Comprehensive psychiatry
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Comprehensive psychiatry · Mar 2008
Basic emotions and psychological distress: association between recognition of facial expressions and Symptom Checklist-90 subscales.
Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated universal similarity in the recognition and expression of basic emotions in facial expressions. The so-called mood congruency effect, observed primarily in clinical populations, implies that subjects with depressed mood tend to judge positive emotions as neutral and neutral faces as negative. The objective was to investigate whether a mood congruency effect can be detected in case of mild impairments among healthy subjects. First, it was hypothesized that subjects with mild psychiatric symptom distress have poorer performance in affective facial recognition in general. Second, it was also hypothesized that these subjects have poorer functioning in neutral face recognition and that they are prone to attribute negative emotions, for example, sadness and fear to neutral faces. Third, it was also assumed that people with mild psychiatric symptom distress have poor performance in recognizing positive emotions. ⋯ These findings support the notion that difficulties in emotion processing in general and in neutral face recognition, including a negative bias in particular, are strongly related to psychological distress and the severity of psychiatric symptoms in a healthy population.
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Comprehensive psychiatry · Mar 2008
Conduct disorder in referred children and adolescents: clinical and therapeutic issues.
Studies on referred children and adolescents with conduct disorder (CD) have relevant implications for prevention and treatment. We addressed this issue in a large sample of youths with CD, considering age at onset, sex, and response to treatments as variables. ⋯ Age at onset and sex may be critical variables for prognosis of CD. Psychosocial intervention can significantly improve the treatment response.