Neuroscience
Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen’s University in Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a heightened ability to detect other people’s emotions.
Kate Harkness and colleagues asked 43 depressed and non-depressed students to identify people's emotions from pictures that showed only the eye region of their faces. The 16 students who were classified as mildly to moderately depressed – based on their score on the Beck Depression Inventory – performed significantly better (78 per cent correct) on this emotion-recognition test relative to the 27 non-depressed controls (69 per cent correct). The depressed students didn’t take any longer over their answers and their superior performance was not due to their being more sensitive to negative emotions only. Also, there was no difference between the groups on two control tests, one of which involved detecting people’s gender just from pictures of their eyes.
The researchers replicated their finding in a second experiment that involved a larger sample of 81 students, and which controlled for the influence of anxiety using the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire. Again, students classified as mild to moderately depressed were better at recognising the emotions shown in pictures of people’s eyes.
Understanding other people’s feelings requires two stages, the authors said – the ability to detect emotions, followed by the ability to interpret and reason about those emotions. The researchers believe depressed people have an enhanced ability for the first stage paired with negatively biased functioning in the second stage.
“…hypersensitivity to others’ emotional states may have pathological implications simply because by being more sensitive, dysphoric and depressed individuals have more opportunities to deploy their negative biases in interpreting fleeting emotional reactions”, the researchers said.
_________________________________
Harkness, K.L., Sabbagh, M.A., Jacobson, J.A., Chowdrey, N.K. & Chen, T. (2005). Enhanced accuracy of mental state decoding in dysphoric college students. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 999-1025.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- 10 Studies That Show The Advantages Of Feeling Sad
As human beings, there's no avoiding feeling sad – as R.E.M. put it "everybody cries, and everybody hurts sometimes". We usually think of this as an unpleasant state, and for those of us who want to minimise our miserable moods as much as possible,...
- Biting On Pen Impairs People's Emotion Recognition
Have you ever noticed how, when two people are talking, they seem to mimic each other's facial expressions? Some psychologists say this is simply a case of emotions being contagious. However, others go further, arguing this mimicry plays a functional...
- Depression Linked With Impaired Spatial Ability
Depression has a detrimental effect on people's ability to find their way around, according to researchers. Husseini Manji and colleagues compared the performance of 30 depressed patients and 19 healthy controls on a virtual reality spatial navigation...
- Of Cats And Basketball Players - How We're Better At Recognising The Emotions Of Those We Identify With
Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves. Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University...
- The Sad Cingulate Before Cbt
The latest sad cingulate news is an fMRI study that examined the responsiveness of this region (subgenual cingulate cortex, aka Brodmann area 25) to emotional stimuli as a predictor of recovery in depressed patients receiving cognitive behavior therapy...
Neuroscience
Depression linked with ultra-sensitivity to other people’s emotions
Depressed people are normally thought of as being somewhat disengaged from the rest of the world, but psychologists at Queen’s University in Canada have found that mildly depressed students actually have a heightened ability to detect other people’s emotions.
Kate Harkness and colleagues asked 43 depressed and non-depressed students to identify people's emotions from pictures that showed only the eye region of their faces. The 16 students who were classified as mildly to moderately depressed – based on their score on the Beck Depression Inventory – performed significantly better (78 per cent correct) on this emotion-recognition test relative to the 27 non-depressed controls (69 per cent correct). The depressed students didn’t take any longer over their answers and their superior performance was not due to their being more sensitive to negative emotions only. Also, there was no difference between the groups on two control tests, one of which involved detecting people’s gender just from pictures of their eyes.
The researchers replicated their finding in a second experiment that involved a larger sample of 81 students, and which controlled for the influence of anxiety using the Mood and Anxiety Symptom Questionnaire. Again, students classified as mild to moderately depressed were better at recognising the emotions shown in pictures of people’s eyes.
Understanding other people’s feelings requires two stages, the authors said – the ability to detect emotions, followed by the ability to interpret and reason about those emotions. The researchers believe depressed people have an enhanced ability for the first stage paired with negatively biased functioning in the second stage.
“…hypersensitivity to others’ emotional states may have pathological implications simply because by being more sensitive, dysphoric and depressed individuals have more opportunities to deploy their negative biases in interpreting fleeting emotional reactions”, the researchers said.
_________________________________
Harkness, K.L., Sabbagh, M.A., Jacobson, J.A., Chowdrey, N.K. & Chen, T. (2005). Enhanced accuracy of mental state decoding in dysphoric college students. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 999-1025.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- 10 Studies That Show The Advantages Of Feeling Sad
As human beings, there's no avoiding feeling sad – as R.E.M. put it "everybody cries, and everybody hurts sometimes". We usually think of this as an unpleasant state, and for those of us who want to minimise our miserable moods as much as possible,...
- Biting On Pen Impairs People's Emotion Recognition
Have you ever noticed how, when two people are talking, they seem to mimic each other's facial expressions? Some psychologists say this is simply a case of emotions being contagious. However, others go further, arguing this mimicry plays a functional...
- Depression Linked With Impaired Spatial Ability
Depression has a detrimental effect on people's ability to find their way around, according to researchers. Husseini Manji and colleagues compared the performance of 30 depressed patients and 19 healthy controls on a virtual reality spatial navigation...
- Of Cats And Basketball Players - How We're Better At Recognising The Emotions Of Those We Identify With
Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves. Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University...
- The Sad Cingulate Before Cbt
The latest sad cingulate news is an fMRI study that examined the responsiveness of this region (subgenual cingulate cortex, aka Brodmann area 25) to emotional stimuli as a predictor of recovery in depressed patients receiving cognitive behavior therapy...