A smile or frown can show more than just a person’s mood — so much so that a Binghamton University researcher is trying to find a connection between facial expressions and depression in women.
For the past two years, Mary Woody, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate studying clinical psychology, has been working on a project called Moods in Mothers and in Children (MMIC). The study examines information processing systems as indicators for depression in women and their children.
“Depression is a highly recurrent disorder that is associated with significant impairment in quality of life, productivity and interpersonal relationships,” Woody said. “Despite this clear public health significance, little is known about the specific mechanisms underlying risk for recurrence of depression. My hypothesis is that it might have something to do with information-processing biases, which are biases in how people pay attention to emotional information in their lives.”
Woody’s work is conducted at the BU Mood Disorders Institute (BMDI). According to the BMDI Director Brandon Gibb, the center’s research focuses primarily on cognitive, genetic and environmental risk factors in the development of depression and anxiety in people of all ages.
“Because depression is such a complicated disorder, an explicit goal of the Mood Disorders Institute is to look at how influences across multiple levels of analysis combine to increase risk,” Gibb said. “So we look at genetic, epigenetic, molecular, physiological, neural and environmental influences and how these may change across development.”
Woody studied 160 women for the study, 57 of whom had a history of depression. She showed each woman a series of two faces, one with a neutral expression and one with an angry, sad or happy expression. The results showed that women with a history of depression moved their eyes towards the face with an angry expression. According to Woody, this meant that they are at a greater risk for developing depression again in the next two years.
Woody said she is now following up this research by examining potential reasons why emotional faces may increase risk for depression among women with a history of depression, which entails seeing what kind of faces “distract” women. These studies are also conducted with a group of women, half of which had experienced depression in the past. They are shown different kinds of faces while using a computer and their “negative” reactions, as gauged by heart rate, are used to gauge the relationship between reactions and a tendency for depression.
According to Gibb, the research that Woody is conducting to understand why depression is such a recurrent disorder is important in finding out reasons for depression.
“We know that up to 80 percent of people who have an initial episode of depression and then recover will have another episode of depression at some point in the future,” Gibb said. “But, we do not really understand the mechanisms of this risk. Mary’s research focuses on understanding cognitive and physiological mechanisms of risk. Mary has found that the ways in which people may pay attention to what is occurring around them may be one important mechanism of risk.“
Woody said she is hoping her work will go toward discovering ways to cure depression.
“My hope is that our research can help identify women at greatest risk for recurrent depression and inform new therapy techniques that use computer or smartphone games to target and retrain their attention away from negative emotion information,” Woody said. “These techniques have been effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders and there is exciting, novel work testing this as a treatment for depression.”