Consistent Deficits In Facial Emotion Recognition Found in Non-Ill Children of Parents with Bipolar Disorder
Children with bipolar parents may have difficulty identifying the emotions they see on another person’s face. Aditya Sharma of Newcastle University presented a poster at the Pediatric Bipolar Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March, which indicated that children without bipolar disorder but at risk because a parent has the illness showed deficits in facial emotion recognition. Similar results were reported by Brotman et al. in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2008. Since children of bipolar parents are at increased risk of developing the disease, this deficit in labeling facial emotion may be a marker of early bipolar disorder or a risk factor for its onset.
Editor’s Note: These types of deficits in facial emotion recognition have been consistently observed in adults and children diagnosed with bipolar disorder, so assessing whether children can successfully identify others’ facial emotions could become part of the assessment of risk for bipolar disorder. This deficit could also be targeted for psychosocial intervention and rehabilitative training to enhance emotion recognition skills. Such an approach could improve interpersonal communication and lessen hypersensitive responses to perceived emotional threats and negative emotional experiences.
Environmental Influences on Gene Structure May Be Transmitted to Offspring
It has been thought that one fundamental principle of genetics is that the impact of environment factors cannot be passed from one generation to the next via the genetic code. New data suggest this may not be true.
In an emerging field called epigenetics, researchers are finding that while the impact of environment and life experiences is not registered in DNA sequences, environmental factors can influence the structure of DNA or tightness of its packaging. Early life experiences, particularly psychosocial stress, can lead to the accumulation of methyl groups on DNA (a process called methylation), which generally constricts DNA’s ability to start transcription (turning on) of genes and the synthesis of the proteins the genes encode. DNA is tightly wound around proteins called histones, which can also be methylated or acetylated based on events in the environment. When histones are acetylated, meaning that acetyl groups are attached to them, DNA is wound around them more loosely, facilitating gene transcription (i.e. the reading out of the DNA code into messenger RNA, which then arranges amino acids in order to construct proteins). Conversely, histone methylation usually tightens the winding of DNA and represses transcription.
