Genetic modulation of the response bias towards facial displays of anger and happiness

Gohier, B., Senior, C., Radua, J., El-Hage, W., Reichenberg, A., Proitsi, P., Phillips, M.L. and Surguladze, S.A. 2014. Genetic modulation of the response bias towards facial displays of anger and happiness. European Psychiatry 29 (4) , pp. 197-202. 10.1016/j.eurpsy.2013.03.003

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Investigating genetic modulation of emotion processing may contribute to the understanding of heritable mechanisms of emotional disorders. The aim of the present study was to test the effects of catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) val158met and serotonin-transporter-linked promoter region (5-HTTLPR) polymorphisms on facial emotion processing in healthy individuals. METHODS: Two hundred and seventy five (167 female) participants were asked to complete a computerized facial affect recognition task, which involved four experimental conditions, each containing one type of emotional face (fearful, angry, sad or happy) intermixed with neutral faces. Participants were asked to indicate whether the face displayed an emotion or was neutral. The COMT-val158met and 5-HTTLPR polymorphisms were genotyped. RESULTS: Met homozygotes (COMT) showed a stronger bias to perceive neutral faces as expressions of anger, compared with val homozygotes. However, the S-homozygotes (5-HTTLPR) showed a reduced bias to perceive neutral faces as expressions of happiness, compared to L-homozygotes. No interaction between 5-HTTLPR and COMT was found. CONCLUSIONS: These results add to the knowledge of individual differences in social cognition that are modulated via serotonergic and dopaminergic systems. This potentially could contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms of susceptibility to emotional disorders.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Medicine
Subjects:	R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0924-9338
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2019 17:47
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/76788

Citation Data

Cited 26 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item