Facial Expression and Sex Recognition in Schizophrenia and Depression

Abstract

Background: Impaired facial expression recognition in schizophrenia patients contributes to abnormal social functioning and may predict functional outcome in these patients. Facial expression processing involves individual neural networks that have been shown to malfunction in schizophrenia. Whether these patients have a selective deficit in facial expression recognition or a more global impairment in face processing remains controversial. Objective: To investigate whether patients with schizophrenia exhibit a selective impairment in facial emotional expression recognition, compared with patients with major depression and healthy control subjects. Methods: We studied performance in facial expression recognition and facial sex recognition paradigms, using original morphed faces, in a population with schizophrenia ( n = 29) and compared their scores with those of depression patients ( n = 20) and control subjects ( n = 20). Results: Schizophrenia patients achieved lower scores than both other groups in the expression recognition task, particularly in fear and disgust recognition. Sex recognition was unimpaired. Conclusion: Facial expression recognition is impaired in schizophrenia, whereas sex recognition is preserved, which highly suggests an abnormal processing of changeable facial features in this disease. A dysfunction of the top-down retrograde modulation coming from limbic and paralimbic structures on visual areas is hypothesized.

Emotion recognition in pictures of facial affect: Is there a difference between forensic and non-forensic patients with schizophrenia?

“…Notably, we did not obtain any difference regarding the gender recognition tasks between the three groups, which is in line with the findings of Bediou and colleagues 1,4 . This lends support to the assumption that schizophrenia patients have a specific deficit in facial emotion recognition rather than a more global face processing deficit.…”

“…Emotion recognition from facial expressions is a cornerstone of social interaction 1,2 . The ability to decipher emotions in faces is universal across cultures, especially when focusing on the basic emotions of happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, surprise and contempt 3 .…”

“…Poor emotion recognition in schizophrenia has been found to be associated with poor social functioning [8][9][10] . There is still contest about the question, however, whether poor emotion recognition in schizophrenia is more profound for negative emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and disgust 1,6,11,12 , or whether patients with schizophrenia exhibit a more global deficit in emotion recognition 13,14 . Also, the question of whether or not the emotion recognition deficit in schizophrenia is limited to facial expressions 15 or the consequence of a more generalized performance deficit 16,17 remains to some extent elusive.…”

Systematic review of the neural basis of social cognition in patients with mood disorders

“…Given the heterogeneous profile of these disorders in terms of symptom severity, chronicity, recurrence, comorbidities and treatment status, it will be important for future studies to incorporate larger sample sizes to take into account the influence of these variables on social cognitive processing. In particular, small sample sizes in fMRI paradigms may have constrained the ability to detect performance differences among groups (for example, see Canli and colleagues, 44 Chen and colleagues, 48 Schaefer and colleagues, 100 Gotlib and colleagues, 134 Gilboa-Schechtman and colleagues 156 and Bediou and colleagues 251 ). Longitudinal studies, for example, will be necessary to determine whether social cognitive deficits are trait markers of vulnerability for patients with mood disorders.…”

Facial emotion recognition in schizofrenia and depression

“…Queste regioni sono coin volte soprattutto nel riconoscimento della paura (Adolphs et al, 1999) e infatti alcuni studi confermano che il riconoscimento della paura e alterato nella schizofrenia (Kohler et al, 2003). Tuttavia, altri studi hanno riscontrato un alterato riconoscimento della paura e del disgusto in persone con schizofrenia (Bediou et al, 2005b), ma non nel riconoscimento dellafelicita (Mandal et al, 1998). E stato inoltre riscontrato che in soggetti con schizofrenia in remissione, 1'alterato riconoscimento emotivo delle espressioni facciali coinvolgeva soprattutto le emozioni di tristezza e di rabbia (Bediou et al, 2005a).…”