Abstract
Depression is a mood disorder that affects a large number of people worldwide and in Malaysia the number of people diagnosed with depression is on the rise. Impairments in emotion processing and regulation lead to depression. It was found that those with MDD had impaired emotion processing abilities especially in recognition of emotion. This study aims to investigate the difference in emotion processing between Malaysian Malays with and without MDD. There were 40 participants in this study (20 with MDD and the other 20 without MDD). This study consisted of three tasks. The first was the facial emotion recognition (FER) task; the participants were asked to look at pictures of Caucasians and Asians and determine their facial expressions. The second task involved identifying whether the point light display (PLDs) clips shown depicted a human movement or not. In the last task the participants were required to identify the emotional state of the PLD figures. There were significant differences between participants with MDD and participants without MDD in two of the tasks. Participants with MDD were less accurate than those without MDD in identifying emotion through facial expressions and through biological motion. The participants' condition did influence their ability to recognise emotion in facial expression and biological motion. Participants with MDD were found to have impaired emotion processing abilities.
Author Information
Sindhu Nair, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Firdaus Mukhtar, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
Laura Jobson, Monash University Clayton Campus, Australia
Hairul Anuar Hashim, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
Ruziana Masiran, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia
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