Reactions of chronic schizophrenic patients and college students to facial expressions and geometric forms

Abstract

PROBLEMThe major purpose of this investigation was to determine whether chronic schizophrenic patients are deviant with respect to (a) ability to derive bipolar conceptual dimensions in terms of which sets of concrete materials (such as geometric forms or photographs of facial expressions) may be meaningfully arranged in rank order; (b) ability to rank these sets of materials in terms of a dimension of meaning after the bipolar concepts have been made explicit and anchor points have been provided; (c) their relative ability to perform tasks involving materials depicting the expression of human emotions vs. tasks involving geometric figures; (d) their admission of subjective disturbance for various photographed facial expressions; and (e) their preference for geometric forms vs. photographed expressions as task materials. A secondary purpose was to determine whether the ability of schizophrenic patients to derive conceptual dimensions from sets of concrete materials and to arrange these materials along conceptual dimensions (once these were specified) is related to estimated premorbid level of general intelligence, to current level of intellectual impairment, or to type of schizophrenic reaction. METHOD Subjects.Twenty-four patients were selected from a ward of the Brentwood VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital. Each had a staff psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia of at least two years duration. These patients ranged in age from 27 to 49 years (median, 41) and had been hospitalized from two to fourteen years (median, 4). The clinical records of only two patients showed evidence of neurological abnormality. In both instances, prefrontal lobotomy had been performed at least five years prior to the experiment. The vocabulary ages of the patients ranged between 14.3 and 18.6 (median, 16.6) on the Shipley-Institute of Living Scale. The range of their conceptual quotients (CQ) on this scale was between 51 and 96 (median, 73.5). All patients appeared to be in good contact at the times of testing and experimentation (which were spaced approximately one week apart) and showed willingness to cooperate in all phases of the experiment. All patients were receiving some form of tranquilizing drug; none were under treatment with insulin or electroshock.A non-schizophrenic group was composed of four medical students and eight clinical psychology and experimental psychology trainees (graduate students receiving training in the Veterans Administration Hospitals). These subjects, nine males and three females, ranged in age from 22 to 38 years (median, 26).The performance of the twenty-four schizophrenic patients on the ShipleyInstitute of Living Scale yielded a wide range of scores on the vocabulary scale, the abstract thinking scale, and the conceptual quotient. Ten of the patients had a diagnosis of schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type; the others were diagnosed as schizophrenic reactions of the five other types, viz., catatonic, hebephrenic, mixed, undifferentiated, or simple. Since it seemed possible that level of performance on cer...

Schizophrenic inability to judge facial emotion: A controlled study

“…The inconsistency is shown in the number of studies where, at least in part, schizophrenic performance has been normal. Thus, when supplied with category labels (Levy, Orr & Rosenzweig, 1960;Shannon, 1970;Spiegel, Gerard, Grayson & Gengerelli, 1962), schizophrenics perform as well as normal subjects. Other experiments (Pilowsky & Bassett, 1980;Ferdowsi, 1983;Walker, 1981) have found that schizophrenics perform at the same levels as neurotic o r depressed subjects.…”

“…Many of the inconsistencies can be attributed to methodological differences. Firstly, none of the early studies quote diagnostic criteria for their schizophrenic subjects (Levy et aI., 1960;Shannon, 1970;Spiegel et al, 1962). In this study, RDC (Spitzer & Endicott, 1975) was used.…”

Face processing in psychiatric conditions

“…(1989) found that, when compared with controls, acute schizophrenic patients were impaired on both types of tasks. An early study by Spiegel, Gerard, Grayson & Gengerelli (1962), which included a non-facial task, found that, when bipolar concepts and anchor points were provided, there were no differences in the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls on a task which involved ranking photographs of emotion expression and on non-facial tasks, one of which involved ranking circles from small to large.…”

Facial Affect Recognition in Schizophrenia is there a Differential Deficit?

“…To date, studies with schizophrenics have given less consideration to auditory cues and concentrated on the recognition of facial expressions of emotion. Aside from one early negative report (Spiegel et a!, 1962) more recent studies have noted a deficit in facial affect recognition in at least some groups of schizophrenics (Shannon, 1970;Dougherty eta!, 1974;Muzekari and Bates, 1977;Kurucz Ct a!, 1979;Walker et a!, 1980;Walker, 1981;Cutting, 1981). However, there are several problems with these studies.…”