Perception of faces in schizophrenia: Subjective (self-report) vs. objective (psychophysics) assessments

Abstract

Objectives Face perception impairment in schizophrenia has been demonstrated, mostly through experimental studies. How this laboratory-defined behavioral impairment is associated with patients’ perceptual experience of various faces in everyday life is however unclear. This question is important because a first-person account of face perception has direct consequences on social functioning of patients. In this study, we adapted and administered a self-reported questionnaire on narrative perceptual experience of faces along with psychophysical assessments of face perception in schizophrenia. Methods The self-reported questionnaire includes six rating items of face-related functioning in everyday life, providing a subjective measure of face perception. The psychophysical assessment determines perceptual threshold for discriminating different facial identities, providing an objective measure of face perception. Results Compared to controls (n=25), patients (n=35) showed significantly lower scores (worse performance) in the subjective assessment and significantly higher thresholds (worse performance) in the objective assessment. The subjective and objective face perception assessments were moderately correlated in controls but not in patients. The subjective face perception assessments were significantly correlated with measurements of a social cognitive ability (Theory of Mind), again in controls but not in patients. Conclusion These results suggest that in schizophrenia the quality of face-related functioning in everyday life is degraded and the role that basic face discrimination capacity plays in face-related everyday functioning is disrupted.

Changes in visual size perception in Schizophrenia and Depression

“…A great variety of studies show changes in the visual processing of patients with schizophrenia and depression. Among those are altered perceptual organization (Steven et al, 2020;Panton, Badcock, & Badcock, 2016;Silverstein & Keane, 2011), face perception and recognition (Frassle et al, 2020;Marosi, Fodor, & Csukly, 2019;Stroud et al, 2018;Chen & Ekstrom, 2017;Berg et al, 2016;Maher, Ekstrom, Holt, Ongur, & Chen, 2016;McBain, Norton, & Chen, 2010;Silverstein et al, 2014;Vakhrusheva, et al, 2014), Psicol. Pesqui.…”

Face pareidolia in male schizophrenia

“…Yet women with SZ perform generally better on emotion recognition tasks 49,50 . SZ patients not only exhibit aberrant facial affect recognition, but also deficient face processing such as face recognition, visual scanning of faces, and unfamiliar face matching [51][52][53][54] . Deficits appear to refer to assessment of the spatial relationship between facial features as well as holistic face perception [55][56][57][58][59] .…”

Dynamic face processing impairments are associated with cognitive and positive psychotic symptoms across psychiatric disorders

“…In contrast, the relationship between identity recognition impairments and symptoms has not been widely studied, and evidence is mixed. Two studies have reported a negative correlation between identity recognition performance in schizophrenia and both positive and negative symptoms 47,48 while several report correlations with negative symptoms only 26,45,[49][50][51] . To date, no studies have assessed symptom correlates with identity processing using dynamic stimuli.…”