Face emotion labeling deficits in children with bipolar disorder and severe mood dysregulation

Area of Science:

• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Children with narrow phenotype bipolar disorder (NP-BD) exhibit deficits in labeling facial emotions.
• It remains unclear if these deficits extend to youth with severe mood dysregulation (SMD), characterized by chronic irritability and hyperarousal.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate face-labeling abilities in children with NP-BD and SMD compared to controls.
• To determine if emotion recognition deficits are specific to certain emotions or generalize across conditions.
• To explore the association between face-labeling impairments and psychosocial functioning.

Main Methods:

• Utilized the emotional expression multimorph task with 39 NP-BD, 31 SMD, and 36 control subjects.
• Assessed the intensity of facial emotion required for correct identification across happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, and disgust.
• Compared groups on emotion identification accuracy and the required intensity threshold.

Main Results:

• Both NP-BD and SMD youth required significantly more morphs (higher intensity) than controls to correctly label disgusted, surprised, fearful, and happy faces.
• Impaired face labeling in NP-BD youth correlated with deficient social reciprocity.
• Impaired face labeling in SMD youth correlated with dysfunctional family relationships.

Conclusions:

• Youth with NP-BD and SMD exhibit significant deficits in recognizing facial emotions, requiring more intense emotional expressions for correct identification compared to controls.
• These face-labeling impairments are associated with critical psychosocial impairments, including social reciprocity and family relationships.
• Understanding the neural basis of these deficits may illuminate the pathophysiology of NP-BD and SMD.