I Cannot Read Your Eye Expression: Suicide Attempters Have Difficulties in Interpreting Complex Social Emotions

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Emotion recognition is crucial for navigating social situations.
• Suicide attempters may exhibit difficulties in recognizing emotions, potentially leading to social stress.
• Previous research shows mixed findings regarding social emotion recognition deficits in suicide attempters.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine social emotion recognition differences in patients with Major Depressive Episode (MDE) based on suicide attempt history.
• To compare individuals with a history of suicide attempts (SA) against those with Major Depressive Episode but no suicide attempt history (AC).

Main Methods:

• Recruited 210 MDE patients: 115 SA and 95 AC.
• Assessed complex social emotion recognition using the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET).
• Controlled for verbal IQ and attention using NART and d2 test, respectively.

Main Results:

• Suicide attempters (SA) performed worse on recognizing neutral emotions compared to affective controls (AC) (OR = 0.87).
• A trend for group differences in neutral emotion recognition was observed when comparing violent/serious SA to non-violent/non-serious SA and AC.
• Violent/serious SA showed significantly lower RMET scores for neutral emotions than AC (OR = 0.79).

Conclusions:

• Poor recognition of neutral social emotions is evident in suicide attempters.
• Impaired neutral emotion recognition may contribute to difficulties in daily social interactions for SA.
• Interventions targeting complex emotion understanding could aid in preventing suicidal risk in depressed patients.