Face processing in psychiatric conditions

Abstract

Functional models of face processing have indicated that dissociations exist between the various processes involved, e.g. between familiar face recognition and matching of unfamiliar faces, and between familiar face recognition and facial expression analysis. These models have been successfully applied to the understanding of the different types of impairment that can exist in neuropsychological patients. In the present study, aspects of face processing in psychiatric patients were investigated in relation to Bruce & Young's (1986) model. Based on this functional model different predictions can be made. We contrast here the impaired expression analysis hypothesis, which is that psychiatric patients would show a deficit in facial expression recognition, but not in facial identity recognition or unfamiliar face matching, with the generalized deficit hypothesis, that patients would be impaired on all tasks. These hypotheses were examined using three forced-choice tasks (facial recognition, facial expression recognition, and unfamiliar face matching) which were presented to schizophrenic and depressed patients, and to non-patient controls. Results showed that schizophrenic patients performed at a significantly lower level than non-patient controls on all three tasks, supporting the generalized deficit hypothesis.

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

“…In contrast to all other studies, we adopted a strategy of testing intellectually preserved patients. As noted in the introduction, some authors (Archer et al 1992 ;Kerr & Neale, 1993 ;Salem et al 1996) have argued that poor facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia could simply reflect generalized intellectual impairment, and this view has also been echoed in two recent critical reviews (Johnston et al 2001 ;Edwards et al 2002). It follows that, if steps were taken to reduce the effects of general intellectual impairment on specific test performance, the deficit in facial emotion processing might be partially or completely abolished.…”

“…This is because patients with schizophrenia perform poorly on almost all cognitive tasks (Chapman & Chapman, 1973), a finding that in turn almost certainly reflects the fact that the disorder is associated with a variable degree of general intellectual impairment (McKenna, 2007 ;Reichenberg & Harvey, 2007). Indeed, there is an ongoing debate about whether the facial emotion recognition deficit in schizophrenia is specific, in the sense of being disproportionate to that seen in other areas of cognition, and several authors have argued that this has not been demonstrated conclusively (Archer et al 1992 ;Kerr & Neale, 1993 ;Johnston et al 2001 ;Edwards et al 2002).…”

Identification of emotions in mixed disgusted-happy faces as a function of depressive symptom severity

“…In standard experiments, pictures of real actors or schematic faces depicting different prototypical emotions are shown, and participants have to categorize the emotion depicted and/or judge its intensity. Results using this approach have been mixed (for a recent meta-analysis, see Dalili, Penton-Voak, Harmer, & Munafo, 2015), with some studies supporting a depression-related impaired ability to identify prototypical facial expressions of emotions (e.g., Gur et al, 1992;Persad & Polivy, 1993), but others failing to replicate those findings (e.g., Archer et al, 1992;Frewen & Dozois 2005).…”

Correlations between psychometric schizotypy, scan path length, fixations on the eyes and face recognition

“…In schizophrenia, however, number of saccades and scan path length appear to be different to control participants (Manor et al, 1999), leading Loughland, Williams, Gordon, and Davidson (2002a) to suggest that eye-movement deviations in patients with schizophrenia may cause a reduction in face recognition accuracy levels. If generalised eyemovements abnormalities are the cause of face recognition deficits in schizotypy, a positive negative correlation between these abnormal eye movements and face recognition accuracy should exist in the general population (Archer, Hay, & Young, 1992).…”