Impaired central processing of emotional faces in anorexia nervosa

To elucidate the potential relationship between classification of emotional faces and impaired central processing in eating disorders and to investigate the potential mediatory role of alexithymia and depression in this relationship. Visual-evoked potentials (VEPs) to emotional faces and classificat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychosomatic medicine 2008-07, Vol.70 (6), p.701-708
Main Authors: Pollatos, Olga, Herbert, Beate M, Schandry, Rainer, Gramann, Klaus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Affective Symptoms - psychology
Anorexia
Anorexia nervosa
Anorexia Nervosa - psychology
Brain
Classification
Cognition Disorders - diagnosis
Cognition Disorders - etiology
Cognition Disorders - psychology
Depressive Disorder - psychology
Eating disorders
Electroencephalography - statistics & numerical data
Emotions
Evoked Potentials, Visual
Expressed Emotion
Expressed emotions
Face
Face recognition
Facial Expression
Female
Humans
Mental depression
Mental Processes
Psychosomatic medicine
Recognition (Psychology)
Social functioning
Visual Perception
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Summary:To elucidate the potential relationship between classification of emotional faces and impaired central processing in eating disorders and to investigate the potential mediatory role of alexithymia and depression in this relationship. Visual-evoked potentials (VEPs) to emotional faces and classification performance were assessed in 12 anorexic females and matched healthy controls. Patients with anorexia nervosa showed no modulation of emotional face processing and displayed significantly increased N200 amplitudes in response to all emotional categories and decreased VEPs in response to unpleasant emotional faces in the P300 time range as compared with healthy controls. They also made more mistakes in emotional face recognition, in particular, for neutral, sad, and disgusted content. There are marked differences in evoked potentials and emotion recognition performances of patients with anorexia nervosa and controls in facial processing. Differences in brain dynamics might contribute to difficulties in the correct recognition of facially expressed emotions, deficits in social functioning, and in turn the maintenance of eating disorders.
ISSN:0033-3174
1534-7796
DOI:10.1097/PSY.0b013e31817e41e6