Altered recognition of fearful and angry facial expressions in women with fibromyalgia syndrome: an experimental case–control study 2022 Scarpina

Abstract

Evidence relative to facial emotion recognition and the role played by alexithymia in fibromyalgia syndrome is rare and heterogeneous. In this work, we investigated this ability in fibromyalgia investigating the implicit behaviour in the facial emotion recognition task, focusing on fear and anger.

Twenty women with fibromyalgia and twenty healthy women as controls performed a facial emotion recognition of fearful and angry expressions. Their implicit behaviour was scored in accordance with the redundant target effect. The level of alexithymic traits through a standard psychological questionnaire and its effect on behavioral performance were also assessed. Participants affected by fibromyalgia reported a lower level of accuracy in recognizing fearful and angry expressions, in comparison with the controls. Crucially, such a difference was not explained by the different levels of alexithymic traits between groups. Our results agreed with some previous evidence suggesting an altered recognition of others’ emotional facial expressions in fibromyalgia syndrome. Considering the role of emotion recognition on social cognition and psychological well-being in fibromyalgia, we underlined the crucial role of emotional difficulties in the onset and maintenance of the symptoms life-span.

Open access, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25824-9

 

Let's throw some mud at people with fibromyalgia and see if any of it sticks.

 

You can not say anything about ‘altered’ perception unless you tested the same people pre onset merely indicate they are different from the norm, and healthy subjects are not necessarily a relevant control for a chronically ill group, a comparably disabled control group with a distinct medical condition should be a basic requirement.

[added - also there is not any evidential justification that poorer recognition of facial expressions is a negative, it could equally well be a positive adaptation to a difficult situation. Alternatively it could be an irrelevant side effect unrelated to the onset or the maintenance of the condition, for example I have gone from reading four or five books a week pre my ME onset, to struggling to read one book a year, however I do not claim this is causal in the onset nor a contributory factor to maintaining my ill health, and I certainly do not expect intervention aimed at improving my reading skills to have any impact on my ME, beyond the potential cost of such intervention triggering PEM. ]

 

Many of these facia1 recognition tests are timed (e.g. photos are f1ashed for say 15 seconds each), so if you have a s1ow processing speed you might not have time to make an accurate judgment. As someone with autism, ADHD and dys1exia I find this to be the case during such tests. If I'm a11owed extra time then I process things much more accurate1y.

This is one reason I can recognise facia1 expressions when just observing one other person impersona11y, but not if I have to engage with them (for examp1e, whi1e having a conversation). I am sure that the cognitive and physica1 exertion/over1oad p1aces simi1ar demands on peop1e with any energy 1imiting condition, even without any neurodiversity cognitive processing issues.

 

Medicine has lost any credibility to laugh at pseudoscience. This is a joke paper except the joke is everyone involved in its production and publication. I'm not even sure medieval alchemists did stuff as ridiculous as this. They at least had genuine ignorance as an actual justification and it was reasonable to look at what can be done through chemistry before anyone understood physics.

What an incredible waste of public resources. It's outrageous that academic funding is wasted on this pointless nonsense running around in circles doing nothing of value when real research efforts keep being denied.

 

Do any researchers actually work on finding causes and treatments for fibro? You know, things that might actually help? I've heard it called incurable. Could that partly be from the lack of good research into this condition?

 

Having decided that there is no cause, it would indeed be weird to research a cause. Hence why the cause is not being researched.

At this point the very monopoly of medicine needs to be called into question. If they flat out refuse to do some of their job, fine, but they can't be in control of it all to the point of blocking necessary efforts out of myths and spite.

Often people will use the analogy of how replacing the pilot in mid-flight with one of the passengers would be stupid, but this is a case where the plane is crashing straight down but the pilot insists that his broken instrument showing he's perfectly horizontal is right and what's false is what the windscreen is showing: reality.

In this case definitely tie the pilot up and try to work it out. Either medicine can be a monopoly and fulfil its obligations, or medicine has to be significantly liberalized. Obviously the first choice is better, but it's in a perma-locked state precisely because medicine is an unaccountable monopoly that exists in a tightly insulated ideological bubble.

 

Seriously?? This is research?? What a complete waste of time and money.

 

A more nuanced facial recognition study was referenced in the Washington Post today:

"Facial expressions may be an unreliable way to read emotions" (https://wapo.st/3W6Ebjg)

Based on this study:

"Genetic algorithms reveal profound individual differences in emotion recognition"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201380119