First Impact Factor released in June 2010 bs_bs_banner and now listed in MEDLINE! Early Intervention in Psychiatry 2015; ••: ••–•• doi:10.1111/eip.12212 Brief Report Neuroticism and facial emotion recognition in healthy adults Sanja Andric,1 Nadja P. Maric,1,2 Goran Knezevic,3 Marina Mihaljevic,2 Tijana Mirjanic,4 Eva Velthorst5,6 and Jim van Os7,8 Abstract 1School of Medicine, University of Results: A significant negative corre- Belgrade, 2Clinic for Psychiatry, Clinical Aim: The aim of the present study lation between the degree of neuroti- 3 Centre of Serbia, Faculty of Philosophy, was to examine whether healthy cism and the percentage of correct Department of Psychology, University of individuals with higher levels of neu- answers on DFAR was found only for Belgrade, Belgrade, 4Special Hospital for roticism, a robust independent pre- happy facial expression (significant Psychiatric Disorders Kovin, Kovin, Serbia; after applying Bonferroni correction). 5Department of Psychiatry, Academic dictor of psychopathology, exhibit Medical Centre University of Amsterdam, altered facial emotion recognition Amsterdam, 6Departments of Psychiatry performance. Conclusions: Altered sensitivity to the and Preventive Medicine, Icahn School of emotional context represents a useful Medicine, New York, USA; 7South Methods: Facial emotion recognition and easy way to obtain cognitive phe- Limburg Mental Health Research and accuracy was investigated in 104 notype that correlates strongly with Teaching Network, EURON, Maastricht healthy adults using the Degraded inter-individual variations in neuroti- University Medical Centre, Maastricht, Facial Affect Recognition Task cism linked to stress vulnerability and 8 The Netherlands; and King’s Health (DFAR). Participants’ degree of neu- subsequent psychopathology. Present Partners, Department of Psychosis roticism was estimated using neuroti- findings could have implication in Studies, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s early intervention strategies and College London, London, UK cism scales extracted from the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire staging models in psychiatry. Corresponding author: Assistant Professor and the Revised NEO Personality Nadja P. Maric, Department for Research Inventory. and Early Interventions in Psychiatry, Clinic for Psychiatry, Clinical Centre of Key words: facial emotion recognition, healthy adult, neuroticism. Serbia, Pasterova 2, PO Box 11000, Belgrade. Email: [email protected] Received 19 August 2014; accepted 9 November 2014 INTRODUCTION forms of psychopathology,3 including depression anxiety spectrum,4 substance use5 and psychosis Facial emotion recognition is considered to be one spectrum disorders.6 It is associated with negative of the crucial vectors of non-verbal communication bias in attention, interpretation and recall of infor- as most of our social interactions involve perception mation, increased reactivity and ineffective coping.3 of emotional information from the faces of others. The data from cognitive psychology have shown Although impaired facial emotion recognition is that individuals scoring high on neuroticism tend to well documented in depressed patients1 and to have negative interpretation bias,7,8 which repre- some extent in patients recovered from depression,2 sents the tendency to interpret ambiguous informa- it remains insufficiently clarified whether these tion in a threatening way. Cognitive theories suggest impairments are present before the first depressive that this biased information processing is common episode in depression-vulnerable groups. among depression anxiety spectrum disorders and In search for the cognitive causes of vulnerability might contribute to the risk of developing afore- to emotional disorders, facial emotion recognition mentioned disorders.8 Attending less to positive has received little attention in relation to neuroti- than to negative facial feedback might lead one to cism. Neuroticism is a personality trait that is con- appraise social interactions in a more negative sidered to be a risk factor associated with many manner, which can further elicit depressive © 2015 Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd 1 Neuroticism and emotion recognition symptoms.9,10 Previous studies examining the asso- extracted from the Eysenck Personality Question- ciation between neuroticism and facial emotion naire (EPQ-103)15 and a 48-item scale extracted from recognition in healthy individuals have found that the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI- certain emotion processing biases preceded the first R).16 Both scales were administered to overcome depressive episode and could in part mediate the methodological differences in neuroticism assess- vulnerability to depression.11,12 However, it remains ment seen in previous studies exploring the