High-risk boys better able to detect depression in parents
Ariana Assaf
Daily Staff ReporterMay 22nd, 2013
If parents want to keep their bad moods to themselves, they’d better start avoiding their kids. A study performed by University researchers shows that children are even more perceptive of their parents’ bad moods than originally believed.
A study entitled “Facial emotion expression recognition by children at familial risk for depression” was published last October by University researchers Nestor L. Lopez-Duran and Kate R. Kuhlman, and Charles George and Maria Kovacs of the University of Pittsburgh.
The study suggests that boys whose parents suffer from depression recognize sadness more easily than low-risk boys, low-risk girls and high-risk girls.
For the study, children were identified as high-risk if at least one of their parents had been diagnosed with depression. Kuhlman said the researchers wanted to gain a sense of whether children with depressed parents process social information — in this case, the emotions of others — differently than other children.
“We wanted to examine if the high and low-risk kids differed in the level of intensity of facial expression that they needed before they could correctly identify the emotion,” Lopez-Duran, an assistant professor of psychology, added in an e-mail interview.
The study analyzed data on 104 children, 64 of whom were high-risk and 40 of whom were low-risk. As the children observed a picture of a neutral facial expression morph into an expression of sadness or anger, the study was able to determine that high-risk boys in particular were better able to recognize sadness — but not anger — in less intense facial expressions than their low-risk peers.
The participants in this study were followed for over 10 years, and data was recorded over the past two to three years, Lopez-Duran said.
The study is part of a wider research program being carried out at the University of Pittsburgh and led by Dr. Maria Kovacs, who studies how depression develops and is passed along through generations. The research aims to understand why children with depressed parents are more likely to develop depression themselves later in life.
Lopez-Duran said although the study did not involve the collection of facial expression recognition of positive emotions he said future studies could involve that.
Similarly, the study did not predict the participants’ likelihood to develop depression later in life as a result of their ability to recognize emotions.
The study will follow the children for years to come in order to determine if a link between sensitivity to sadness and risk of developing depression does in fact exist.
Kuhlman said the fact that high-risk boys are better at recognizing sadness than girls might partially explain why, generally, boys have a lower risk of developing depression than girls.
“Hopefully in the future, this piece of the puzzle will connect with other pieces that will help us to improve our ability to identify children at risk, provide better preventive interventions and develop better treatments for affected children and adolescents,” Lopez-Duran said.
Printed from www.michigandaily.com on Mon, 27 May 2013 14:26:25 -0400