The McCollough Effect and Facial Emotion Discrimination in Patients With Schizophrenia and Their Unaffected Relatives

Abstract

Abnormalities in visual processing have been found consistently in schizophrenia patients, including deficits in early visual processing, perceptual organization, and facial emotion recognition. There is however no consensus as to whether these abnormalities represent heritable illness traits and what their contribution is to psychopathology. Fifty patients with schizophrenia, 61 of their first-degree healthy relatives, and 50 psychiatrically healthy volunteers were tested with regard to facial affect (FA) discrimination and susceptibility to develop the color-contingent illusion [the McCollough Effect (ME)]. Both patients and relatives demonstrated significantly lower accuracy in FA discrimination compared with controls. There was also a significant effect of familiality: Participants from the same families had more similar accuracy scores than those who belonged to different families. Experiments with the ME showed that schizophrenia patients required longer time to develop the illusion than relatives and controls, which indicated poor visual adaptation in schizophrenia. Relatives were marginally slower than controls. There was no significant association between the measures of FA discrimination accuracy and ME in any of the participant groups. Facial emotion discrimination was associated with the degree of interpersonal problems, as measured by the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire in relatives and healthy volunteers, whereas the ME was associated with the perceptual-cognitive symptoms of schizotypy and positive symptoms of schizophrenia. Our results support the heritability of FA discrimination deficits as a trait and indicate visual adaptation abnormalities in schizophrenia, which are symptom related.

Increased cold and heat pain thresholds influence the thermal grill illusion in schizophrenia

“…Some are perceived earlier or stronger, e.g., the visual Müller‐Lyer illusion (Pessoa et al., ). In contrast, e.g., the visual color‐contingent illusion (Surguladze et al., ) is delayed and diminished in schizophrenia. While some authors discussed deficits in inhibitory control (Chen et al., ), Kantrowitz and co‐workers recently tested a broad spectrum of visual illusions in these patients and developed a unifying hypothesis, explaining the different findings by early sensory processing deficits, namely contrast sensitivity (Kantrowitz et al., ).…”

Altered short-term neural plasticity related to schizotypal traits: Evidence from visual adaptation

“…Discrepant findings across studies have been attributed to a combination of medication use, as antipsychotics reduce visual aftereffect duration in healthy individuals (Harris et al, 1986;Harris et al, 1983), clinical status, and mode of measuring aftereffects (Harris, 1994). A more recent study confirmed slower aftereffect onset in patients with schizophrenia and healthy first-degree relatives, an effect that scaled with positive symptoms in the patient group and the positive dimension of a scale of schizophrenia-like personality traits in the healthy relatives (Surguladze et al, 2012).…”

The Impact of Sex Differences on Odor Identification and Facial Affect Recognition in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

“…Schizophrenia has been shown to be associated with impairments in basic and social cognition, which share some neural circuitry. Deficits in emotion recognition (ER) and smell identification [SI; smell identification deficits (SIDs)] have often been detected in chronic ( 2 ), first episode ( 3 ), and high-risk patients ( 4 ) as well as in unaffected relatives ( 5 , 6 ) [for SID ( 7 )]. Gender dichotomous differences in these domains have been shown in healthy subjects mostly in women showing higher emotional and olfactory discriminative abilities ( 8 , 9 ).…”