asso- unclear whether individuals scoring high on neu- ciations of neuroticism and facial expression roticism show decreased processing of positive or recognition.11,12 All participants completed EPQ increased processing of negative emotional infor- neuroticism scale during a testing session and after- mation, or perhaps both. It is noteworthy that these wards, on the same day, the NEO-PI-R neuroticism studies often had moderate sample sizes and inves- scale was sent to them by email to be returned tigated only those subjects with the highest and within 7 days (because the testing sessions were lowest neuroticism scores (i.e. extreme groups time limited). The total number of 72 participants approach), which limits generalizability of the (70.59%) completed and returned NEO-PI-R neu- results. roticism scale. The present study aimed to reconcile uncertain- The Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT),17 an ties seen in previous studies investigating the rela- accurate measure of the ability to match non- tionship of neuroticism and facial emotion emotional unfamiliar faces, was used to assess recognition11,12 and to clarify the pattern of facial general facial recognition ability. emotion recognition alterations related to neuroti- The Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task cism through measures applied in a large sample of (DFAR)18 was used to measure participants’ ability randomly selected healthy adults. Thus, in line with to recognize emotional facial expressions: neutral, the previous findings,11,12 we hypothesized that happy, fearful and angry. The photographs present- healthy individuals with higher degrees of neuroti- ing facial expressions were passed through a filter cism would exhibit poorer recognition of happy resulting in a reduced visual contrast by 30% to facial expression and/or better recognition of fearful increase difficulty and to enhance the contribution facial expression (i.e. bias away from positive of interpretation. The percentages of correct towards negative) than matched group scoring low answers per facial expression served as the main on neuroticism. outcome parameters of DFAR. A brief version of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III19 was used as a screening device of general METHODS intellectual ability. Participants Statistical analyses One hundred four healthy adults from a larger ‘European Network of Schizophrenia Networks The SPSS version 19 (Armonk, NY: IBM Corp). for the Study of Gene-Environment Interactions package was used for all calculations. As previous 20 21 22 (EUGEI)’13 sample were enrolled in this study. Inclu- research have shown that age, gender and IQ sion criteria were age > 18 years, IQ > 70, normal have impact on facial emotion recognition perfor- vision (or corrected to normal), no evidence of mance, partial correlation analyses were used to current/past history of psychiatric disorder and no assess the relationship between the participants’ recent history of alcohol or drugs abuse as verified degree of neuroticism and facial emotion recogni- by Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview.14 tion performance while controlling for their poten- The study was conducted in accordance with the tial confounding effect. All analyses on DFAR Declaration of Helsinki and its design was approved performance were adjusted for general facial recog- by the Medical Ethics Committee of the School nition ability (BFRT). After applying Bonferroni cor- of Medicine, University of Belgrade. All partici- rection for multiple comparisons (four pairwise pants gave their written informed consent and comparisons), P level 0.05 was set at the 0.0125 received compensation (vouchers) for their study value (two tailed). participation. RESULTS Measures To estimate participants’ degree of neuroticism we Demographic and sample characteristics of 104 used two neuroticism scales: a 30-item scale study participants are displayed in Table 1. 2 © 2015 Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd S. Andric et al. TABLE 1. Subjects’ characteristics (n = 104) emotion recognition performance. Therefore, we controlled for the potentially confounding factors: n (%) age, gender and IQ. Gender (female) 60 (57.70%) Mean ± SD Associations between facial emotion recognition Age (years) 29.18 ± 6.65 performance and the degree of participants’ neu- (range 18–45) roticism are shown in Table 2. IQ 106.33 ± 15.91 A significant negative correlation between the Neuroticism EPQ neuroticism scale 7.81 ± 4.42 degree of neuroticism and the percentage of correct ± scores NEO-PI-R neuroticism 70.53 20.66 answers on DFAR (controlled for age, gender, IQ and scale general facial recognition ability) was found only for EPQ, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire; NEO-PI-R, Revised NEO Personality happy facial expression (EPQ neuroticism