Facial emotion recognition in patients with violent schizophrenia (original) (raw)
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European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 2019
Evidence for an association between impaired facial emotion recognition and violence in people with schizophrenia is inconclusive. In particular, the role of misidentification patterns involving specific emotions such as anger and the influence of clinical characteristics on this association remain unclear. In this study, we compared facial emotion recognition performance in age-and gender-matched schizophrenia spectrum disorders subjects with (N = 52) and without (N = 52) a history of violence. Data on current symptom severity, Cluster B personality status, past victimization, and alcohol and substance misuse were also collected. Compared to those without, subjects with a history of violence showed worse facial emotion recognition performances, involving anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness. When formally testing the reporting of angry faces, evidence of enhanced sensitivity to anger was not supported. Finally, when the impact of current symptoms was assessed, higher severity of activation symptoms, including motor hyperactivity, elevated mood, excitement and distractibility, mediated the relationship between history of violence and poor facial emotion recognition performance. As a whole, our findings seem to support the role of perceptual deficits involving different emotions as well as of a mediation played by activation symptoms. Facial emotion recognition deficits associated with the propensity to violence, as well certain symptoms mediating their relationship, should be targeted by specific treatment approaches.
Basic Emotion Recognition and Psychopathology in Schizophrenia
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2010
Socio-emotional competence is a key aspect of schizophrenia, both in terms of psychopathological vulnerability and outcome. In this respect, current research increasingly emphasizes the importance of deficits in facial expression recognition. The focus of the present study is the performance in recognizing 6 basic emotions (sadness, anger, happiness, fear, disgust, surprise) which play an essential role in shaping daily function and interpersonal interactions. A group of 20 patients diagnosed with DSM-IV schizophrenia were compared with a group of 20 matched controls on a facial expression recognition task, derived from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (Lundqvist D, Flykt A, Ö hmann A (1998) The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF). Stockholm (Sweden): Karolinska Institute), and were subsequently assessed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Facial expression recognition performance was significantly more impaired in patients, and was selectively correlated with the positive and cognitive dimensions of the positive and negative syndrome scale. Furthermore, significant group differences were found with respect to happiness and surprise.
Recognition of facial expressions of emotions in schizophrenia
Defi cits in recognition of facial expressions of emotions are considered to be an important factor explaining impairments in social functioning and affective reactions of schizophrenic patients. Many studies confi rmed such defi cits while controversies remained concerning the emotion valence and modality. The aim of the study was to explore the process of recognizing facial expressions of emotion in the group of schizophrenic patients by analyzing the role of emotion valence, modality and gender of the model. Results of the group of 35 patients and 35 matched controls indicate that while schizophrenic patients show general impairment in recognizing facial expressions of both positive and the majority of negative emotions, there are differences in defi cits for particular emotions. Expressions also appeared to be more ambiguous for the patients while variables connected with gender were found less signifi cant.
Facial Emotion Recognition in Schizophrenia: Intensity Effects and Error Pattern
American Journal of Psychiatry, 2003
ObjectiveaaPrevious studies reported gender differences for facial emotion recognition in healthy people, with women performing better than men. Few studies that examined gender differences for facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia brought out inconsistent findings. The aim of this study is to investigate gender differences for facial emotion identification and discrimination abilities in patients with schizophrenia. Methodsaa35 female and 35 male patients with schizophrenia, along with 35 female and 35 male healthy controls were included in the study. All the subjects were evaluated with Facial Emotion Identification Test (FEIT), Facial Emotion Discrimination Test (FEDT), and Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT). Patients' psychopathological symptoms were rated by means of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). ResultsaaMale patients performed significantly worse than female patients on FEIT total, and negative scores. Male controls performed significantly worse than female controls on FEIT total and negative scores. On all tasks, female patients performed comparable with controls. Male patients performed significantly worse than controls on FEIT, and FEDT. ConclusionaaWomen with schizophrenia outperformed men for facial emotion recognition ability in a pattern that is similar with the healthy controls. It could be claimed that male patients with schizophrenia need special consideration for emotion perception deficits. Psychiatry Investig 2013;10:69-74
