Friday, January 7, 2011

Facial Affective Reactivity in Depression

Taken from "Patterns of Facial Affective Reactivity in Depression: A literature review of emotion elicitation using film" by Jeff Girard (in press).

Clinicians have long relied on nonverbal communication to aid in the diagnosis and assessment of psychopathological populations. Specifically, blunted or flattened displays of facial affect have long been associated with schizophrenia and depression (Marsden et al. 1975). These ratings are usually made subjectively, however, and there are many conflicting theories about how such populations respond to different types of emotion elicitation. Only careful research can properly determine what (if any) patterns of emotion reactivity can be associated with different disorders. This article will review the literature on a subset of this research. Specifically, it will focus on how patients suffering from Major Depressive Disorder differ from healthy controls in terms of facial affect when positive and negative emotions are elicited using film. Although there are many methods for eliciting emotion, film is the focus of this review because it is more naturalistic than asking participants to pose facial expressions, more immersive and engaging than pictorial stimuli, and allows for more experimental control and standardization than emotional imaginings or interviews (Gross & Levenson, 1995).

Four hypotheses about the effect of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) on facial affective reactivity have been put forth in the literature: positive attenuation (less reactivity to positive stimuli), negative potentiation (more reactivity to negative stimuli), emotion context insensitivity (less reactivity to both positive and negative stimuli), and cultural norm violation (reactivity opposite of cultural expectancy). There is strong evidence from a variety of measures in support of the Positive Attenuation Hypothesis. However, there is no evidence in support of the Negative Potentiation Hypothesis and only tentative support for the Emotion Context Insensitivity and Cultural Norm Hypotheses. More research is needed before definite conclusions can be drawn about the role of cultural norms. Reactivity to positive emotion elicitation was found to be a good indicator of prospective functioning, whereas reactivity to negative emotion elicitation was found to be a good indicator of current psychosocial functioning.


Measure

Article

Positive Attenuation

Negative Potentiation

Emotion-Context Insensitivity

Cultural Norm

Electromyography

(Facial EMG)

Sakamoto et al. 1997

Yes*

-

-

No*

Kaviani et al. 2004

No

No

No

-

Rottenberg et al. 2005

Yes*

No

No

-

Emotion Facial Action Coding System (EMFACS)

Berenbaum et al. 1992

Yes*

No

No

-

Tsai et al. 2003

Yes*

No

No

Yes*

Renneberg et al. 2005

Yes*

No*

Yes*

-

Reed et al. 2007

Yes*

-

-

-

Emotional Expressive Behavior Coding System (EEB)

Rottenberg et al. 2002

No

No

No

-

Chentsova-Dutton et al. 2007

No

No

No

Yes*

Chentsova-Dutton et al. 2010

Yes*

-

-

Yes*

Computer-Based Facial Action Analysis

Schneider et al. 1990

No

No

No

-

Mergl et al. 2005

Yes*

-

-

-

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4 comments:

  1. Jeff GirardJanuary 7, 2011 at 12:47 PM

    Berenbaum, H., & Oltmanns, T. F. (1992). Emotional experience and expression in schizophrenia and depression. J Abnorm Psychol, 101(1), 37-44.

    Bylsma, L. M., Morris, B. H., & Rottenberg, J. (2008). A meta-analysis of emotional reactivity in major depressive disorder. Clin Psychol Rev, 28(4), 676-691.

    Chentsova-Dutton, Y. E., Chu, J. P., Tsai, J. L., Rottenberg, J., Gross, J. J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2007). Depression and emotional reactivity: variation among Asian Americans of East Asian descent and European Americans. J Abnorm Psychol, 116(4), 776-785.

    Chentsova-Dutton, Y. E., Tsai, J. L., & Gotlib, I. H. (2010). Further evidence for the cultural norm hypothesis: positive emotion in depressed and control European American and Asian American women. Cultur Divers Ethnic Minor Psychol, 16(2), 284-295.

    Clark, L. A., Watson, D., & Mineka, S. (1994). Temperament, personality, and the mood and anxiety disorders. J Abnorm Psychol, 103, 103-116.

