Object: Bipolar disorder (BD) is associated with abnormalities in emotional competence. One of the main aspects of this competency is emotion recognition which is presented in the face. This study aimed to evaluate facial emotion recognition in adolescents with bipolar disorder when they are free of acute symptoms.
Method: Thirty patients diagnosed with BD aged 12 to 18 were selected from a large sample of consecutive admitted adolescents in Roozbeh hospital. They were compared with 30 matched normal developing adolescents who were recruited from mainstream schools at Tehran. All participants were evaluated using a facial emotion recognition task. The participants needed to recognize happy, sad, angry and neutral facial expressions The ANOVA was used to analyze the differences between the two groups in terms of emotion recognition variables.
Results: The patients with BD showed a significant deficit in recognizing emotions in general (p=.01) which was prominent in the angry faces. Their response time to recognize the facial expressions was longer compared to the normal individuals. This difference was significant in recognizing the happy and neutral faces (p<0.05).
Conclusion: This study suggests an inaccurate recognition of facial expressions in adolescents with BD, particularly for anger, as well as slowness in detecting emotions especially happiness.
Keywords: Bipolar disorder; adolescents; facial emotion recognition.