Cortical source localization during facial emotion recognition in bipolar mania: An ERP study

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Facial emotion recognition is crucial for social cognition and daily functioning.
• Impaired emotional cue processing is observed across all bipolar disorder phases, potentially contributing to its development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate facial emotion recognition deficits in patients with bipolar mania and psychotic symptoms.
• To identify neural correlates of these deficits using electroencephalography (EEG) and source localization.

Main Methods:

• Thirty patients with bipolar mania and psychotic symptoms and 30 healthy controls participated.
• A facial emotion recognition task (happy, sad, anger, fear) was administered.
• Sixty-four channel EEG recordings were analyzed using sLORETA for source localization of late positive potentials (LPP).

Main Results:

• Bipolar mania patients exhibited statistically significant reduced cortical sources in the right insula (p = 0.004) at the LPP peak.
• This hypoactivation was specifically observed during the processing of anger facial emotions.

Conclusions:

• Reduced right insular activation during anger recognition in bipolar mania may indicate aberrant interoceptive prediction system function.
• These findings suggest a potential neural basis for emotional processing disturbances in acute manic phases.