Bipolar Disorder, Autism and Facial Expressions

Doctor Ellen Leibenluft explains that although individuals with bipolar disorder can have trouble interpreting emotional expressions, this is much more subtle than in autism.

Both children with autism and children with bipolar disorder have difficulty labeling face emotion. It's important to emphasize that the kind of difficulty that the children with bipolar disorder have is much, much more subtle than the problem that the children with autism have. We don’t yet know whether there is any association between autism and bipolar disorder. Thus far there isn’t a very clear one, and it's important to recognize that two groups like this, autism and bipolar disorder, could both have the same problem but it could be coming from different brain regions and mediated by different genes and different brain dysfunction. But the most important thing to say is that the kind of problem that the children with bipolar disorder have is much, much more subtle than the kind of problem that children with autism have.