Facial Affect Recognition Performance and Event-Related Potentials in Violent and Non-Violent Schizophrenia Patients

Abstract

We investigated whether male inpatients with schizophrenia and a history of hands-on violent offences (forensic schizophrenic, FOS) are more impaired in emotion recognition than matched schizophrenia patients without any history of violence (general psychiatric schizophrenic, GPS). This should become apparent in performance in psychometry and in scalp event-related brain potentials (ERPs) evoked by pictures of facial affect. FOS and GPS (each n = 19) were matched concerning age, intelligence, comorbid addiction, medication and illness duration. FOS revealed significantly poorer affect recognition (AR) performance, especially of neutral and fear stimuli. Analysis of ERPs revealed a significant interaction of hemisphere, electrode position and group of the N250 component. Post hoc analysis of group effect showed significantly larger amplitudes in FOS at FC3. These results support the hypothesis that in FOS emotional faces are more salient and evoke higher arousal. Larger impairment in AR performance combined with higher salience and arousal may contribute to the occurrence of violent acts in schizophrenia patients.

Social cognition and paranoia in forensic inpatients with schizophrenia: A cross-sectional study

“…Our participants were similar in profile to participants in previous studies of social cognition in forensic patients (Pinkham et al;Frommann et al, 2013;Luckhaus et al, 2013).…”

Altered Insular Function during Aberrant Salience Processing in Relation to the Severity of Psychotic Symptoms

“…Among patients with schizophrenia, the risk for violence has been associated with several factors, such as personality traits, substance abuse, intelligence, presence of psychotic symptoms, and demographic background (86). To the best of our knowledge, there is only one study assessing salience in forensic patients: greater impairment in affect recognition performance combined with higher salience and arousal may contribute to the occurrence of violent acts in schizophrenic patients (87). Additionally, it has been demonstrated that positive symptoms in schizophrenic patients can be associated with a criminal history even before diagnosis of a first episode (88).…”

Processing of Emotions in Speech in Forensic Patients With Schizophrenia: Impairments in Identification, Selective Attention, and Integration of Speech Channels

“…Deficits in identification of spoken emotions (semantics and prosody) for people with schizophrenia were associated with impaired social functioning (56,57). However, to the best of our knowledge, the literature is silent regarding identification of spoken emotions by forensic patients with schizophrenia.…”