Recognition Of Facial Expressions Of Emotion In Panic Disorder

[Background] Fear is an emotion which helps to cope with danger. Patients with this disorder also have a different cognition of emotion, which includes panic-threat information processing. Facial expressions of emotion is the important presentation of interpretation of others’emotion state, which is often understood. The ability to accurately recognize facial expressions of emotion in others is an important social communication skill. When referring to the recognition of facial expressions of emotion, One study identified that the recognition of sadness and anger was significantly worse in panic disorder patients. One researcher showed that patients suffering from panic disorder with agoraphobia showed a recognition bias for safe facial expression such as happiness. However, two studies found no recognition deficits in panic disorder patients. None of these studies found an abnormality for recognizing fear-related emotions in panic disorder.Readers may see reasons for the inconsistencies in the above studies. Firstly, the facial stimuli used by the investigators were different. Secondly, one study design demonstrated lower statistical power with regard to the sample size of the panic disorder patients (n=6). Thirdly, none of the above-mentioned studies registered the facial expression of contempt. Contempt has been proven to be an independent emotion, similar to anger, disgust, happiness, and sadness. It is characterized by rejection and social exclusion of others, and people showing contempt often display overly controlling behavior and express anger.A recently developed picture pool, the Matsumoto and Ekman displays all7emotions including anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, and posers in the pictures include both people of Japanese decent and people of American decent.[Object] We intend to use Japanese and Caucasian facial expressions of emotion (JACFEE), which displays all7emotions including anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, to study Whether patients with panic disorder behave.differently or not when recognizing the facial expressions of emotions.[Methods]1. Participants21outpatients (men:n=10, women:n=11) were diagnosed as having panic disorder without agoraphobia by two experienced psychiatrists using the DSM-IV-TR criteria. Age years:26.76±9.10.Thirty-four healthy volunteers (men:n=14,women:n=20) were recruited from among students or were paid volunteers from the general population. Age years:26.74±6.74.There is no statistic difference in gender and age between groups.2. Procedures We tested21out-patients with panic disorder and34healthy subjects, with a photo set from the Matsumoto and Ekman Japanese and Caucasian facial expressions of emotion, which includes anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.3. StatisticsWhen the mean accuracies and intensities referring to the seven facial emotions in each group were treated as repeated measures, they were analyzed by a three-way ANOVA. In addition, as a post hoc test, the independent Student t test was employed to search for the group difference. The accuracy and the misreport in percentages for a given emotion in the two groups were analyzed by the x2test.[Results] When referring to the recognition accuracies of all the seven emotions, patients behaved differently from the healthy volunteers did. Compared to the healthy subjects, patients showed lower accuracies when recognizing disgust (0.57±0.35) and fear (0.47±0.28), but higher accuracy when recognizing surprise (0.91±0.09). When scrutinizing the individual performance of the recognition accuracy, significantly more patients correctly identified surprise compared to the healthy volunteers (x2=5.29, p<0.05). When referring to the intensity rating scores of all the seven emotions, patients behaved not statistical-differently from the healthy volunteers did.[Conclusions] Patients reported lower accuracies for fear and disgust and showed a higher vigilance for surprise. These results suggest that the altered specificity to these emotions leads to self-awareness mechanisms to prevent further emotional reactions in panic disorder patients.