Facial emotion processing and depression

• Main Authors: Eu, Juan Lih, Lau, Hubert Guan Ting
• Other Authors: Xu Hong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/74081
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Being deficient in the ability to process the facial emotions of others has ramifications on one’s social relationships and mental health, and this deficient processing of facial emotions has been found to characterize patients with depression. In this review, we examined 21 studies that investigated facial emotion processing in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) patients. Studies were identified through a literature search of the PsychINFO database, from 1988 till December 2017. Analysis of the studies show that MDD patients possess a maintained attentional bias towards sad faces (i.e. patients do not actively seek out sad faces but are unable to disengage from them once they come into sight). Lower recognition accuracy of all emotions (both positive and negative ones) as well as a negative response bias (where MDD patients label a neutral face as being sad) was also reported. More importantly, these processing biases are found to be of a trait-based nature and this means that these impairments would continue to be a problem for the patients even after remission.