Positive emotional information avoiding bias in sadness

The purpose of this study is to analyze specific and general deficits in facial and vocal emotional expression recognition in people with low and high sadness. The aim is to verify whether common biases of major depressive disorder occur in nonclinical emotional conditions too. According to the results there are no general deficits in emotional recognition, but there is avoidance bias of positive emotional information. As for voice recognition bias, there also appears to be a more accurate recognition of the expression of sadness in the high sadness group. Both biases seem to be independent phenomena as they do not occur in the case of facial recognition and the correlation between both is nonsignificant.