Fibromyalgia and facial expressions

When I took a speech class  I had points deducted several times for not showing enough emotion in my face, or not being animated enough. I’ve seen it in others with Fibromyalgia as well, I think we learn to hide how we feel so well that it becomes difficult to express emotions of any kind (positive or negative). Perhaps in doing so we are pushing people away or leaving them thinking we are uninterested?

One hypothesis on how we form emotions is that we assume our emotion from our own physical responses. For example, if you put a pencil between your teeth and hold it so that your lips don’t touch it you are effectively forcing a smile. When people are asked to do this for 30 seconds or so then asked their mood they typically report a happier mood. So, it’s possible that by over-controlling our emotions we may be converting what could be positive emotions into negative ones, by simply not showing the positive we are feeling. In other words, smile more and you would actually feel better (yes there is science behind this). This is actually the one thing I remember from my Psych 101 class. That was my take-away 20 years ago and I walked away making myself smile more and had an awesome year. It’s something I often look back on and wish I’d maintained.

When I make myself smile it just feels weird and I end up looking like Chandler in Chandler & Monica’s engagement portraits (Friends). No seriously, I have photos… I look just like this.

I guess that’s why I found this 2013 study interesting.Evidently one of the many symptoms associated with Fibromyalgia is something called alexithymia (the inability to recognize emotions in ones self) –don’t worry I’d never heard that word before I read this study either –as well as the inability to recognize facial expressions in others.

The researchers had 35 Fibromyalgia patients and 35 healthy individuals complete a facial emotion recognition task. Basically, they show them 30 pictures of people expressing six basic emotions (happy, angry, anxious, sad, disgusted, surprised,neutral). Each image was displayed separately followed by an 8 second time period for the participant to classify the emotion.

Patients overall misclassified more emotional images than the control group. Both groups were more able to properly identify happy faces. The faces most commonly misclassified were anxious, sadness, and disgust. There were no specific common miss-classifications of one group for another, indicating that the issue was in general inability to recognize the emotions not in a strict case of miss-identifying one emotion for another.

One thing I’m noticing in this study is that they did not use Eckman’s 6 basic emotions (sadness, anger, disgust, fear, interest, surprise, & happiness). I can’t help but wonder if since anxious is not typically considered one of the basic cross-cultural emotions if that might have added to the issue of miss-classification. Neutral also is not considered a classic emotional expression. It’s possible that there may have been an issue with the images used since the Fibro group miss-labeled the same emotions as the control group (just at a higher rate).

The researchers theorized that there is something amiss in Fibromyalgia patients ability to identify emotions. Could this be to blame for the anxiety we feel and perhaps often feeling more negative emotions from others than they intend? The study doesn’t really seem to indicate that we miss-classify positive emotions as negative, but rather than we just miss-identify emotional expressions in general. It is believed that observing someone else’s emotional state can activate the same state within us. You see someone happy you are more likely to feel happy. Your partner comes home in a bad mood and your mood soon follows (at least that’s how it works in my house). So, it’s possible that our negative emotions are amplified because we are misreading the emotions of those around us.

I certainly wouldn’t see Chandler (above) or me in many photos and think those were happy expressions, regardless of the intent behind them. I’m guessing most people wouldn’t either.

So, what are your thoughts? Do you feel that you display the emotions you intend? Do you feel that you read others emotional expressions properly?

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Reference:
Weiß, S., Winkelmann, A., & Duschek, S. (2013). Recognition of Facially Expressed Emotions in Patients with Fibromyalgia Syndrome. Behavioral Medicine, 39(4), 146-154. doi:10.1080/08964289.2013.818932