Research paper on facial emotion recognition in bipolar disorder patients using the TREF-54g test, highlighting impairments in recognizing emotions, particularly anger and contempt.
Extract
[...] Facial Expression Recognition Troubles in Bipolar Disorder Patients, Excerpt - Coll. (2025) Article 'Research paper Impairments in facial expression recognition in patients with euthymic bipolar disorders using the facial emotions recognition test' Nicolas Franck, Lisa Blecha, Amine Benyamina, Marie-Cécile Bralet, Alain Dervaux (2025) DOI : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2024.11.016 Context of the article: Cognitive impairments in individuals with bipolar disorder are well-documented. Various studies demonstrate that the recognition of emotional facial expressions (FER) is altered in bipolar disorder patients. However, studies are highly divided and the methods used do not achieve scientific consensus due to the lack of use of color faces with variable intensities, a method recommended by the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. [...]
[...] The differences between the types of bipolarity remain very low since only the recognition of contempt appears more difficult for bipolar patients of type I compared to those of type II. In conclusion, people with bipolar disorders in the euthymic phase have more difficulty recognizing facial emotions, particularly in differentiating anger and contempt. The use of TREF-54g has proven itself in this study and is reliable. The study establishes clinical thresholds to define alterations but this study remains limited to a restricted panel and does not take into account a complete neurocognitive evaluation. [...]
[...] This test allows measuring the detection thresholds and identification error rates of the different emotions. Indeed, clinical thresholds of alteration (score ?60.2%) and mild alteration (score ?65.9%) have been characterized in relation to the observed standard deviations with respect to the control group. Results and conclusions: These tests allowed establishing scores of alteration of facial emotion recognition. The study concludes that patients with bipolar disorders have more difficulty recognizing emotions compared to healthy patients. Their accuracy is 64.7% and for healthy patients it reaches 71.1%. [...]
