Inferring social signals from the eyes in male schizophrenia

Abstract

Nonverbal communication habitually leaks out in ways that expose underlying thoughts, true feelings, and integrity of a counterpart. Social cognition is deficient in a wide range of mental disorders, including schizophrenia (SZ). Inferring social signals through the eyes is pivotal for social interaction but remains poorly investigated. The present work aims to fill this gap by examining whether and, if so, how reading language of the eyes is altered in SZ. We focused on male SZ, primarily because the disorder manifests a gender-specific profile. Patients and matched typically developing (TD) individuals were administered the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test-Modified (RMET-M) and Emotions in Masked Faces (EMF) task that provide comparable visual information. The findings indicate that in SZ, the emotion recognition profile is similar to TD, with a more accurate recognition of some emotions such as fear, neutral expressions, and happiness than the others (sadness and disgust). In SZ, however, this profile is shifted down: all emotions are recognized less accurately than in TD. On the RMET-M, patients are also less precise, albeit they perform better on items with positive valence. In SZ only, recognition accuracy on both tasks is tightly linked to each other. The outcome reveals global challenges for males with SZ in inferring social information in the eyes and calls for remediation programs to shape social cognition. This work offers novel insights into the profiles of social cognitive deficits in mental disorders that differ in their gender prevalence.