New research
A Developmental Twin Study of Emotion Recognition and Its Negative Affective Clinical Correlates

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Objective

Youth with psychiatric disorders distinguished by irritability, including depression and associated trait neuroticism, show deficits in the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion, particularly happiness. However, the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to this ability remains unknown. The present study examined this trait in twins to assess the genetic and environmental influences on face-emotion recognition abilities and their association with irritability, neuroticism, and depression.

Method

Child and adolescent twins (N = 957 from 496 families) 9 to 17 years old rated their irritability (on the Affective Reactivity Index), neuroticism (on the Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire), and depression (on the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire) and completed a face-emotion labeling task. Faces depicting anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise were morphed with a neutral face, yielding 10 levels of increasing emotional expressivity. Biometrical twin analyses evaluated contributions of genetic and environmental factors to the etiology of face-emotion recognition and its association with irritability, neuroticism, and depression.

Results

Recognition of each emotion was heritable; common and specific sets of genetic factors influenced all emotions and individual emotions, respectively. Irritability, neuroticism, and depression were modestly and negatively correlated with emotion recognition, particularly the recognition of happiness. For irritability and neuroticism, this correlation appeared largely due to genetic factors.

Conclusion

This study maps genetic and environmental contributions to face-emotion recognition and its association with irritability, neuroticism, and depression. Findings implicate common genetic factors in deficits regarding the recognition of happiness associated with irritability and neuroticism in childhood and adolescence.

Section snippets

Participants

Child and adolescent participants (N = 1,279, 54.59% female) were recruited as pairs of twins 9 to 20 years old from the mid-Atlantic area of the United States by the Mid-Atlantic Twin Registry.22 Detailed demographic information is provided in 2 published overviews of the child23 and adolescent24 samples. The child sample exclusively recruited Caucasian twins; the adolescent sample primarily recruited Caucasian twins. This was done to enhance power for planned subsequent genomic research by

Descriptive Statistics and Face-Emotion Recognition Deficits

Table 1 lists descriptive data on the FELT outcomes. Test-retest reliability for performance on the FELT was high for each emotion and similar across emotions as evidenced by overlapping CIs for reliability estimates. Performance in recognizing each emotion was correlated across emotions. However, also as presented in Table 1, mean performance for each emotion differed significantly, reflecting greater accuracy to identify certain emotions (eg, happiness) over others (eg, disgust).

The

Discussion

The present study used a genetically informed epidemiologic sample of child and adolescent twins to examine the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to face-emotion recognition and its association with irritability, neuroticism, and depression. After demonstrating strong test-retest reliability for the FELT, the study demonstrated the heritability of a common emotion recognition ability and specific abilities to recognize happiness, disgust, and fear/surprise. The present study

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      Therefore, though speculative, while generalized anxiety disorder may be associated with broad heightened vigilance, individuals with elevated symptoms of separation anxiety disorder may demonstrate less accurate facial emotion recognition as social cognitive resources are devoted instead to ascertain the presence or absence of caregivers. Also, consistent with prior research (Dalili et al., 2015; Rappaport et al., 2018), elevated depressive symptoms were associated with less accurate overall facial emotion recognition, specifically recognition of happiness. Results were largely similar when anxiety and depressive symptoms were assessed using the average of child- and parent-report or by child-report only, with the caveat that several associations (e.g., of depressive symptoms with recognition of sadness) survived adjustment for multiple testing only when based on child-report (see Supplemental Table S1).

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      Finally, irritability is a common symptom of mood and anxiety disorders (Savage et al., 2015), however, depression and anxiety refer to marked sadness and fear that do not characterize irritability. In addition to sharing common features, depression, anxiety, aggression, and anger are associated with social cue processing deficits similar to those observed in irritability (Hirsch, Meeten, Krahe, & Reeder, 2016; Rappaport et al., 2018; Stoddard et al., 2019; Wilkowski & Robinson, 2010) but are infrequently accounted for in studies of irritability. While some research suggests that links between irritability and social cue identification and HIB persist after accounting for co-occurring constructs (Deveney et al., 2019; Rappaport et al., 2018), other research suggests that some associations disappear (Deveney et al., 2019; Vidal-Ribas et al., 2018).

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    This study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH098055 to Dr. Hettema, R01MH101518 to Dr. Roberson-Nay, NIMH-IRPziamh002781 to Dr. Pine, and T32MH020030) and the National Center for Research Resources (UL1TR000058).

    Preliminary research findings were presented at the 37th Annual Conference of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, San Francisco, CA, April 6–9, 2017.

    Drs. Hettema and Roberson-Nay contributed equally to this research.

    Drs. Verhulst and Neale served as the statistical experts for this research.

    The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 as revised in 2008. The material contained in this article has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration elsewhere. Two prior articles, which described the child and adolescent samples that compose the present study, respectively, are cited in the text. In addition, 1 prior article (Cecilione et al., 2017) reported on the test-retest reliability data, which are described in the present article using an alternative data analytic approach. This is described in the text.

    Disclosure: Drs. Rappaport, Verhulst, Neale, Blair, Brotman, Pine, Leibenluft, Hettema, and Roberson-Nay and Ms. Carney report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.

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