The processing of facially expressed emotion in persons with self-reported depression and anxiety
Year: 1989
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The purpose of the present study was to assess whether persons who report significant levels of anxious and depressed symptomatology process facial expressions in a manner different from normal control subjects.Earlier studies tested for putative deficits in the accuracy of qualitative identification of emotion by depressed persons.Procedures were included to investigate the existence of such deficits.Additionally, employing a model which posits that emotions can be represented along two orthogonal dimensions of arousal and pleasantness, procedures were included for assessing whether anxious and depressed persons differ from normal controls in the levels of arousal and pleasantness that they assign to others' facial expressions of different emotions.As hypothesized, although anxious and anxious, depressed subjects ascribed higher levels of arousal to others' facial expressions, they appeared to be no less accurate than normal control subjects in the accuracy with which they categorized facial expressions as representing particular emotions.In contrast to the differences noted in perceived arousal, multidimensional scaling procedures illustrated that all three groups were very similar in terms of the "mental maps" they form of the interrelations between different emotions.Results have interesting implications in that they call into question past findings of qualitative emotion perception i i i differences between depressed and normal persons.In addition, they suggest that it is imperative to include an anxious control group in any study which seeks to assess the emotion processing of depressed populations.
Source: Summit (Simon Fraser University)
Author: Jonathan C Mayhew
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W424534178