SynthesisPsychological medicine2015
Meta-analysis of emotion recognition deficits in major depressive disorder.
Synthesis in Psychological medicine, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 126 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
126 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 339 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Association Between Emotion Recognition and Internalizing Problems in Children and Adolescents: A Three-Level Meta-Analysis.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2024Pooled it
- Insecure Attachment Orientation in Adults and Children and Negative Attribution Bias: A Meta-Analysis.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2023Pooled it
- An Emotion Recognition-Awareness Vulnerability Hypothesis for Depression in Adolescence: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2020Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Lithium effects on impulsivity and emotional processing.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Training emotion recognition in depression-An experimental study.The British journal of clinical psychology · 2025Trial
- Training reduces error in rating the intensity of emotions.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2022Trial
- Early effects of duloxetine on emotion recognition in healthy volunteers.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2015Trial
- Distinct Representations of Irrelevant Emotional Information in the Visual Network Are Associated With Psychopathology in Youth.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Decision dynamics of negative bias in subclinical depression during ambiguous facial emotion perception.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Altered acetylcholine modulations and corticoaccumbal pathway in P11-linked social dysfunction.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Negative bias in encoding and recall memory in depressed patients with inadequate response to antidepressant medication.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- The Relationship Between Emotion Processing Assessed by an Affect Rating Task and Depression Symptoms Following the Accelerated Sequential Dorsolateral-Dorsomedial Prefrontal rTMS Treatment.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- White Matter Abnormalities in Bipolar II and Unipolar Depression - Evidence from Fixel-Based Analysis.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- The Role of Alexithymia in Social Learning and Feedback-Driven Social Inferences.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Emotional Responses and Emotion Regulation in Drug-Free Women with Major Depressive Disorder.Noro psikiyatri arsivi · 2026Article
- Demographic and clinical influences on emotion prosody recognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Emotion regulation dynamics in empathy in young children.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Depressive symptoms are associated with impaired body affect recognition for neutral expressions.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Article
- Age-Related Positivity Bias in Emotion Recognition Is Linked to Lower Cognitive Performance and Altered Amygdala-Orbitofrontal Connectivity.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
66 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundMany studies have explored associations between depression and facial emotion recognition (ER). However, these studies have used various paradigms and multiple stimulus sets, rendering comparisons difficult. Few studies have attempted to determine the magnitude of any effect and whether studies are properly powered to detect it. We conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize the findings across studies on ER in depressed individuals compared to controls.
methodStudies of ER that included depressed and control samples and published before June 2013 were identified in PubMed and Web of Science. Studies using schematic faces, neuroimaging studies and drug treatment studies were excluded.
resultsMeta-analysis of k = 22 independent samples indicated impaired recognition of emotion [k = 22, g = -0.16, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.25 to -0.07, p < 0.001]. Critically, this was observed for anger, disgust, fear, happiness and surprise (k's = 7-22, g's = -0.42 to -0.17, p's < 0.08), but not sadness (k = 21, g = -0.09, 95% CI -0.23 to +0.06, p = 0.23). Study-level characteristics did not appear to be associated with the observed effect. Power analysis indicated that a sample of approximately 615 cases and 615 controls would be required to detect this association with 80% power at an alpha level of 0.05.
conclusionsThese findings suggest that the ER impairment reported in the depression literature exists across all basic emotions except sadness. The effect size, however, is small, and previous studies have been underpowered.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.