ArticleFrontiers in psychiatry2017
Earthquake Brain: Altered Recognition and Misclassification of Facial Expressions Are Related to Trauma Exposure but Not Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.
Article in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Emotion recognition in generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, skin picking disorder, trichotillomania, and posttraumatic stress disorder: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- The Impact of Perceptual Adaptation and Real Exposure to Catastrophic Events on Facial Emotion Categorization.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- The impact of intimate partner violence on facial emotion recognition among Korean baby boomers.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
- Emotion identification and emotion sensitivity following interpersonal and non-interpersonal traumatic experiences: Results from the AURORA study.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Article
- Attachment, Mentalizing and Trauma: Then (1992) and Now (2022).Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Examining the long-term cognitive effects of exposure to the Canterbury earthquakes in a resilient cohort.BJPsych open · 2022Article
- Retracted: 'We were on our knees long before COVID': How healthcare workers experienced the compassionate care model during COVID-19.Counselling and psychotherapy research · 2022Article
- Blocking facial mimicry during binocular rivalry modulates visual awareness of faces with a neutral expression.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Multimodal MRI Assessment of Thalamic Structural Changes in Earthquake Survivors.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Neural Correlates of Facial Expression Recognition in Earthquake Witnesses.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2019Article
- Impact of Oxytocin on the neural correlates of fearful face processing in PTSD related to childhood Trauma.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2019Article
- Post-earthquake Distress and Development of Emotional Expertise in Young Adults.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesThe study investigated facial expression recognition (FER) in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by exposure to earthquakes, and in particular whether people with this condition showed a bias toward interpreting facial expressions as threat-related emotions (i.e., as anger, fear, or disgust). The study included a trauma-exposed control group who had been similarly exposed to the earthquakes but had not developed PTSD. We hypothesized that individuals with PTSD would have increased sensitivity to threat-related facial emotions compared with the trauma-exposed control group. This would be shown by increased accuracy in recognition of threat-related emotions and the misinterpretation of neutral expressions to these emotions (i.e., misidentifying them as anger, fear, or disgust). The availability of a group of healthy controls from a previous study who had been tested on a similar task before the earthquakes allowed a further non-exposed comparison.
methodTwenty-eight individuals with PTSD (71% female, mean age 42.8 years) and 89 earthquake-exposed controls (66% female, mean age 50.1 years) completed an FER task, which featured six basic emotions. Further comparisons were made with 50 non-exposed controls (64% female, mean age 38.5 years) who had been tested before the earthquakes.
resultsThere was no difference in sensitivity to threat-related facial expressions (as measured by accuracy in recognition of threat-related facial expressions and the misinterpretation of neutral expressions as threatening) in individuals with PTSD compared with similarly earthquake-exposed controls. Supplementary comparison with an historical, non-exposed control group showed that both earthquake-exposed groups had increased accuracy for the identification of all facial emotions and showed a bias in the misclassification of neutral facial expressions to the threat-related emotions of anger and disgust.
conclusionThese findings suggest that it is exposure to earthquakes and repeated aftershocks, rather than the presence of PTSD that affects FER accuracy and misinterpretation. The importance of these biases in both PTSD and trauma-exposed controls needs further exploration and is an area for future research.
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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.