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Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome

Published on: July 31, 2016

Visual information processing of faces in body dysmorphic disorder.

Jamie D Feusner¹, Jennifer Townsend, Alexander Bystritsky

¹Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, 300 UCLA Medical Plaza, Ste 2345, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA. jfeusner@mednet.ucla.edu

Archives of General Psychiatry

|December 7, 2007

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Individuals with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) exhibit distinct brain activity patterns when processing faces, suggesting visual processing differences may underlie their condition. This study highlights altered neural responses in BDD patients compared to controls.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Psychiatry
Cognitive Psychology

Background:

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is a psychiatric condition characterized by preoccupation with perceived flaws in appearance.
Clinical observations suggest BDD patients focus on details rather than holistic facial features.
This study investigates visual information processing abnormalities in BDD.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate differences in brain activation patterns between BDD patients and controls.
To examine how spatial frequency information in faces affects visual processing in BDD.
To determine if altered brain activity in BDD relates to visual perception of faces.

Main Methods:

A case-control study comparing 12 individuals with BDD and 13 matched controls.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity.
Participants performed face matching tasks using unaltered, high spatial frequency, and low spatial frequency stimuli.

Main Results:

BDD subjects showed increased left-hemisphere activation in prefrontal and temporal regions across all face tasks.
Controls exhibited left-sided prefrontal and anterior cingulate activation only for high spatial frequency faces.
BDD patients displayed greater dorsal anterior cingulate activity for low spatial frequency faces compared to controls.

Conclusions:

Individuals with BDD exhibit fundamental differences in visual face processing compared to controls.
The pattern of activation in BDD suggests a bias towards detail analysis over holistic processing.
These visual processing abnormalities may contribute to perceptual distortions experienced by BDD patients, extending beyond self-perception.