University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007 W Harrison, room 1062D, M/C 285, Chicago IL 60607, USA.
J Affect Disord. 2013 Jan 10;144(1-2):134-40. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2012.06.021. Epub 2012 Sep 7.
Pediatric Bipolar Disorder (PBD) is a debilitating condition associated with impairment in many domains. Social functioning is one of the disorder's most notable areas of impairment and this deficit may be in part due to difficulties recognizing affect in others.
In the present study, medication naïve youth with PBD were compared to age-matched healthy controls on their ability to (a) distinguish between categorical emotions, such as happiness, anger, and sadness on the Emotion Recognition Test (ER-40) and (b) differentiate between levels of emotional intensity on an adapted version of the Penn Emotional Acuity Task (Chicago-PEAT).
Results indicated that PBD youth misidentified sad, fearful, and neutral faces more often than controls, and PBD girls mislabeled 'very angry' faces more often than healthy girls. A mediation analyses indicated that these diagnostic group differences on emotion recognition were significantly mediated by irritability.
The Chicago-PEAT only examined variations in emotional intensity for the emotions happy and anger. Additionally, all results are correlational; therefore causal inferences cannot be made.
Supporting previous literature, the present findings highlight the importance of emotion recognition deficits in PBD individuals. Additionally, the irritability associated with PBD may be an important mechanism of this deficit and may thus represent an important target for treatment.
儿科双相情感障碍（PBD）是一种使人衰弱的疾病，会导致许多方面的障碍。社会功能是该疾病最显著的损害领域之一，而这种缺陷可能部分是由于难以识别他人的情绪。
在本研究中，与年龄匹配的健康对照组相比，药物-naive 的 PBD 青少年在以下方面的能力存在差异：（a）在情绪识别测试（ER-40）上区分快乐、愤怒和悲伤等类别情绪；（b）在宾夕法尼亚情感敏锐度任务（Chicago-PEAT）的改编版本上区分情绪强度的水平。
结果表明，PBD 青少年比对照组更频繁地错误识别悲伤、恐惧和中性面孔，而 PBD 女孩比健康女孩更频繁地错误标记“非常愤怒”的面孔。中介分析表明，情绪识别方面的这些诊断组差异主要由易激惹引起。
Chicago-PEAT 仅检查了快乐和愤怒这两种情绪的情感强度变化。此外，所有结果均为相关性，因此无法做出因果推断。
支持先前的文献，本研究结果强调了 PBD 个体情绪识别缺陷的重要性。此外，与 PBD 相关的易激惹可能是这种缺陷的一个重要机制，因此可能是治疗的一个重要目标。
