Coming Face-to-Face with Depression: The Impact of Symptom Severity on Emotion Perception
Open Access
- Author:
- Sigler, Jordan
- Area of Honors:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Suzy Scherf, Thesis Supervisor
Frank Gerard Hillary, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Major Depressive Disorder
Emotion Perception
Symptom Severity
Facial Processing - Abstract:
- Emotion perception plays a critical role in our face-to-face social interactions. Although many may not realize it, emotions provide nonverbal signals to the affective state of others, which can influence our response and behavior during interpersonal exchanges. However, many disorders, such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), may have a detrimental impact on the ability to perceive and interpret facial expressions accurately. Prior research suggests that individuals with a history of MDD often exhibit a negative bias while observing happy, neutral, and ambiguous facial expressions. We wanted to know if this bias extends to subclinical levels of MDD as well. Our study aimed to investigate if perceptual sensitivity to emotional expressions differed in adult participants at varying levels of depressive symptom severity. Using a perceptual staircase procedure, we determined the lowest threshold level at which participants were able to detect different expressions. We then utilized mixed linear models to measure the relationship between symptom severity and sensitivity to the expressions. The findings suggest a marginal negative effect of symptom severity on sensitivity to sad expressions and a significant positive effect on sensitivity to fearful expressions. Overall, symptom severity only seemed relevant when perceiving negative emotions. There also did not appear to be significant group differences when factoring in emotional complexity. While the results support the negative bias theory to some extent, we cannot reach a sound conclusion, given that the effects on sadness were only marginal.