Facial Emotion Recognition in Attenuated Psychosis, Depressive, and Anxiety Syndromes: Are Impairments Common or Specific?
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Date
2019-01-01
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Department
Psychology
Program
Psychology
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Distribution Rights granted to UMBC by the author.
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
This item may be protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is made available by UMBC for non-commercial research and education. For permission to publish or reproduce, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/specoll/repro.php or contact Special Collections at speccoll(at)umbc.edu
Abstract
Facial emotion recognition (FER) is often impaired among individuals with schizophrenia or clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis, but is also impaired among individuals with depressive and anxiety disorders, diagnoses which themselves are highly prevalent among those at CHR. The transdiagnostic nature of FER impairment and its specificity to any one clinical group remains therefore unknown. A promising approach to addressing this limitation may be to identify unique subgroups of individuals with CHR, depression, or anxiety based on theoretically-relevant FER dimensions, and to evaluate the relation of these subgroups to symptoms, diagnosis, and functioning. In a sample of 263 young adults with CHR, depression/anxiety, or no disorder, a k-means cluster analysis identified three distinct subgroups of participants: those with normal performance, those prone to misclassifying faces as threatening, and those with a generalized deficit plus a tendency to misclassify faces as sad. Despite an even distribution of clinical diagnoses across the clusters, participants in the threat-bias cluster presented with more severe attenuated symptoms of psychosis, more severe anxiety, and poorer social functioning than participants in the normal performance cluster. Participants in the sad-bias cluster presented with more severe attenuated psychotic symptoms than those in the normal performance cluster. The findings suggest the presence of distinct FER-defined subgroups among individuals with CHR, depression/anxiety, or no disorder. Although FER performance profiles appear similar across clinically-defined groups, the unique clinical presentations among FER-defined clusters suggests that certain FER profiles may be transdiagnostic risk factors for psychopathology.