Facial emotion perception abnormality in patients with early schizophrenia
Schizophrenia Research, 2013
Background: Deficit in facial emotion perception is an important social cognitive impairment in schizophrenic patients, and it is one of the key determinants of functional outcome in schizophrenia. However, the moderating effect of social context and the boundary of perceptual categories of facial emotion perception remain unclear. Method: A total of 36 schizophrenic outpatients in their early stage of illness and 43 healthy controls were recruited for evaluation of social and clinical characteristics, neurocognitive profiles, and facial emotion categorization (FEC) performance. FEC was assessed by a computer-based program with 120 trials, in which social context was presented in the form of a preceding question, in order to simulate the conditions of being praised (positive), blamed (negative), or inquiry (neutral), while the participants were asked to judge a photograph derived from one of the five facial images in a happy-angry emotion continuum. The FEC data was inserted into a logistic function model with subsequent analysis by repeated measures ANOVA and the shift point and slope as outcome measures. Results: Schizophrenic patients were significantly more likely to perceive ambiguous and subtle facial expressions as happy, rather than angry, in all three social contexts. However, the interaction effects between group and context for FEC performance was not significant. Conclusions: Schizophrenic patients, even in their early stage of illness, appear to have abnormal perceptions of facial emotion categories, which may explain some of their abnormal social interactions and disabilities. This study provides additional information in understanding social cognitive deficits among schizophrenic patients.
Cognitive Remediation Journal
Background: Facial affect recognition is the ability of all individuals to recognize basic forms of affective expression reflected on people's faces. These expressions are happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, and the absence of emotion, also called neutral expression. Patients with schizophrenia present difficulty in recognizing these expressions in themselves and/or in other people. Objective: The objective was to determinate which emotions were confused and for what other emotion they were taken for (misattribution). Method: We included three groups: 34 schizophrenic patients, 34 siblings, and 34 control subjects. All patients attend the schizophrenia clinic, their siblings were those closest in age and gender, and subjects without mental illness were paired by age and gender. We used SCID-I and SCL-90 scales to discard mental illness in siblings and controls. PANSS, CDSS, and CGI were used to measure the severity of the disease in schizophrenic patients. We used the Pictures of Facial Affect developed by Ekman (1976), to evaluate facial affect recognition. Results: Across all groups, the least recognized emotion was fear; in the patients and siblings groups, the most recognized emotion was surprise. In the patient group happiness was mistaken for the neutral face in 13%. The patients mistook anger for neutral face in 5.6%, fear in 5.2%, surprise in 5.0%, and disgust in 4.9 %. Neutral face: only the patients group mistook the neutral face for sadness in 4.6%. Fear was the least recognized emotion; the patient group mistook it for surprise in 42.6% and anger in 6.9 %. The siblings mistook it for surprise in 41.3 %, and the control group also for surprise in 25.4%. Disgust: It was mistaken for anger by patients in 25.6%, siblings in 23.3%, and control subjects in 11.5%. Sadness: it was mistaken for fear in 15.6%, and for neutral faces in 10.9% in the patients group. In the siblings group the sadness was mistaken for fear in 14.1%, and the controls group sadness was mistaken for fear in 11.1%.
Facial emotion identification in early-onset psychosis
Schizophrenia Research, 2014
Facial emotion identification (FEI) deficits are common in patients with chronic schizophrenia and are strongly related to impaired functioning. The objectives of this study were to determine whether FEI deficits are present and emotion specific in people experiencing early-onset psychosis (EOP), and related to current clinical symptoms and functioning. Patients with EOP (n = 34, mean age = 14.11, 53% female) and healthy controls (HC, n = 42, mean age 13.80, 51% female) completed a task of FEI that measured accuracy, error pattern and response time. Relative to HC, patients with EOP (i) had lower accuracy for identifying facial expressions of emotions, especially fear, anger and disgust, (ii) were more likely to misattribute other emotional expressions as fear or disgust, and (iii) were slower at accurately identifying all facial expressions. FEI accuracy was not related to clinical symptoms or current functioning. Deficits in FEI (especially for fear, anger and disgust) are evident in EOP. Our findings suggest that while emotion identification deficits may reflect a trait susceptibility marker, functional deficits may represent a sequelae of illness.
Facial emotion processing in schizophrenia: a non-specific neuropsychological deficit?
