Author ' s personal copy Research paper Unseen positive and negative affective information in fl uences social perception in bipolar I disorder and healthy adults

Bipolar disorder is fundamentally a disorder of emotion regulation, and associated with explicit processing biases for socially relevant emotional information in human faces. Less is known, however, about whether implicit processing of this type of emotional information directly influences social perception. We thus investigated group-related differences in the influence of unconscious emotional processing on conscious person perception judgments using a continuous flash suppression task among 22 individuals with remitted bipolar I disorder (BD; AgeM1⁄430.82, AgeSD1⁄47.04; 68.2% female) compared with 22 healthy adults (CTL; AgeM1⁄420.86, AgeSD1⁄49.91; 72.2% female). Across both groups, participants rated neutral faces as more trustworthy, warm, and competent when paired with unseen happy faces as compared to unseen angry and neutral faces; participants rated neutral faces as less trustworthy, warm, and competent when paired with unseen angry as compared to neutral faces. These findings suggest that emotion-related disturbances are not explained by early automatic processing stages, and that activity in the dorsal visual stream underlying implicit emotion processing is intact in bipolar disorder. Implications for understanding the etiology of emotion disturbance in BD are discussed. & 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. Our daily lives are rife with emotional signals from others that we use to guide our judgments of them. For example, a happy face may signal that another person is warm, trustworthy and even competent and may lead us to consequently initiate a friendship or business transaction with them; by contrast, an angry or scowling face may signal an absence of these important social qualities, and we may choose to avoid people as a result. How do we form these powerful initial social impressions? Empirical evidence suggests that we often make these deep and long-lasting social judgments using our affective feelings over and above cues in the face as signs of a person's social demeanor and even stable personality characteristics (e.g., Anderson et al., 2012; Barrett and Bar, 2009). Indeed, we form these impressions quite rapidly and often outside of conscious (i.e., “unseen”) awareness. Much less is known about how affective information processing influences social perception in populations characterized by disturbances in affective and social processing. An ideal candidate to further explore this question is bipolar disorder (BD), a severe and chronic emotional disorder characterized by emotion dysregulation (Gruber, 2011; Johnson et al., 2007), including mood fluctuations that centrally include periods of abnormal and elevated mood (i.e., manic mood episodes) and many BD individuals also experience frequent periods of depressed and dysphoric mood (i.e., depressive mood episodes) (e.g., Leppänen, 2006). Importantly, BD is also characterized by impaired social functioning (e.g., Johnson et al., 1999; MacQueen et al., 2001b; Miklowitz, 2011). Examining affective influences on social perception in BD has the potential to shed insight into the origins of social difficulties in BD specifically, as well as potentially elucidating the role of emotion disturbance in impacting real-world social outcomes more generally. 1. Affective influences on person perception Affective information is a powerful source fromwhich we make social judgments about other people, influencing decisions about whether to approach or avoid them in everyday contexts. Most of these judgments often occur rapidly and outside of our conscious awareness. A recently developed and well-suited approach to assess the influence of unconscious affective information on