    Cohn, J. F., Simon, T. Kreuz, Matthews, I., Yang, Y., Nguyen, M. H., Tejera Padilla, M., et al. (2009). Detecting depression from facial actions and vocal prosody. Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2009), 1-7.

    Coyne, J. C. (1990). Interpersonal processes in depression. In G. L. Keitner (Ed.), Depression and families (pp. 31-54). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.

    Gross, J. , & Levenson, R. W. (1995). Emotion elictation using films. Cognition & Emotion, 9, 81-108.

    Gross, J. J., Richards, J. M., & John, O. P. (2006). Emotion regulation in everyday life. In D. K. Snyder, J. A. Simpson, & J. N. Hughes (Eds.) Emotion regulation in families: Pathways to dysfunction and health (pp. 13-35). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

    Henriques, J. B., & Davidson, R. J. (2000). Decreased responsiveness to reward in depression. Cognition & Emotion, 14, 711-724.

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  2. Jeff GirardJanuary 7, 2011 at 12:47 PM

    Kaviani, H., Gray, J. A., Checkley, S. A., Raven, P. W., Wilson, G. D., & Kumari, V. (2004). Affective modulation of the startle response in depression: influence of the severity of depression, anhedonia, and anxiety. J Affect Disord, 83(1), 21-31.

    Lewinsohn, P. M., & Graf, M. (1973). Pleasant activities and depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 41, 261-268.

    Marsden, C. D., Tarsy, D., & Baldessarini, R. J. (1975). Spontaneous and drug-induced movement disorders in psychotic patients. In: D. F. Benson & D. Blumer (Eds.) Psychiatric aspects of neurologic disease (pp. 219-265). New York: Grune and Stratton.

    Mergl, R., Mavrogiorgou, P., Hegerl, U., & Juckel, G. (2005). Kinematical analysis of emotionally induced facial expressions: a novel tool to investigate hypomimia in patients suffering from depression. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry, 76(1), 138-140.

    Reed, L. I., Sayette, M. A., & Cohn, J. F. (2007). Impact of depression on response to comedy: a dynamic facial coding analysis. J Abnorm Psychol, 116(4), 804-809.

    Renneberg, B., Heyn, K., Gebhard, R., & Bachmann, S. (2005). Facial expression of emotions in borderline personality disorder and depression. J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry, 36(3), 183-196.

    Rottenberg, J., Gross, J. J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2005). Emotion context insensitivity in major depressive disorder. J Abnorm Psychol, 114(4), 627-639.

    Rottenberg, J., Kasch, K. L., Gross, J. J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2002). Sadness and amusement reactivity differentially predict concurrent and prospective functioning in major depressive disorder. Emotion, 2(2), 135-146.

    Sakamoto, S., Nameta, K., Kawasaki, T., Yamashita, K., & Shimizu, A. (1997). Polygraphic evaluation of laughing and smiling in schizophrenic and depressive patients. Percept Mot Skills, 85(3 Pt 2), 1291-1302.

    Schneider, F., Heimann, H., Himer, W., Huss, D., Mattes, R., & Adam, B. (1990). Computer-based analysis of facial action in schizophrenic and depressed patients. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci, 240(2), 67-76.

    Tsai, J. L., Pole, N., Levenson, R. W., & Munoz, R. F. (2003). The effects of depression on the emotional responses of Spanish-speaking Latinas. Cultur Divers Ethnic Minor Psychol, 9(1), 49-63.

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  3. C JohnstonJanuary 9, 2011 at 12:34 PM

    Interesting. Do you know if any of the studies also examined physiological reactions during the films?

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  4. Jeff GirardJanuary 10, 2011 at 12:34 AM

    Such reactions weren't the focus of my review, but lots of studies examined them. The Bylsma et al. 2008 paper provides a nice review of this.

    Interestingly, non-facial physiological measures tend to support the Emotion Context Insensitivity model. As a result, many of these studies assume that this hypothesis extends to facial reactivity as well, despite that not being supported in the film studies.

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