Nieratschker Vanessa, Brückmann Christof, Plewnia Christian
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Tübingen, Calwerstrasse 14, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2015 Nov 27;5:17349. doi: 10.1038/srep17349.
Recognition and correct interpretation of facial emotion is essential for social interaction and communication. Previous studies have shown that impairments in this cognitive domain are common features of several psychiatric disorders. Recent association studies identified CACNA1C as one of the most promising genetic risk factors for psychiatric disorders and previous evidence suggests that the most replicated risk variant in CACNA1C (rs1006737) is affecting emotion recognition and processing. However, studies investigating the influence of rs1006737 on this intermediate phenotype in healthy subjects at the behavioral level are largely missing to date. Here, we applied the "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test, a facial emotion recognition paradigm in a cohort of 92 healthy individuals to address this question. Whereas accuracy was not affected by genotype, CACNA1C rs1006737 risk-allele carries (AA/AG) showed significantly slower mean response times compared to individuals homozygous for the G-allele, indicating that healthy risk-allele carriers require more information to correctly identify a facial emotion. Our study is the first to provide evidence for an impairing behavioral effect of the CACNA1C risk variant rs1006737 on facial emotion recognition in healthy individuals and adds to the growing number of studies pointing towards CACNA1C as affecting intermediate phenotypes of psychiatric disorders.
面部情绪的识别和正确解读对于社交互动和交流至关重要。先前的研究表明，这一认知领域的损伤是几种精神疾病的常见特征。最近的关联研究将CACNA1C确定为精神疾病最有前景的遗传风险因素之一，先前的证据表明，CACNA1C中最常被复制的风险变异（rs1006737）影响情绪识别和处理。然而，迄今为止，在行为水平上研究rs1006737对健康受试者这一中间表型影响的研究基本上还没有。在此，我们应用了“从眼睛读懂心灵”测试，这是一种面部情绪识别范式，对92名健康个体组成的队列进行研究以解决这个问题。虽然准确率不受基因型影响，但与G等位基因纯合个体相比，CACNA1C rs1006737风险等位基因携带者（AA/AG）的平均反应时间明显更慢，这表明健康的风险等位基因携带者需要更多信息才能正确识别面部情绪。我们的研究首次为CACNA1C风险变异rs1006737对健康个体面部情绪识别的行为损害作用提供了证据，并增加了越来越多指向CACNA1C影响精神疾病中间表型的研究。
