Reduced facial emotion recognition in overweight and obese children

Emotional problems often co-occur in overweight or obese children. However, questions of whether emotion recognition deficits are present and how they are reflected have only been sparsely investigated to date.

Therefore, the present study included 33 overweight and obese as well as 33 normal weight elementary school children between six and ten years that were matched for sex, age and socioeconomic status. Participants were shown different emotional faces of a well-validated set of stimuli on a computer screen, which they categorized and then rated on an emotional intensity level. Key measures were categorization performance along with reaction times and emotional intelligence as well as emotional eating questionnaire ratings.

Overweight children exhibited lower categorization accuracy as well as longer reaction times as compared to normal weight children, while no differences in intensity ratings occurred. Reaction time to neutral facial expressions was negatively related to intrapersonal and interpersonal emotional intelligence and emotional eating correlated negatively with accuracy for recognizing sad expressions.

Facial emotion decoding difficulties seem to be of importance in overweight and obese children and deserve further consideration in terms of their exact impact on social functioning as well as on the maintenance of elevated body weight during child development.