The evidence from trials in adults suggests that interactive and tailored Internet-based interventions with or without additional behavioural support are moderately more effective than non-active controls at six months or longer, but there was no evidence that these interventions were better than other active smoking treatments. However some of the studies were at high risk of bias, and there was evidence of substantial statistical heterogeneity. Treatment effectiveness in younger people is unknown.

Background.Many studies have explored associations between depression and facial emotion recognition (ER). However, these studies have used various paradigms and multiple stimulus sets, rendering comparisons difficult. Few studies have attempted to determine the magnitude of any effect and whether studies are properly powered to detect it. We conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize the findings across studies on ER in depressed individuals compared to controls.Method.Studies of ER that included depressed and control samples and published before June 2013 were identified in PubMed and Web of Science. Studies using schematic faces, neuroimaging studies and drug treatment studies were excluded.Results.Meta-analysis of k = 22 independent samples indicated impaired recognition of emotion [k = 22, g = −0.16, 95% confidence interval (CI) −0.25 to −0.07, p < 0.001]. Critically, this was observed for anger, disgust, fear, happiness and surprise (k's = 7–22, g's = −0.42 to −0.17, p's < 0.08), but not sadness (k = 21, g = −0.09, 95% CI −0.23 to +0.06, p = 0.23). Study-level characteristics did not appear to be associated with the observed effect. Power analysis indicated that a sample of approximately 615 cases and 615 controls would be required to detect this association with 80% power at an alpha level of 0.05.Conclusions.These findings suggest that the ER impairment reported in the depression literature exists across all basic emotions except sadness. The effect size, however, is small, and previous studies have been underpowered.

High trait anxiety has been associated with detriments in emotional face processing. By contrast, relatively little is known about the effects of state anxiety on emotional face processing. We investigated the effects of state anxiety on recognition of emotional expressions (anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and happiness) experimentally, using the 7.5% carbon dioxide (CO2) model to induce state anxiety, and in a large observational study. The experimental studies indicated reduced global (rather than emotion-specific) emotion recognition accuracy and increased interpretation bias (a tendency to perceive anger over happiness) when state anxiety was heightened. The observational study confirmed that higher state anxiety is associated with poorer emotion recognition, and indicated that negative effects of trait anxiety are negated when controlling for state anxiety, suggesting a mediating effect of state anxiety. These findings may have implications for anxiety disorders, which are characterized by increased frequency, intensity or duration of state anxious episodes.