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Facial emotion recognition in childhood-onset bipolar I disorder: an evaluation of developmental differences between youths and adults.

ABSTRACT: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe mental illness with high healthcare costs and poor outcomes. Increasing numbers of youths are diagnosed with BD, and many adults with BD report that their symptoms started in childhood, suggesting that BD can be a developmental disorder. Studies advancing our understanding of BD have shown alterations in facial emotion recognition both in children and adults with BD compared to healthy comparison (HC) participants, but none have evaluated the development of these deficits. To address this, we examined the effect of age on facial emotion recognition in a sample that included children and adults with confirmed childhood-onset type-I BD, with the adults having been diagnosed and followed since childhood by the Course and Outcome in Bipolar Youth study.Using the Diagnostic Analysis of Non-Verbal Accuracy, we compared facial emotion recognition errors among participants with BD (n = 66; ages 7-26 years) and HC participants (n = 87; ages 7-25 years). Complementary analyses investigated errors for child and adult faces.A significant diagnosis-by-age interaction indicated that younger BD participants performed worse than expected relative to HC participants their own age. The deficits occurred both for child and adult faces and were particularly strong for angry child faces, which were most often mistaken as sad. Our results were not influenced by medications, comorbidities/substance use, or mood state/global functioning.Younger individuals with BD are worse than their peers at this important social skill. This deficit may be an important developmentally salient treatment target - that is, for cognitive remediation to improve BD youths' emotion recognition abilities.

SUBMITTER: Wegbreit E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4548881 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Facial emotion recognition (FER) is essential to guide social functioning and behaviour for interpersonal communication. FER may be altered in severe mental illness such as in psychosis and in borderline personality disorder patients. However, it is unclear if these FER alterations are specifically related to psychosis. Awareness of FER alterations may be useful in clinical settings to improve treatment strategies. The aim of our study was to examine FER in patients with severe mental disorder and their relation with psychotic symptomatology. MATERIALS AND METHODS:Socio-demographic and clinical variables were collected. Alterations on emotion recognition were assessed in 3 groups: patients with first episode psychosis (FEP) (n = 64), borderline personality patients (BPD) (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 137), using the Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, Structured Interview for Schizotypy Revised and Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences scales were used to assess positive psychotic symptoms. WAIS III subtests were used to assess IQ. RESULTS:Kruskal-Wallis analysis showed a significant difference between groups on the FER of neutral faces score between FEP, BPD patients and controls and between FEP patients and controls in angry face recognition. No significant differences were found between groups in the fear or happy conditions. There was a significant difference between groups in the attribution of negative emotion to happy faces. BPD and FEP groups had a much higher tendency to recognize happy faces as negatives. There was no association with the different symptom domains in either group. CONCLUSIONS:FEP and BPD patients have problems in recognizing neutral faces more frequently than controls. Moreover, patients tend to over-report negative emotions in recognition of happy faces. Although no relation between psychotic symptoms and FER alterations was found, these deficits could contribute to a patient's misinterpretations in daily life.

Project description:This study aimed to identify neuroimaging measures associated with risk for, or protection against, bipolar disorder by comparing youth offspring of parents with bipolar disorder versus youth offspring of non-bipolar parents versus offspring of healthy parents in (i) the magnitude of activation within emotional face processing circuitry; and (ii) functional connectivity between this circuitry and frontal emotion regulation regions. The study was conducted at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre. Participants included 29 offspring of parents with bipolar disorder (mean age = 13.8 years; 14 females), 29 offspring of non-bipolar parents (mean age = 13.8 years; 12 females) and 23 healthy controls (mean age = 13.7 years; 11 females). Participants were scanned during implicit processing of emerging happy, sad, fearful and angry faces and shapes. The activation analyses revealed greater right amygdala activation to emotional faces versus shapes in offspring of parents with bipolar disorder and offspring of non-bipolar parents than healthy controls. Given that abnormally increased amygdala activation during emotion processing characterized offspring of both patient groups, and that abnormally increased amygdala activation has often been reported in individuals with already developed bipolar disorder and those with major depressive disorder, these neuroimaging findings may represent markers of increased risk for affective disorders in general. The analysis of psychophysiological interaction revealed that offspring of parents with bipolar disorder showed significantly more negative right amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex functional connectivity to emotional faces versus shapes, but significantly more positive right amygdala-left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex functional connectivity to happy faces (all P-values corrected for multiple tests) than offspring of non-bipolar parents and healthy controls. Taken together with findings of increased amygdala-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex functional connectivity, and decreased amygdala-anterior cingulate cortex functional connectivity previously shown in individuals with bipolar disorder, these connectivity patterns in offspring of parents with bipolar disorder may be risk markers for, rather than markers conferring protection against, bipolar disorder in youth. The patterns of activation and functional connectivity remained unchanged after removing medicated participants and those with current psychopathology from analyses. This is the first study to demonstrate that abnormal functional connectivity patterns within face emotion processing circuitry distinguish offspring of parents with bipolar disorder from those of non-bipolar parents and healthy controls.

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Facial emotion recognition in childhood-onset bipolar I disorder: an evaluation of developmental differences between youths and adults.

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