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Adolescents with PTSD, conduct disorder misidentify anger, sadness

Among adolescents, PTSD was associated with falsely identifying angry faces as fearful and conduct disorder was associated with greater difficulty identifying sadness.

“Our findings suggest that exposure to stress and trauma can have acute emotional impacts that simply translate to misidentification of important affective cues,” Shabnam Javdani, PhD, of New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, said in a press release.

Shabnam Javdani

To assess emotional processing deficits among adolescents with PTSD and conduct disorder, researchers had 371 teens enrolled in therapeutic day schools complete a structured diagnostic assessment and the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy-2 facial affect recognition task.

Higher levels of PTSD were associated with less accurate identification of angry faces compared with fearful and sad faces.

PTSD symptoms were not associated with better performance on fearful faces than sad faces.

Researchers found a positive association between PTSD symptom severity and total number of false-positive identifications of fear, such that adolescents with greater PTSD symptoms were more likely to misidentify sad and angry emotions as fearful.

Further, PTSD symptoms were positively associated with the tendency to misidentify anger as fear and sadness.

Participants with higher levels of conduct disorder symptoms were more likely to misidentify sad faces than fearful faces.

Conduct disorder symptoms were not associated with deficits in identifying angry or fearful faces.

“Fear is particularly relevant for understanding PTSD, as the disorder has been associated with a ‘survival mode’ of functioning characterized by an overactive fight-or-flight response and increased threat perception,” Javdani said in the release. “Difficulty interpreting displays of sadness and misidentifying sadness as anger may contribute to the impaired affective bonding, low empathy, and callous behavior observed in teens with conduct disorder.” – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosure: Please see the study for a full list of relevant financial disclosures.