Interaction of HPA axis genetics and early life stress shapes emotion recognition in healthy adults

For humans navigating a social world, facial expressions are a valuable source of information about other ’s emotional states and adequate behaviour in social interactions. Competency in inferring emotions from facial expressions (facial emotion recognition; FER) emerges already in infancy and continues to develop with increasing refinement until adolescence (Leppänen and Nelson, 2009). Early life st ress (ELS; i.e. conditions during childhood that threaten the emotional or physical well-being and exceed the child’s coping resources), however, affects this development (da Silva Ferreira et al., 2014).

Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - August 24, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Corinna Hartling, Yan Fan, Anne Weigand, Irene Trilla, Matti G ärtner, Malek Bajbouj, Isabel Dziobek, Simone Grimm Source Type: research