A Clinical Investigation of the Nonverbal Emotional Recognition in Depressed Patients
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Huang, Yu-Lien
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
This study aimed to empirically investigate the association between depression and nonverbal emotional recognition, and examine the possible deficits of nonverbal emotion recognition abilities in facial, paralanguage, and dual-channel expression in depressed patients. Literature review shows that there exists difference of nonverbal emotion recognition between depressed patients and normal controls. However, the results are inconclusive yet. Such inconsistent results probably arise from diverse samples, various tools, and different research designs of existent studies. Thus, through bettering the research design and assessment tools, the present study used clinically depressed patients and normal controls to examine two hypotheses: a) clinically depressed patients might display negative and positive biases in various emotion recognition of both facial and paralanguage expression; b) clinically depressed patients might show negative and sensitive tendency in dual-channel nonverbal emotion recognition task. The subjects consisted of 30 clinically depressed patients and 39 normal controls. The study used structured diagnostic interview for screening purpose, self-report symptom scale for assessing depressive tendency, computerized Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy 2-Taiwan version（DANVA2-TW）for assessing ability of nonverbal emotional recognition, and short form of WAIS-III for assessing IQ. Results revealed that, after controlling for IQ, there existed negative bias in nonverbal emotional recognition of facial and paralanguage expression in depressed patients. Specifically, depressed patients recognized sad emotions more accurately. They tended to misperceive nonverbal emotions as negative ones including sad and angry, whereas there was no difference in positive emotions. The results suggested that depressed individuals tended to correctly recognize negative emotions and negatively perceive other’s emotions in a mood-congruent manner. Besides, results revealed that, in dual-channel nonverbal emotion recognition, there was no difference in accuracy between depressed patients and normal controls. But, depressed patients tended to be more accurate in recognizing congruent sad and happy emotions and less accurate in congruent angry and fear emotions. In terms of their error pattern, depressed patients tended to misperceive congruent emotions as happy ones, and misperceive incongruent emotions as fear ones. Finally, some possible explanations about maintenance of depression were discussed from viewpoints of cognitive, interpersonal, and diathesis-stress models. Clinical applications as well as future research directions were also addressed.
Subjects
憂鬱
非語言情緒辨識
臉部表情
聲音語調
雙重管道
depression
nonverbal emotional recognition
facial expression
paralanguage expression
dual-channel expression
Type
other
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