Elevated accuracy in recognition of subliminal happy facial expressions in patients with panic disorder after psychotherapy
Background: Individuals with anxiety disorders (ADs) often display hypervigilance to threat information, although this response may be less pronounced following psychotherapy. This study aims to investigate the unconscious recognition performance of facial expressions in patients with panic disorder...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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| Summary: | Background: Individuals with anxiety disorders (ADs) often display hypervigilance
to threat information, although this response may be less pronounced following
psychotherapy. This study aims to investigate the unconscious recognition
performance of facial expressions in patients with panic disorder (PD) posttreatment,
shedding light on alterations in their emotional processing biases.
Methods: Patients with PD (n=34) after (exposure-based) cognitive behavior
therapy and healthy controls (n=43) performed a subliminal affective recognition
task. Emotional facial expressions (fearful, happy, or mirrored) were displayed for
33 ms and backwardly masked by a neutral face. Participants completed a forced
choice task to discriminate the briefly presented facial stimulus and an uncovered
condition where only the neutral mask was shown. We conducted a secondary
analysis to compare groups based on their four possible response types under
the four stimulus conditions and examined the correlation of the false alarm rate for fear responses to non-fearful (happy, mirrored, and uncovered) stimuli with
clinical anxiety symptoms.
Results: The patient group showed a unique selection pattern in response to
happy expressions, with significantly more correct “happy” responses compared
to controls. Additionally, lower severity of anxiety symptoms after psychotherapy
was associated with a decreased false fear response rate with nonthreat
presentations.
Conclusion: These data suggest that patients with PD exhibited a “happy-face
recognition advantage” after psychotherapy. Less symptoms after treatment
were related to a reduced fear bias. Thus, a differential facial emotion
detection task could be a suitable tool to monitor response patterns and biases
in individuals with ADs in the context of psychotherapy. |
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| Item Description: | Gefördert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der UB Marburg. |
| Physical Description: | 9 Pages |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1375751 |