Facial emotion processing in schizophrenia: a non-specific neuropsychological deficit?

Abstract

BackgroundIdentification of facial emotions has been found to be impaired in schizophrenia but there are uncertainties about the neuropsychological specificity of the finding.MethodTwenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls were given tests requiring identification of facial emotion, judgement of the intensity of emotional expressions without identification, familiar face recognition and the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT). The schizophrenia patients were selected to be relatively intellectually preserved.ResultsThe patients with schizophrenia showed no deficit in identifying facial emotion, although they were slower than the controls. They were, however, impaired on judging the intensity of emotional expression without identification. They showed impairment in recognizing familiar faces but not on the BFRT.ConclusionsWhen steps are taken to reduce the effects of general intellectual impairment, there is no deficit in identifying facial emotions in schizophrenia. There may, however, be a deficit in judging emotional intensity. The impairment found in naming familiar faces is consistent with other evidence of semantic memory impairment in the disorder.

Are patients with schizophrenia impaired in processing non-emotional features of human faces?

“…The most commonly used face-matching task is the Benton Test of Facial Recognition (Benton, 1983; see Figure 1A). Individuals with schizophrenia have shown impaired performance on the Benton test in many (e.g., Addington and Addington, 1998; Evangeli and Broks, 2000; Whittaker et al, 2001; Hooker and Park, 2002; Kucharska-Pietura et al, 2005; Soria Bauser et al, 2012), but not all studies (Hall et al, 2004; Scholten et al, 2005; Van 't Wout et al, 2007; Pomarol-Clotet et al, 2010). One study using a booklet-based face-matching task with similar properties to the Benton also found no impairment (Hooker and Park, 2002).…”

Detecting facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia using dynamic stimuli of varying intensities

“…These findings lend support to the notion that difficulties in emotion recognition are associated in SZ with key cognitive deficits. Indeed, it may be the case, as [51] suggests, that without the generalised cognitive decline experienced by patients with SZ, there would be no emotion recognition deficits at all.…”

Recognition of facial emotions and identity in patients with mesial temporal lobe and idiopathic generalized epilepsy: An eye-tracking study

“…It has been historically postulated that communicating through facial expressions is universal [3][4][5] ; however, recent work suggests that expression and visual processing of FER differ for Western and Eastern people. [6][7][8][9] In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in FER deficits for a wide spectrum of disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, [10][11][12] Alzheimer's disease, 13 multiple sclerosis, 14 Turner syndrome, 15 autism, 16,17 Williams syndrome, 18 schizophrenia, 19 depression 20 and antisocial personality disorder. 21 In the epilepsy field, FER deficits in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) are well known.…”