Judging the Facial Expressions is Hard for People with Severe Depression

The depression can have many bad affects on the mental as well as the physical health of human and recent study has shown that the people who are suffering from severe depression find it really harder to interpret facial expressions as compared to the healthy people.

Image by Elja Vellekoop

The study got published in the august issue of the British Journal of Psychiatry and it was carried by a group of researchers from University of Otago in New Zealand. Almost 68 people have been studied who were suffering from severe depression and they were asked to take part in the facial expression recognition task.

The people were shown 96 different faces and all of them were displaying 5 basic emotions angry, happy, sad, fearful and disgusted expressions. After the study it was found that the normal group of people was quite good at recognizing the facial expressions of disgust as compared to those who have been reported of severe depression.

Researcher Professor Richard Porter, of the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago while talking about the study said that “The specific impairment we found in the ability of people with severe depression to recognize disgusted facial expressions has not been previously reported. However, disgust recognition has been shown to be impaired in patients with Parkinson’s disease who are not taking medication.”

Thus we can say that a new way has been found out that depression can also affect the power of recognition of people and even the simple facial expressions of disgust can’t be recognized in that situation.