Facial emotion recognition in psychiatrists and influences of their therapeutic identification on that ability

ObjectivesAlthough emotional cues like facial emotion expressions seem to be important in social interaction, there is no specific training about emotional cues for psychiatrists. Here, we aimed to investigate psychiatrists' ability of facial emotion recognition and relation with their clinical identification as psychotherapy–psychopharmacology oriented or being adult and childhood-adolescent psychiatrist.MethodsFacial Emotion Recognition Test was performed to 130 psychiatrists that were constructed by a set of photographs (happy, sad, fearful, angry, surprised, disgusted and neutral faces) from Ekman and Friesen's.ResultsPsychotherapy oriented adult psychiatrists were significantly better in recognizing sad facial emotion (p = .003) than psychopharmacologists while no significant differences were detected according to therapeutic orientation among child-adolescent psychiatrists (for each, p > .05). Adult psychiatrists were significantly better in recognizing fearful (p = .012) and disgusted (p = .003) facial emotions than child-adolescent psychiatrists while the latter were better in recognizing angry facial emotion (p = .008).ConclusionFor the first time, we have shown some differences on psychiatrists' facial emotion recognition ability according to therapeutic identification and being adult or child-adolescent psychiatrist. It would be valuable to investigate how these differences or training the ability of facial emotion recognition would affect the quality of patient–clinician interaction and treatment related outcomes.