Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia:When and why does it go awry?

Abstract

Objective-Schizophrenia patients demonstrate impaired emotional processing that may be due, in part, to impaired facial emotion recognition. This study examined event-related potential (ERP) responses to emotional faces in schizophrenia patients and controls to determine when, in the temporal processing stream, patient abnormalities occur.Method-16 patients and 16 healthy control participants performed a facial emotion recognition task. Very sad, somewhat sad, neutral, somewhat happy, and very happy faces were each presented for 100 ms. Subjects indicated whether each face was "Happy", "Neutral", or "Sad". Evoked potential data were obtained using a 32-channel EEG system.Results-Controls performed better than patients in recognizing facial emotions. In patients, better recognition of happy faces correlated with less severe negative symptoms. Four ERP components corresponding to the P100, N170, N250, and P300 were identified. Group differences were noted for the N170 "face processing" component that underlies the structural encoding of facial features, but not for the subsequent N250 "affect modulation" component. Higher amplitude of the N170 response to sad faces was correlated with less severe delusional symptoms. Although P300 abnormalities were found, the variance of this component was explained by the earlier N170 response. Conclusion-Patientswith schizophrenia demonstrate abnormalities in early visual encoding of facial features that precedes the ERP response typically associated with facial affect recognition. This suggests that affect recognition deficits, at least for happy and sad discrimination, are secondary Correspondence: Bruce I. Turetsky, M.

Magnocellular Pathway Impairment in Schizophrenia: Evidence from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

“…These regions reportedly play a critical role in visual processes such as motion discrimination , face processing (Puce et al, 1995;Narumoto et al, 2000), and reading (Pugh et al, 1996;Booth et al, 2001), all of which have been shown to be impaired in schizophrenia (Chen et al, 1999a(Chen et al, , 2004Manor et al, 1999;Herrmann et al, 2004;Revheim et al, 2006;Turetsky et al, 2007). Together, our findings thus suggest that the deficient responsiveness of the magnocellular pathways in schizophrenia patients may influence the operation of higherorder perceptual and cognitive systems.…”

Attentional-shaping as a means to improve emotion perception deficits in schizophrenia

“…Participants were not told to fixate on the cross when it appeared, thus making the prompt a passive intervention. The three-second prompt time was selected based on research that problems in emotion perception occur early in the perceptual process (Gordon et al, 1992;Swartz et al, 1999;Turetsky et al, 2007). In the shaping condition, if the participant correctly identified the emotional expression, they were reinforced with ten cents that was placed in a cup in front of the participant; incorrect responses were not reinforced .…”

Individual differences in cardiac vagal tone are associated with differential neural responses to facial expressions at different spatial frequencies: An ERP and sLORETA study

“…People with severe psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, were characterized by impaired neural activity in response to BSF faces (Couture, Penn, & Roberts, 2006;Lee, Kim, Kim, & Bae, 2010;Turetsky et al, 2007). We did not expect that level of neural impairment in a normal population.…”