Recognition and identification of facial stimuli by schizophrenics and patients with affective disorders

Abstract

Schizophrenics have been shown to manifest a significant deficit in identifying facial expressions of emotion. The present study sought to determine whether this deficit lay at the level of decoding facial cues of emotion, or whether it is specific to the process of labelling emotional faces. The latter specific deficit would be consistent with the hypothesis of left-hemisphere dysfunction in schizophrenia. Samples of schizophrenics, patients with affective disorders and normal controls were tested on a battery of facial tasks that had previously been shown to be capable of distinguishing between patients with left- and right-hemisphere lesions. The battery was comprised of four tests: facial discrimination, emotion discrimination, emotion labelling, and a multiple choice emotion task. The performance of affective patients fell midway between that of schizophrenics and normals on all the tasks. Schizophrenics performed significantly below normals on all but the facial discrimination task, and below affective patients on the emotion labelling task. There were no other significant group differences in performance. The performance pattern manifested by schizophrenics across the four tasks is not comparable to that shown by patients with unilateral brain damage. These results indicate that previously reported emotion identification deficits in schizophrenia were not solely a function of the labelling requirements of the tasks. Instead it appears that schizophrenics, although capable of deciphering facial cues of identity, are impaired in the ability to extract salient emotional cues from faces.

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

“…Although, as noted in the introduction, studies comparing the performance of schizophrenia patients on facial emotion processing tasks to other aspects of face processing have produced mixed findings (Novic et al 1984 ;Walker et al 1984 ;Archer et al 1992 ;Kerr & Neale, 1993 ;Laws et al 1996 ;Salem et al 1996), two recent studies have reported greater impairment on facial emotion tasks than on structural encoding of the facial percept (Kucharska-Pietura et al 2005) and on judging age from faces (Schneider et al 2006). Kucharska-Pietura et al (2005) found that 100 patients with schizophrenia (50 chronically ill and 50 in the early stages of illness) showed impairment on both an emotional face processing task and the BFRT.…”

Recognition, Expression, and Understanding Facial Expressions of Emotion in Adolescents With Nonverbal and General Learning Disabilities

“…The ability to recognize facial expressions of emotions has also been investigated among children, adolescents, and adults with other exceptionalities (Walker, McGuire, & Bettes, 1984;Zabel, 1979). Zabel (1979) Zabel (1979) found the students with special needs to be less accurate overall at recognizing facial expressions of emotion.…”

Emotion processing and its relationship to social functioning in schizophrenia patients

“…Most of these investigations have found that schizophrenia patients have defi-cits in both facial and vocal affect recognition (e.g. Archer et al, 1994;Baudouin et al, 2002;Borod et al, 1993;Edwards et al, 2001;Feinberg et al, 1986;Heimberg et al, 1992;Mandal et al, 1998;Penn et al, 2000;Schneider et al, 1995;Walker et al, 1984), and that these deficits are not related to age, gender, medication status or neuroleptic dose (Kline et al, 1992;Poole et al, 2000;Salem et al, 1996;Schneider et al, 1995).…”