Facial Emotion Recognition in Anorexia Nervosa

Altered emotional processing is reported in Anorexia Nervosa. However, this capability is generally measured through explicit measures, like self-report questionnaires and facial emotion recognition tasks. Instead, no previous research has investigated implicit emotional processing in this clinical condition. In the implicit facial emotion recognition task grounded on the implicit "redundant target effect", individuals generally respond faster when two identical targets are presented simultaneously rather than when presented alone; moreover, the competitive presence of a distractor (that is another emotion or a neutral expression) affects the correct recognition of the target. The ability to recognize and detect facial expressions is explored about two main emotions, fear and anger, because of their role in the intra- and interindividual psychological processing.