Intact implicit processing of facial threat cues in schizophrenia

Abstract

An emerging body of research suggests that people with schizophrenia retain the ability to implicitly perceive facial affect, despite well-documented difficulty explicitly identifying emotional expressions. It remains unclear, however, whether such functional implicit processing extends beyond emotion to other socially relevant facial cues. Here, we constructed two novel versions of the Affect Misattribution Procedure, a paradigm in which affective responses to primes are projected onto neutral targets. The first version included three face primes previously validated to elicit varying inferences of threat from healthy individuals via emotion-independent structural modification (e.g., nose and eye size). The second version included the threat-relevant emotional primes of angry, neutral, and happy faces. Data from 126 participants with schizophrenia and 84 healthy controls revealed that although performing more poorly on an assessment of explicit emotion recognition, patients showed normative implicit threat processing for both non-emotional and emotional facial cues. Collectively, these results support recent hypotheses postulating that the initial perception of salient facial information remains intact in schizophrenia, but that deficits arise at subsequent stages of contextual integration and appraisal. Such a breakdown in the stream of face processing has important implications for mechanistic models of social cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and treatment strategies aiming to improve functional outcome.

Facial emotion processing in schizophrenia: a review of behavioural and neural correlates

“…In SZ, when comparing both implicit and explicit processing, implicit emotion processing seems less affected [46]. These results suggest that emotional faces are correctly perceived by patients with SZ at non-awareness level or at early processing but may be biased at higher top-down processing levels [47][48][49]. Nevertheless, a study using event-related potentials found impaired bottom-up processing rather than top-down dysfunction for facial emotion recognition in SZ [50].…”

À propos de la modélisation cognitive de la schizophrénie : « De Frith à nos jours, actualisations ou nouveaux paradigmes ? ». Une revue de littérature systématique.

“…De nombreuses études retrouvent des déficits de la cognition sociale chez les patients schizophrènes (1,2,4,7,28,45,49,58,(85)(86)(87)(88)(89)(90)(91)(92)(93)(94) et ce dans les différents domaines qui la composent : a. Les perceptions sociales : Les patient ont des difficultés à reconnaitre les émotions sur les visages (4,11,49,(85)(86)(87)95,96). Ils auraient tendance à repérer des indices de menaces faciaux là où il n'y en a pas (96). Cependant ils auraient beaucoup de mal à percevoir les émotions négatives et la peur sur les visages.…”

“…(55) Cependant, d'après certaines études, leurs difficultés dans le traitement des informations faciales seraient surtout liées à leur capacité à utiliser ces informations. En effet ils garderaient une capacité intacte au traitement implicite de ces informations (96).…”

“…Ils semblent avoir pour intention une mise à jour de la caractérisation des endophénotypes schizophréniques et surtout la manière dont sont menées les expériences avec l'ajout de ces notions. Nous retrouvons d'ailleurs ces notions de manière significative dans notre littérature dans des articles à partir de 2016 (54,96,200,201).…”

Schizotypy is associated with difficulties detecting emotional facial expressions

“…However, some studies have reported preserved perceptual and emotional processing of facial expressions in schizophrenia [18]. Behavioural studies have demonstrated that emotional facial expressions presented under a priming procedure [19][20][21] or continuous flash suppression [22] can bias subjective evaluation of subsequent neutral stimuli in schizophrenia and control groups. Furthermore, threatening faces enhanced the performance of a delayed matching task [23], and such expressions interfered with a gender discrimination task in schizophrenia and control groups [24].…”