The facial expression of emotions recognition in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome

Background. A facial expression of emotions recognition is one of the basic psychological abilities. Sex steroids are able to strongly modulate the process of interpretation of facial expressions, as it has been shown in Turner syndrome patients.

Objective. The aim of this study was the assessment of ability to interpret the facial emotions in women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Methods. Participants completed a visual emotional task in which they were asked to recognize the emotion expressed of 80 randomly chosen facial expressions from NimStim set (Tottenham et al., 2009). With dedicated software we were able to assess the accuracy of patients facial emotion recognition (in comparison to NimStim validation set) and time required to provide the answer. Patients with psychotic personality have been excluded using Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ). All the patients underwent also hormonal tests including gonadotropins, estradiol and androgen concentrations.

Patients. 80 women diagnosed with PCOS and hyperandrogenemia were included to the study. The control group consisted of 60 healthy, euovulatory women matched by age.

Intervention. Each patient underwent visual emotional and EPQ tasks using specifically designed software.

Main outcome measures. The accuracy rate (AR) and time required to recognize emotion (TE) of following emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, calm and neutral has been measured.

Results. Patients with PCOS showed significantly reduced AR for calm (0.76¬+/-0.09) and surprise (0.67+/-0.18) emotions in comparison to controls (0.81+/-0.09, 0.79+/-0.08 respectively). The TE for the anger was higher in PCOS group. Estradiol concentrations showed a statistic tendency (p=0.07) for correlation with TE for the happiness in controls.

Conclusions. In this study we showed for the first time that patients affected by hyperandrogenism shows signs of disturbed recognition of facial expression of emotions.