Facial Affect Recognition Deficits in Schizophrenia. Association with Language and Communication Skills.

Abstract

Aim: Impairments in facial emotion recognition observed among people with schizophrenia has received increasing attention over the past few decades, however the nature of this deficit is unclear. Researchers have attempted to identify mechanism explaining this deficit, focusing on such cognitive functions like abstract thinking, mental flexibility, attention, verbal and spatial memory, language abilities and executive functions. Communication skills are extremely important for good social interactions and its deficits are the core feature of schizophrenia. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationship between emotion perception and complex language processing in patients with schizophrenia. Method: Subjects were 27 patient with diagnosis of paranoidal schizophrenia and 31 healthy people. Measures included The Right Hemisphere Language Battery in Polish adaptation (RHLB-PL), emotion discrimination test and control face recognition test. Results: Patients with schizophrenia performed worse than healthy subjects on RHLB-PL and the emotion perception task but not on the face recognition test. In healthy controls language abilities correlated with emotion perception and face recognition and, by contrast, in schizophrenic patients any correlation was observed. Conclusions: The present study revealed that patients with schizophrenia have deficits in the ability to discriminate facial emotion expression and also selective communication skills impairments like humor or metaphor comprehension. Results did not indicate relation between emotion perception and language impairment in patients, suggesting specific nature of facial emotion recognition deficit in schizophrenia.