BACKGROUND: Identification of facial emotions has been found to be impaired in schizophrenia but there are uncertainties about the neuropsychological specificity of the finding. METHOD: Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls were given tests requiring identification of facial emotion, judgement of the intensity of emotional expressions without identification, familiar face recognition and the Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT). The schizophrenia patients were selected to be relatively intellectually preserved. RESULTS: The patients with schizophrenia showed no deficit in identifying facial emotion, although they were slower than the controls. They were, however, impaired on judging the intensity of emotional expression without identification. They showed impairment in recognizing familiar faces but not on the BFRT. CONCLUSIONS: When steps are taken to reduce the effects of general intellectual impairment, there is no deficit in identifying facial emotions in schizophrenia. There may, however, be a deficit in judging emotional intensity. The impairment found in naming familiar faces is consistent with other evidence of semantic memory impairment in the disorder.
Facial Expressions of Emotions and Schizophrenia: A Review
Schizophrenia Bulletin, 1998
It is generally agreed that schizophrenia patients show a markedly reduced ability to perceive and express facial emotions. Previous studies have shown, however, that such deficits are emotion-specific in schizophrenia and not generalized. Three kinds of studies were examined: decoding studies dealing with schizophrenia patients' ability to perceive universally recognized facial expressions of emotions, encoding studies dealing with schizophrenia patients' ability to express certain facial emotions, and studies of subjective reactions of patients' sensitivity toward universally recognized facial expressions of emotions. A review of these studies shows that schizophrenia patients, despite a general impairment of perception or expression of facial emotions, are highly sensitive to certain negative emotions of fear and anger. These observations are discussed in the light of hemispheric theory, which accounts for a generalized performance deficit, and social-cognitive theory, which accounts for an emotion-specific deficit in schizophrenia. Psychological deficit in schizophrenia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 70:2-24, 1965. Cramer, P.; Weegmann, M.; and O'Neil, M. Schizophrenia and the perception of emotions: How accurately do schizophrenics judge the emotional states of others? British Journal of Psychiatry, 155:225-228, 1989. Cutting, J. Judgment of emotional expression in schizophrenics. British Journal of Psychiatry, 139:1-6, 1981. Davidson, R.J.; Ekman, P.; Saron, CD.; Senulis, J.A.; and Friesen, W.V. Approach-withdrawal and cerebral asymmetry: Emotional expression and brain pathology I. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58:330-341, 1990. Dougherty, P.E.; Bartlett, E.S.; and Izard, CE. Responses of schizophrenics to expressions of fundamental emotions.
Exploring the role of face processing in facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia
Acta Neuropsychiatrica, 2009
Objective: Impairment in emotion perception represents a fundamental feature of schizophrenia with important consequences in social functioning. A fundamental unresolved issue is the relationship between emotion perception and face perception. The aim of the present study was to examine whether facial identity recognition (Identity Discrimination) is a factor predicting facial emotion recognition in the context of the other factors, known as contributing to emotion perception, such as cognitive functions and symptoms. Methods: We enrolled 58 stable schizophrenic out-patients and 47 healthy subjects. Facial identity recognition and emotion perception were assessed with the Comprehensive Affect Testing System. Different multiple regression models with backward elimination were performed in order to discover the relation of each significant variable with emotion perception. Results: In a regression including the six significant variables (age, positive symptomatology, Identity Discrimination, attentive functions, verbal memory-learning, executive functions) versus emotion processing, only attentive functions (standardised β = 0.264, p = 0.038) and Identity Discrimination (standardised β = 0.279, p = 0.029) reached a significant level. Two partial regressions were performed including five variables, one excluding attentive functions and the other excluding Identity Discrimination. When we excluded attentive functions, the only significant variable was Identity Discrimination (standardised β = 0.278, p = 0.032). When we excluded Identity Discrimination, both verbal memory-learning (standardised β = 0.261, p = 0.042) and executive functions (standardised β = 0.253, p = 0.048) were significant. Conclusions: Our results emphasised the role of face perception and attentional abilities on affect perception in schizophrenia. We additionally found a role of verbal memory-learning and executive functions on emotion perception. The relationship between those above-mentioned variables and emotion processing could have implications for cognitive rehabilitation.