Abstract
Recent studies suggest that impaired processing of facial affect has a familial component and may reflect a marker of liability to psychopathology. This study investigated whether facial affect processing is impaired in offspring with parental panic disorder (PD). Psychiatrically healthy children with parental PD (n = 51) and age and sex matched control children with no parental psychopathology (n = 51) completed a standard facial recognition task. High-risk children made more errors recognizing fearful faces than controls and misattributed fear and angry facial affect as surprised. High-risk females also made more errors recognizing sad faces compared to low risk females and misattributed sadness as fear. No difference emerged for self-rated anxiety while viewing facial expressions. However, self-rated anxiety correlated moderately with misrecognition of fearful facial affect in high-risk children. Overall, our data suggest that the ability to correctly recognize negative facial emotions is impaired in children with parental PD. Further research is needed to confirm if these deficits represent a trait marker of liability for PD and elucidate the contribution of genetic and family environmental influences.
Highlights
The ability to accurately decode facial emotions is important for adaptive social behaviors, emotional development, and well-being [1, 2]
Based on findings that patients with panic disorder (PD) exhibit deficits in recognizing negative valence facial affect [41,42,43], especially threat-related expressions which are postulated to signal threat in the environment via activation of the amygdala [29], we examined whether high-risk offspring would exhibit deficits in recognizing threat-related emotions relative to low-risk controls
Facial recognition data were available for 51 HR children from 38 families with parental PD
Summary
The ability to accurately decode facial emotions is important for adaptive social behaviors, emotional development, and well-being [1, 2]. Developmental studies indicate that accuracy and speed in recognizing facial affect improve from childhood through early adulthood, plausibly due to maturation of brain structures associated with facial emotion processing and social experiential factors [3,4,5]. Individual differences in the ability to detect facial emotions accurately have been documented, especially for complex emotions such as fear and anger. Twin studies suggest that genetic and environmental influences likely account for individual differences in processing facial affect [6,7,8]. The role of specific genes and mechanisms are largely unknown, available molecular genetic data has linked facial affect processing with genes encoding neurotransmitter receptors, such catecholamine and serotonin receptors [9,10,11,12,13]
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