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Bipolar disorder (BD) impacts around 1–2.4% of the world's citizens, causing significant declines in life quality and psychosocial functioning for many individuals. The primary objective of our research was to assess facial emotion recognition by employing a unique collection of dynamic virtual faces (DVFs). Data from one-hundred and ten participants were analysed, consisting of fifty-five BD patients and an equally large number of healthy matched controls. Each participant completed a single session comprising sociodemographic and clinical assessments, as well as a task for the recognition of emotions. The task involved virtual non-immersive reality, where participants viewed DVFs displaying the neutral expression and the six basic emotions on a 27" computer screen. After each DVF presentation, enrollees had to identify the underlying emotion by choosing from seven possible responses that were displayed at the bottom of the screen. Patients with BD demonstrated impaired facial emotion recognition skills, exhibiting lower accuracy rates and longer reaction times compared to their healthy counterparts. The most substantial differences were observed in recognising fear, disgust and sadness. Interestingly, individuals with BD exhibited better recognition of positive emotions than negative ones. Notably, factors such as psychopathology (including bipolar symptomology and affectivity), level of functioning and life quality did not show significant correlations with emotion recognition in BD patients. The recognition of the most dynamic faces was superior in healthy controls, and the presentation angle had no discernible impact on either group. This study confirmed that people with BD have trouble recognising affect across the entire spectrum. While our validation of the DVFs tool was successful, it is worth noting that research employing virtual reality in this domain remains relatively scarce. Therefore, further investigations using virtual reality tools are encouraged to enhance the methodological consistency of studies and yield more conclusive findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negative, mood-congruent cognitive bias described in depression, as well as excessive rumination, have been found to interfere with emotional processing. This study focuses on the assessment of facial recognition of emotions in patients with depression through a new set of dynamic virtual faces (DVFs). The sample consisted of 54 stable patients compared to 54 healthy controls. The experiment consisted in an emotion recognition task using non-immersive virtual reality (VR) with DVFs of six basic emotions and neutral expression. Patients with depression showed a worst performance in facial affect recognition compared to healthy controls. Age of onset was negatively correlated with emotion recognition and no correlation was observed for duration of illness or number of lifetime hospitalizations. There was no correlation for the depression group between emotion recognition and degree of psychopathology, excessive rumination, degree of functioning, or quality of life. Hence, it is important to improve and validate VR tools for emotion recognition to achieve greater methodological homogeneity of studies and to be able to establish more conclusive results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional response in aging is typically studied using the dimensional or the discrete models of emotion. Moreover, it is typically studied using subjective or physiological variables but not using both perspectives simultaneously. Additionally, tenderness is neglected in emotion induction procedures with older adults, with the present work being the first to include the study of physiological tenderness using film clips. This study integrated two separate approaches to emotion research, comparing 68 younger and 39 older adults and using a popular set of film clips to induce tenderness, amusement, anger, fear, sadness and disgust emotions. The direction of subjective emotional patterns was evaluated with self-reports and that of physiological emotional patterns was evaluated with a wearable emotion detection system. The findings suggest a dual-process framework between subjective and physiological responses, manifested differently in young and older adults. In terms of arousal, the older adults exhibited higher levels of subjective arousal in negative emotions and tenderness while young adults showed higher levels of physiological arousal in these emotions. These findings yield information on the multidirectionality of positive and negative emotions, corroborating that emotional changes in the adult lifespan appear to be subject to the relevance of the emotion elicitor to each age group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia is characterised by difficulty understanding the thoughts and intentions of other people. Misunderstandings could lead people to attribute hostility to others' actions. Theories suggest that we use our autobiographical memories to inform our understanding of other people but no study has examined the relation between memory and hostile attributions in schizophrenia. People with (n = 42) and without (n = 34) schizophrenia diagnoses completed The Ambiguous Intentions and Hostility Questionnaire (AIHQ) to assess their tendency to attribute hostility to other people's actions and the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) to assess their ability to recall specific positive and negative autobiographical memories. In linear regressions the interaction between diagnostic group and the proportion of specific negative memories participants retrieved explained significant variance in each AIHQ index. Follow-up correlation analyses showed that participants with schizophrenia who retrieved more negative memories also attributed greater hostility to other people's actions (r = 0.47) and reported that they would respond with greater aggression (r = 0.59). These correlations were in the opposite direction for controls. People with schizophrenia may use their memories for negative past events to understand the actions and intentions of other people, leading to attributions of hostility for otherwise benign actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]