Objective: Bipolar patients have impairment in recognizing facial expressions of emotions even in remission. Only two thirds of remitted bipolar patients report adequate emotional functioning. Since disturbances in affective neurocircuitry are documented in pediatric bipolar disorder, they are associated with emotional dysregulation and social cognitive difficulties in bipolar youth. In this present study it is aimed to evaluate the impact of impaired recognition of facial emotions on psychosocial functioning in bipolar patients.
Methods: The study was carried out with a total of 91 bipolar patients, 63 in remission, 17 in manic episode and 11 in major depressive episode. The mean age was 39.9 and 58.2% of the group was female. Mean duration of the illness was 13.6 years and mean number of previous episodes was 7. For the evaluation of facial emotion recognition, Facial Emotion Identification (FEI) and Facial Emotion Discrimination (FED) Tests and for functioning, Bipolar Disorder Functioning Questionnaire (BDFQ) were used.
Results: Even though manic patients performed worse in FED Test, there were no differences between the groups in FEI Test. Patients have impairment in discriminating between happiness and surprise. More than half of the patients could not identify fear. There was no correlation between the FEI and FED Tests, and BDFQ. Patients with dysfunction in discriminating facial emotions had impaired social functioning but other domains of functioning did not differ.
Conclusions: Even though there is impairment in both identifying and discriminating facial emotions, this seems to have minimal impact on psychosocial functioning in bipolar patients.