Modality-specific alterations in the perception of emotional stimuli in Bipolar Disorder compared to Healthy Controls and Major Depressive Disorder

Abstract

Objectives Affect identification accuracy paradigms have increasingly been utilized to understand psychiatric illness including Bipolar Disorder (BD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). This investigation focused on perceptual accuracy in affect identification in both visual and auditory domains among patients with BD, relative to Healthy Controls (HC) and patients with MDD. Demographic and clinical variables, in addition to medications were also investigated. Methods The visual Facial Emotion Perception Test (FEPT) and auditory Emotional Perception Test (EPT) were administered to adults with BD (n = 119) and MDD (n = 78) as well as HC (n = 66). Results Performance on the FEPT was significantly stronger than on the EPT irrespective of group. Performance on the EPT did not significantly differentiate the groups. On the FEPT, BD samples had the greatest difficulty relative to HC in identification of sad and fearful faces. BD participants also had greater difficulty identifying sad faces relative to MDD participants though not after controlling for severity of illness factors. For the BD (but not MDD) sample several clinical variables were also correlated with FEPT performance. Conclusions The findings suggest that disruptions in identification of negative emotions such as sadness and fear may be a characteristic trait of BD. However, this effect may be moderated by greater illness severity found in our BD sample.

The association between childhood trauma and facial emotion recognition in adults with bipolar disorder

“…Several studies have suggested that emotion processing impairments in BD are limited to certain emotions, although there is inconsistency regarding which specific emotions may be affected. Findings have been reported for sadness and fear (Derntl et al, 2009; Vederman et al, 2012), happiness (Lawlor-Savage et al, 2014), and surprise (Summers et al, 2006). Other data suggest a more generalized level of impairment that is not limited to specific emotions per se (Brotman et al, 2008; Van Rheenen and Rossell, 2014).…”

“…This study suggested that the two diagnostic groups had a similar level of impairment in emotion identification and differentiation ( d =−.49 and d =−.46 respectively), and that the same results held across a variety of emotion recognition tasks. Data suggest that deficits occur not only during the acute phases of the illness (Lembke and Ketter, 2002; Getz et al, 2003; Gray et al, 2006; Vederman et al, 2012), but also during symptom remission (Bozikas et al, 2006). Although less severe than in schizophrenia (Addington and Addington 1998; Lee et al, 2014), deficits have been shown to be profound in patients with BD who are experiencing acute psychotic symptoms.…”

Auditory-prosodic processing in bipolar disorder; from sensory perception to emotion

“…There is growing evidence to indicate that persons with bipolar disorder (BD) are impaired in their ability to process facial expressions (Getz et al, 2003;Lembke and Ketter, 2002;Vederman et al, 2012). However, available research with regards to the prosodic emotion processing profile of BD is narrow and inconsistent at best; there are findings of impaired emotional prosody processing in some studies of euthymic and symptomatic BD groups (Bozikas et al, 2007;Hofer et al, 2010;Murphy and Cutting, 1990) but not others (Edwards et al, 2001;Mitchell et al, 2004;Rossell et al, in press;Vederman et al, 2012), with little explanation for the disparity.…”

Event-related potential examination of facial affect processing in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

“…There is evidence of facial affect processing deficits in patients with bipolar disorder at the behavioral, anatomical and functional levels. Several studies have noted that bipolar disorder patients are impaired compared to controls in labeling basic facial emotions (e.g., angry, disgusted, fearful, happy, sad and surprised) (Bozikas et al , 2006, Getz et al , 2003, Kohler et al , 2011, Vederman et al , 2011). Abnormalities in facial affect processing are also evident when using structural and functional MRI (fMRI) methodologies.…”