Effects of sad mood on facial emotion recognition in Chinese people

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Abstract

This study examined the influence of sad mood on the judgment of ambiguous facial emotion expressions among 47 healthy volunteers who had been induced to feel sad (n = 13), neutral (n = 15), or happy (n = 19) emotions by watching video clips. The findings suggest that when the targets were ambiguous, participants who were in a sad mood tended to classify them in the negative emotional categories rather than the positive emotional categories. Also, this observation indicates that emotion-specific negative bias in the judgment of facial expressions is associated with a sad mood. The finding argues against a general impairment in decoding facial expressions. Furthermore, the observed mood-congruent negative bias was best predicted by spatial perception. The findings of this study provide insights into the cognitive processes underlying the interpersonal difficulties experienced by people in a sad mood, which may be predisposing factors in the development of clinical depression.

Introduction

The cognitive theory of depression suggests that people with depression demonstrate a mood-congruent bias in their information processing. A bias toward the processing of negative cues has been assumed to operate most strongly where the cognitions involved are connected with interpersonal relationships (Hammen, 1992). Many studies have focused on the facial expressions associated with particular emotions since they are important features of the interpersonal environment and represent a powerful social stimulus. They also provide important nonverbal information, which accounts for approximately 60% of human communication (Burgoon, 1985). Ekman et al. (1982) proposed that the basic emotions are those associated with universal facial expressions, and, according to Ekman (1972), people consistently interpret emotional messages from facial expressions.

It is important to understand whether emotion-specific bias exists in people with normal sadness because interpersonal difficulties could be one of the determinants of the eventual development of pathological depression. Emotion-recognition ability is associated with mental health (Russell et al., 1993, Lembke and Ketter, 2002). Also, as suggested by Bouhuys et al. (1995), perceiving a negative affect underlying the supportive behaviors of others and having a negative reaction to such a perception could have detrimental effects on an individual's social support system by leading to social withdrawal of the individual from others and the distancing of others from the individual. Such an outcome could predispose these individuals to clinical depression. Furthermore, distorted perceptions of facial emotions could evolve into maladaptive self-schemas. These cognitive schemas could then influence social behaviors in terms of associating with distorted perception of stressors and social reinforcement (Schmidt and Joiner, 2004).

Some studies have demonstrated the existence of emotion-specific negative bias in the judgment of facial expressions by people in a depressed mood (Gur et al., 1992, Bouhuys et al., 1995, Hale, 1998). However, not all studies have supported this position. For example, it has been found that depressed patients have decreased sensitivity to emotion-related stimuli compared with controls (Bouhuys et al., 1999). Furthermore, a general impairment in decoding facial expressions, regardless of the type of emotion involved, manifested in the form of decreased accuracy of recognition by depressed patients, has been suggested (Zuroff and Colussy, 1986). Leppanen et al. (2004) explained that individuals in a sad mood may make errors not only in attributing sadness to facial expressions but also when considering happy and neutral faces.

If that biased judgments of facial emotions were observed when people were in a sad mood, and if the biased judgment was emotion-specific (i.e. consistent negativity) (Ekman, 1992), it would counter the argument for a general facial emotion-recognition deficit in people with a sad mood. We therefore used a mood-induction procedure and examined the effects of mood on facial emotion recognition. The specific question studied was: if there were indeed biased judgment of facial expressions by people in a sad mood, would the bias be emotion-specific (i.e. consistent negativity) (Ekman, 1992) or emotion-general (i.e. general impairment in decoding facial expressions of any emotion types)?

Bouhuys et al. (1995) studied healthy volunteers using line drawings of ambiguous faces and observed that sad feelings affect temporarily the perception of emotional expressions. In this study, human facial expressions were used to increase the ecological validity of the stimuli (Isen and Shalker, 1982). The use of ambiguous facial expressions allows for subtle discrimination between stimuli (Cavanagh and Geisler, 2006), which should help maximize any mood-related differences in judging emotional faces.

To understand the neural mechanisms underlying the biased judgment of facial expressions, if any, the relationship between cognition and facial emotion recognition by people in a sad mood was examined. Previous studies have investigated the relationship between various neuropsychological variables and scores on tests of emotion recognition (e.g., Addington and Addington, 1998). There have been speculations that other cognitive factors, such as visual perceptual deficits, may explain emotion-recognition inadequacies in depressed people (e.g. Asthana et al., 1998) and in other clinical populations such as people with schizophrenia (Bediou et al., 2005, Martin et al., 2005) and social phobia (e.g. Horley et al., 2004). Suslow et al. (2004) reported a spatial processing deficit in depressives with comorbid anxiety disorders when they viewed positive facial expressions. Others have suggested that a memory deficit (Gilboa-Schechtman et al., 2002) and/or attention bias (Gilboa-Schechtman et al., 2004) may account for impaired emotion recognition among people with depression. Until now, the findings of studies that have attempted to elucidate the specific nature of information processing bias in people with depression are intriquing but require further study (e.g. Gotlib et al., 2004). Chan et al. (2008) reported that spatial perception was the best predictor of performance in facial emotion identification in individuals with nonparanoid schizophrenia. It has not yet been verified if such a relationship between spatial perceptual skills and emotion recognition also exists in people in a sad mood state.

Section snippets

Participants

The sample consisted of 47 Chinese freshmen: 16 men and 31 women. Their mean age was 23.81 years (S.D. = 3.43 years). Their intellectual abilities, as measured by the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-3 (Brown et al., 1997), were within normal limits. The participants were assigned to three experimental groups: a sad group (n = 13), a neutral group (n = 15), and a happy group (n = 19). The three groups were matched for age, education, gender composition, general intelligence, and trait depressiveness (P > 

Results

Trait depressiveness of all participants was assessed with the Chinese version of the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) (Beck and Steer, 1996) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) (Radloff, 1977); mean scores on the two scales were 13.81 (S.D. = 5.81) and 11.02 (S.D. = 5.65), respectively. These results confirm that all the participants' scores fell below the cut-off for clinical depression.

Discussion

Research into the awareness of facial emotion can help us understand the interplay between cognitive processes and their impact on interpersonal behavior (Geerts et al., 1996) and the contribution to the development of clinical conditions (e.g. Teasdale and Dent, 1987, Bouhuys et al., 1999, Bouhuys and Sam, 2000). Consistent with some previous studies (e.g. Bouhuys et al., 1995), our healthy volunteers in a sad mood also demonstrated a biased perception towards ambiguous facial expressions.

Acknowledgements

The project was supported by the University Development Fund administered by the University of Hong Kong and the Wei Lun Foundation Limited.

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