Deficits in implicit facial recognition of fear in aggressive patients with schizophrenia

Neuropsychology and emotion processing in violent individuals with antisocial personality disorder or schizophrenia: The same or different? A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Comparing VSZ and NVSZ, the differential seems to arise on tasks comparing more complex aspects of FAR: Silver et al (2005) found that their VSZ group was poorer at discriminating between the intensity of emotion shown by two faces. When participants viewed neutral faces which were altered to show slight emotional expressions and asked to rate the perceived dominance, those with low self-reported aggression rated neutral faces showing micro-expressions of fear as less dominant; however, this effect was not observed in the high aggression group (Antonius et al, 2013). These findings suggest that subtle facial cues are not being identified by VSZ groups, which may impede their ability to appropriately respond.…”

“…The picture comparing VSZ to NVSZ is less clear (see Table 4). However, the VSZ group appears more impaired, relative to NVSZ, on tasks assessing more complex aspects of affect recognition, for example, in discriminating the intensity of displayed emotion (Silver et al, 2005) or attributing dominance to faces (Antonius et al, 2013). These skills are likely key to translating emotion into appropriate behavioural actions, and thus may represent an area for potential therapeutic gains.…”

“…VSZ versus NVSZ and healthy controls FAR. Five studies examined FAR in VSZ (Antonius et al, 2013;Demirbuga et al, 2013;Frommann et al, 2013;Silver et al, 2005;Wolfkuhler et al, 2012); see Table 4 for summary. The studies that compared VSZ with healthy controls (Silver et al, 2005;Wolfkuhler et al, 2012) support an emotion recognition deficit, as is seen generally in the schizophrenia literature (Trémeau, 2006).…”

Differences in Facial Emotional Recognition Between Patients With the First-Episode Psychosis, Multi-episode Schizophrenia, and Healthy Controls

“…The clinical value of this wrong attribution of neutral faces is unclear. However, in a study of aggression and identification of neutral faces, the authors suggested that the two were interconnected in SCH (Antonius et al, 2013).…”

“…For example, FER was found to be associated with negative symptoms of schizophrenia (Chan et al, 2010) or with positive symptoms like delusions (Arguedas, Green, Langdon, & Coltheart, 2006). Additionally, the association of impairment of FER of fear with aggressive behavior or other emotions with impulsiveness has been suggested (Antonius et al, 2013; Krakowski et al, 2016).…”