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Clear indications of emotion depend on vivid stimuli

Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry, Munich, Germany

Keywords: Depression; emotion

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In this issue, recognition of emotion in depressed subjects is the focus of a paper by Kan et al (pp 1667–71).¹ In contrast to others, these authors report that recognition of positive and negative visual and prosodic emotions is not impaired in depressed patients. Differences in methodological approaches most likely explain the discrepancy. Whereas earlier authors relied on presentation of static visual images, Kan and colleagues used moving facial stimuli, and it appears that the nature (clarity) of the latter stimulus helped depressed subjects to correctly assess facial emotions.

Since the literature is abundant with reports on facial emotion recognition deficits in a variety of neurological conditions (e.g. stroke, temporal lobe epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease), neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g. schizophrenia, frontotemporal dementia, dementia of the Alzheimer type, autism) and other disorders (e.g. adolescent mood and anxiety disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, social phobia), the results of the study by Kan . . . [Full text of this article]