Facial emotion recognition in major depressive disorder: a meta-analytic review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.06.053

Commentary

With major depressive disorder (MDD), patients often experience difficulties in social and interpersonal functioning, and deficits in emotional processing have been described as a possible cause of these.

Some studies have stated that MDD patients are associated with deficits in the recognition of facial emotions, but other studies have not been able to replicate this.

Therefore, this study investigated the accuracy of facial emotion recognition in MDD from 23 studies including 516 mood modulated/depressed participants and 614 normal control participants.

The assessment included several potential moderators including emotion type, symptom severity, patient status, diagnostic method, stimulus type, and stimulus duration.

Results showed that conditions that presented stimuli of longer duration resulted in lower accuracy levels for participants with mood dysregulation/depression compared to normal participants.

Limitations include the lack of studies examining gender identity, and other potential moderators.

The conclusion from these results is that there is a wide range of facial emotion recognition deficits in individuals suffering from monopolar depression. Therefore, it is stated that clinicians need to be aware of this and other studies that suggest widespread deficits in various forms of information processing, including attention, perception, and memory in depression.