Individuals with insomnia misrecognize angry faces as fearful faces while missing the eyes: an eye-tracking study

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Ophthalmology

Background:

• Individuals experiencing insomnia often exhibit altered perception of facial expressions.
• Visual attention deficits may underlie these difficulties in processing facial cues.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if impaired visual attention functions contribute to difficulties in facial expression recognition in individuals with insomnia.
• To examine eye movement patterns during facial expression categorization in individuals with and without insomnia.

Main Methods:

• Utilized eye movement tracking and hidden Markov modeling to analyze visual attention patterns.
• Participants with insomnia symptoms and controls categorized happy, sad, fearful, and angry facial expressions.

Main Results:

• Participants with insomnia demonstrated lower accuracy in recognizing angry faces, confusing them with fearful expressions.
• Insomnia group showed a "nose-mouth" eye movement pattern, focusing on the face's vertical midline.
• Control group exhibited an "eyes-mouth" pattern, prioritizing lateral features like the eyes.

Conclusions:

• Impaired visual attention, specifically reduced focus on the eye region, may explain difficulties in recognizing angry facial expressions in individuals with insomnia.
• Compromised emotion perception in insomnia may stem from deficits in visual attention control and information selection.