(HealthDay News) --
Children with bipolar disorder and a similar condition called severe mood
dysregulation spend less time looking at the eyes when trying to identify
facial features, compared to children without the psychiatric disorders,
researchers say.

This new study finding may help explain why children with bipolar disorder and
severe mood dysregulation have difficulty determining other people's emotional
expressions, said the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health investigators.

The researchers tracked the eye movements of children with and without
psychiatric disorders as they viewed faces with different emotional
expressions, such as happy, sad, fearful and angry. In general, the children
spent more time looking at the eyes, the facial feature that conveys the most
information about emotion. Read more…