14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of the latest European study on the issue, it would appear that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is impairing sufferers' ability to detect and recognize facial expressions. This deprives the individuals of a critical path used to perceive and process social cues.
A vast proportion of the way in which we interact with others is dictated by social cues. These are signals that all of us perceive unconsciously, and that we use to extract more data from our environments than is immediately obvious to our five sense.
If PTSD patients lose their ability to interpret facial expressions as social cues, then there's no wonder that they find it more and more difficult to interact with other people. The thing is that this makes them ever more depressed, triggering a vicious circle that needs to be broken as soon as possible.
The work was carried out by Dr. Ervin Poljac from the International University of Sarajevo and the University of Leuven, together with Dr. Barbara Montagne from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center and professor Edward de Haan from the University of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.
Experts “investigated emotional processing in a group of war veterans with symptoms developed after prolonged exposure to combat-related traumatic events,” an Elsevier press release reads. Details of the work were published in the September issue of the esteemed scientific journal Cortex.
“PTSD is already known to be associated with difficulties in experiencing, identifying, and describing emotions, the new study however specifically examined the participants’ ability to recognize particular emotional facial expressions,” the statement adds.
Numerous psychiatric and neurological disorders, including social anxiety or Korsakoff’s syndrome, display symptoms that are indicative of the fact that people lose their ability to interpret key social cues. As such, advancements in understanding PTSD could apply to these conditions too.
One of the most interesting implications of the new work is that the data may be used to develop novel early detection methods. The latter would improve patients' quality of life, while decreasing the mounting costs associated with handling this disorder in national healthcare systems.
Experts entitled the new study “Reduced recognition of fear and sadness in post-traumatic stress disorder,” since these are the two main emotions that PTSD sufferers appear to be unable to detect and process properly, PsychCentral reports.