Facial emotion expression recognition by children at familial risk for depression: high‐risk boys are oversensitive to sadness

Offspring of depressed parents are at a greatly increased risk for mood disorders (for reviews, see Beardslee, Versage, & Giadstone, 1998; Goodman et al., 2011), with up to 50% of them developing major depression by the end of their adolescence (Weissman et al., 2005, 2006; Williamson, Birmaher, Axelson, Ryan, & Dahl, 2004). Consequently, efforts to identify potential mechanisms of risk have focused on examining how children at familial-risk for depression differ from their low-risk peers across multiple domains, such as genetics (e.g., Singh et al., 2011), parenting (e.g., Wilson & Durbin, 2010), and intra-individual factors (e.g., Silk, Shaw, Skuban, Oland, & Kovacs, 2006). Among these factors, the identification of atypical cognitive processes in high-risk children has received significant attention during the last decade. For example, studies have reported that high-risk children and adolescents are characterized by negatively biased attention to experimental stimuli (Joormann, Talbot, & Gotlib, 2007; Kujawa et al., 2011), memory recall (Mannie, Barnes, Bristow, Harmer, & Cowen, 2009), and attributions (Dearing & Gotlib, 2009). In the current study we examined another information processing domain, perceptual sensitivity to emotion cues in facial expressions, as a potential mechanism of risk that characterizes the offspring of depressed parents. Research on information processing biases in psychopathology has often focused on examining attentional biases towards facial expressions of specific emotions, including biases in attention allocation/deployment, disengagement, and avoidance (see Cisler & Koster, 2010 for a recent review). One mechanism believed to contribute to some of these biases is enhanced feature detection capacity (Ohman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001). That is, some attentional biases can occur, at least partially, as the result of an enhanced capacity to rapidly identify subtle emotional features at a perceptual, automatic and pre-awareness level (Ohman & Mineka, 2001), which in the case of facial expressions, depends upon the correct detection and decoding of facial features (Prkachin, 2003). In depression, such attentional biases appear to be specific to the identification of sad faces. For example, depressed adults display attentional biases toward dysphoric faces (Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004), and a tendency to label seemingly neutral expressions as sad (e.g., Gollan, Pane, McCloskey, & Coccaro, 2008; Gur et al., 1992; Surguladze et al., 2004). These biases are believed to maintain depressive symptoms by increasing depressed persons’ awareness of the negative affect of others (whether real or perceived), which then negatively impacts their interpersonal functioning (Gotlib et al., 2004). For example, higher perceived frequency of negative affect in others may help maintain the depressed person’s negative schemas about their social world. However, it is unclear whether these biases are due specifically to enhanced sensitivity to subtle traces of sadness because most previous adult studies have not examined perceptual sensitivity directly. Furthermore, it is also unknown whether such perceptual biases only maintain depression or are capable of inducing it. Thus, one important question is whether enhanced sensitivity to sadness is present in high-risk individuals before they become depressed. There is some evidence that both at-risk and depressed youth display attentional bias toward sad faces (Hankin, Gibb, Abela, & Flory, 2010; Joormann et al., 2007; Kujawa et al., 2011). For example, Hankin et al. (2010) compared attentional biases to various facial expressions (e.g., sad, fearful) in depressed, anxious, comorbid and non-affected children using a modified version of the computer-based dot-probe paradigm (MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986). They found that depressed youth had difficulty disengaging from clearly identifiable sad faces while anxious youth had difficulty disengaging from fearful faces. However, evidence of perceptual sensitivity to emotion features in facial expressions is more scant. In fact, we are not aware of any study of perceptual sensitivity to facial expressions with depressed youth and the sole study of high-risk youth produced surprising results. Specifically, Joormann, Gilbert, and Gotlib (2010) examined perceptual sensitivity to sad faces among high-risk adolescent girls (mean age: 12.5 years; range: 9-14 years) who themselves had never been depressed but had mothers with multiple prior episodes of a depressive disorder. The authors found that high-risk girls displayed lower perceptual sensitivity to sad facial expressions, compared to their low-risk peers. That is, when viewing emotionally evocative facial expressions, high-risk girls needed more intense displays of sadness in order to correctly identify that affect. Such under-sensitivity to sad cues among girls at high-risk for depression is contrary to expectations given the findings on attentional biases to facial expressions in similar pediatric populations (Hankin et al., 2010; Joormann et al., 2007; Kujawa et al., 2011) and facial identification biases in depressed adults (e.g., Gollan et al., 2008; Gur et al., 1992; Surguladze et al., 2004). Some methodological differences may account for their surprising finding. Joormann et al. (2010) utilized an innovative experimental protocol that involved watching video sequences of faces morphing from neutral to a target emotion. Participants were asked to respond as soon as they could identify the target emotion. Therefore perceptual sensitivity was assessed using a reaction time task, which raises the possibility that their findings may reflect group differences in reaction time to emotional stimuli instead of perceptual sensitivity, which has been observed in depressed adults (Gollan et al., 2008). In addition, the Joormann et al. (2010) sample included only females who were high-risk but had low levels of depression despite their relatively older age (Mage = 12.5). Although to our knowledge no study has examined sex differences in perceptual sensitivity in at risk youth, there is evidence of sex differences in factors that characterize youth at familial risk for depression (e.g., Silk et al., 2006). This raises the possibility that their findings were specific to older girls but not boys. Therefore, in this study we compared youth (boys and girls aged 7 to 13) at high and low familial risk for depression in their ability to identify subtle features of facial expressions of sadness using a standard forced-choice feature detection paradigm (i.e., Pollak & Kistler, 2002) that more closely matches the procedures used with depressed adults (Gollan et al., 2008; Surguladze et al., 2004). We also examined perceptual sensitivity to anger as well as the ability to distinguish between anger and sadness in order to control for the specificity of the effect to sadness and the possibility of a sadness labeling bias, respectively. Based on findings with depressed adults, we hypothesized that our young, high-risk sample would show enhanced perceptual sensitivity to sad but not to angry cues in facial expressions. Specifically, we expected that high-risk children will identify sadness at lower levels of emotional intensity than low-risk peers (after controlling for the effects of age and depressive symptoms). Given the paucity of research examining sex differences in perceptual sensitivity to facial expressions in high-risk youth, our sex comparisons are exploratory.