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Implicit facial emotion recognition of fear and anger in obesity

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A Correction to this article was published on 08 October 2020

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Abstract

Background

Previous evidence about facial emotion recognition capability in obesity is few and not conclusive.

Objective

We investigated the capability of female individuals affected by obesity to recognize the emotions of fear and anger through a facial emotion recognition task grounded on the implicit redundant target effect.

Methods

20 women affected by obesity and 20 healthy-weight women were enrolled. We administered an implicit facial emotion recognition task. Both reaction time and level of accuracy were computed. Moreover, the level of alexithymia was measured through the standard questionnaire.

Results

Selective difficulties in recognizing the emotion of fear were observed in participants with obesity, when their performance was contrasted with healthy-weight controls. Instead, they showed the implicit redundant target effect when anger was the target. However, the two groups reported globally similar scores at the standard questionnaire relative to the level of alexithymia.

Conclusions

Our result might agree with the hypothesis about affected individuals’ difficulties in being attentive to negative facial emotions, and specifically in the case of fearful expression. This study might encourage future research in which emotional processing will be investigated through subjective judgments and implicit/objective measurements.

Level I

Experimental study.

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Change history

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Funding

No funding was received in supporting this study.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Istituto Auxologico Italiano, IRCCS, U.O. di Neurologia e Neuroriabilitazione, Ospedale San Giuseppe, 28824, Piancavallo, VCO, Italy

    Federica Scarpina & Alessandro Mauro

  2. “Rita Levi Montalcini”, Department of Neurosciences, University of Turin, 10124, Turin, Italy

    Federica Scarpina & Alessandro Mauro

  3. Istituto Auxologico Italiano, IRCCS, Laboratorio di Psicologia, Ospedale San Giuseppe, 28824, Piancavallo, Italy

    Giorgia Varallo, Gianluca Castelnuovo & Enrico Molinari

  4. Psychology Department, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 20123, Milan, Italy

    Giorgia Varallo, Gianluca Castelnuovo & Enrico Molinari

  5. Istituto Auxologico Italiano, IRCCS, U.O. di. Riabilitazione Osteoarticolare, Ospedale S. Giuseppe, 28824, Piancavallo, Italy

    Paolo Capodaglio

Authors
  1. Federica Scarpina
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  2. Giorgia Varallo
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  3. Gianluca Castelnuovo
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  4. Paolo Capodaglio
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  5. Enrico Molinari
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  6. Alessandro Mauro
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Contributions

FS designed the study, managed the literature searches, performed the experiment and the statistical analyses, wrote the first draft of the manuscript. GV recruited participants and provide the psychological assessment. PC and AM supervised the recruitment. EM and GC supervised the psychological assessment. AM supervised the entire project. All authors contributed to and have approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Federica Scarpina.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest for this study.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by Ethics Committee of the I.R.C.C.S Istituto Auxologico Italiano (Italy) and it was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Informed consent

Subjects participated voluntarily and they gave informed written consent.

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Scarpina, F., Varallo, G., Castelnuovo, G. et al. Implicit facial emotion recognition of fear and anger in obesity. Eat Weight Disord 26, 1243–1251 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40519-020-01010-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40519-020-01010-6

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