  
  
  METHODS
  Therefore, the present study included 33 overweight and obese as well as 33 normal weight elementary school children between six and ten years that were matched for sex, age and socioeconomic status. Participants were shown different emotional faces of a well-validated set of stimuli on a computer screen, which they categorized and then rated on an emotional intensity level. Key measures were categorization performance along with reaction times and emotional intelligence as well as emotional eating questionnaire ratings.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Overweight children exhibited lower categorization accuracy as well as longer reaction times as compared to normal weight children, while no differences in intensity ratings occurred. Reaction time to neutral facial expressions was negatively related to intrapersonal and interpersonal emotional intelligence and emotional eating correlated negatively with accuracy for recognizing sad expressions.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Facial emotion decoding difficulties seem to be of importance in overweight and obese children and deserve further consideration in terms of their exact impact on social functioning as well as on the maintenance of elevated body weight during child development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24-25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany. Electronic address: annekoch@mail.de.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Koch
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, University of Ulm, Albert-Einstein-Allee 41, 89069 Ulm, Germany. Electronic address: olga.pollatos@uni-ulm.de.
authors.forename: Olga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Pollatos
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D056348:Emotional Intelligence; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D050177:Overweight / Q000523:psychology*; D063766:Pediatric Obesity / Q000523:psychology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
keywords: Childhood obesity; Emotion; Emotional expressions; Face categorization; Overweight