"Youngsters with pediatric bipolar disorder and healthy peers who have first-degree relatives with bipolar disorder share the same difficulty labeling facial emotions, NIMH researchers have discovered. Reporting in the February 2008 online edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, the scientists suggest that the facial emotion recognition impairment might be part of an inherited predisposition to the illness. Two related imaging studies traced face emotion labeling deficits in youngsters with pediatric bipolar disorder to weak connections and differences in activity of a brain circuit responsible for interpreting the meaning of social and emotional stimuli. Evidence suggested that the differences were stable traits, unrelated to effects of medications or mood states.
“Since we know more about the circuitry of basic processes like facial emotion processing than we do about the circuitry of complex psychiatric symptoms like mania and depression, it serves as a kind of Rosetta Stone for unearthing new clues,” explained Ellen Leibenluft, M.D., chief of the intramural NIMH Section on Bipolar Spectrum Disorders, Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program, which is conducting the studies.
Understanding such specific vulnerabilities in emotional processing may someday lead to improved treatment, diagnosis, and ultimately prevention of bipolar disorder in children, say the researchers."
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