Socio-demographic and Clinical Correlates of Facial Expression Recognition Disorder in the Euthymic Phase of Bipolar Patients

Objective: Bipolar patients show social cognitive disorders. The objective of this study is to review facial expression recognition (FER) disorders in bipolar patients (BP) and explore clinical heterogeneity factors that could affect them in the euthymic phase: socio-demographic level, clinical and changing characteristics of the disorder, history of suicide attempt, and abuse.Method: Thirty-four euthymic bipolar patients and 29 control subjects completed a computer task of explicit facial expression recognition and were clinically evaluated.Results: Compared with control subjects, BP patients show: a decrease in fear, anger, and disgust recognition; an extended reaction time for disgust, surprise and neutrality recognition; confusion between fear and surprise, anger and disgust, disgust and sadness, sadness and neutrality. In BP patients, age negatively affects anger and neutrality recognition, as opposed to education level which positively affects recognizing these emotions. The history of patient abuse negatively affects surprise and disgust recognition, and the number of suicide attempts negatively affects disgust and anger recognition.Conclusions: Cognitive heterogeneity in euthymic phase BP patients is affected by several factors inherent to bipolar disorder complexity that should be considered in social cognition study.