Emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and psychotic bipolar disorder: Findings from the Bipolar-Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) study (original) (raw)
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Emotion recognition deficit in schizophrenia: association with symptomatology and cognition
Biological Psychiatry, 2000
Previous investigations have found impaired recognition of facial affect in schizophrenia. Controversy exists as to whether this impairment represents a specific emotion recognition deficit when compared with other face recognition control tasks. Regardless of whether the emotion processing deficit is differential, it may uniquely influence other manifestations of schizophrenia. We compared patients and healthy control subjects on computerized tasks of emotion and age recognition. Performances on emotion and age recognition tasks were correlated with cognitive functioning and with symptomatology. Thirty-five patients with schizophrenia and 45 healthy people underwent computerized testing for emotion and age recognition. Participants were assessed neuropsychologically, and patients were rated for positive and negative symptoms. The patients with schizophrenia performed worse than control subjects on emotion and age recognition without differential deficit. In both groups, we found higher error rates for identification of emotion in female faces and for identification of sad versus happy faces. In schizophrenic patients, emotion but not age recognition correlated with severity of negative and positive symptoms. In healthy control subjects, neither task correlated with cognitive functions. In schizophrenic patients, emotion but not age recognition correlated with attention, verbal and spatial memory, and language abilities. This study did not reveal a specific deficit for emotion recognition in schizophrenia; however, our findings lend support to the concept that emotion recognition is uniquely associated in schizophrenia with core symptomatology and cognitive domains.
Emotion recognition impairment is present early and is stable throughout the course of schizophrenia
Schizophrenia Research, 2013
Individuals with schizophrenia experience problems in the perception of emotion throughout the course of the disorder. Few studies have addressed the progression of the deficit over time. The present investigation explores face emotion recognition (FER) performance throughout the course of schizophrenia. The aim of the study was to test the hypotheses that: 1) FER impairment was present in ultra high-risk (putatively prodromal) individuals, and that 2) impairment was stable across the course of the illness. Forty-three individuals with a putative prodromal syndrome, 50 patients with first episode of schizophrenia, 44 patients with multi-episode schizophrenia and 86 unaffected healthy control subjects were assessed to examine emotion recognition ability. ANCOVA analysis adjusted for possible confounder factors and subsequent planned contrasts with healthy controls was undertaken. The results revealed deficits in recognition of sadness and disgust in prodromal individuals, and of all negative emotions in both first-episode and multi-episode patients. Furthermore, there were no significant differences between clinical groups. Within the framework of the neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia, our results suggest the presence of emotional recognition impairment before the onset of full-blown psychosis. Moreover, the deficit remains stable over the course of illness, fitting the pattern of a vulnerability indicator in contrast to an indicator of chronicity or severity.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2000
In this study, the authors examined the nature of emotion perception in schizophrenia. Two samples of people with schizophrenia, one receiving acute care for a recent exacerbation of symptoms and the other receiving extended care, were compared with a nonclinical control group on emotion perception and general perception measures. The nonclinical control group obtained the highest scores on all of the study measures, and the acutely ill group obtained the lowest scores. Furthermore, the acutely ill sample had a specific deficit in emotion perception that remained present after controlling for performance on the general perception tasks. Conversely, the deficits in emotion discrimination in the extended-care sample reflected generalized poor performance. Differences in performance on the emotion identification task between the 2 clinical groups were reduced when controlling for active symptoms.
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.
Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, 2013
Introduction: It has recently been highlighted that patients affected by schizophrenia (SCZ) and those affected by bipolar disorder (BD) undergo gradual chronic worsening of cognitive and social functioning. The objective of the current study was to evaluate and compare (using the Facial Action Coding System [FACS]) the way by which patients with the two disorders experience and display emotions in relation to specific emotional stimuli. Materials and methods: Forty-five individuals participated in the study: 15 SCZ patients, 15 BD patients, and 15 healthy controls. All participants watched emotion-eliciting video clips while their facial activity was videotaped. The congruent/incongruent feeling of emotions and the facial expression in reaction to emotions were evaluated. Results: SCZ and BD patients presented similar incongruent emotive feelings and facial expressions (significantly worse than healthy participants); SCZ patients expressed the emotion of disgust significantly less appropriately than BD patients. Discussion: BD and SCZ patients seem to present a similar relevant impairment in both experiencing and displaying emotions; this impairment may be seen as a behavioral indicator of the deficit of social cognition present in both the disorders. As the disgust emotion is mainly elaborated in the insular cortex, the incongruent expression of disgust of SCZ patients can be interpreted as a further evidence of a functional deficit of the insular cortex in this disease. Specific remediation training could be used to improve emotion and social cognition in SCZ and BD patients.
PLoS ONE, 2013
Background: Patients with schizophrenia perform significantly worse on emotion recognition tasks than healthy participants across several sensory modalities. Emotion recognition abilities are correlated with the severity of clinical symptoms, particularly negative symptoms. However, the relationships between specific deficits of emotion recognition across sensory modalities and the presentation of psychotic symptoms remain unclear. The current study aims to explore how emotion recognition ability across modalities and neurocognitive function correlate with clusters of psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2022
population-based controls completed assessments of the Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task (DFAR) and a subsample of 524 FEP and 899 controls provided blood or saliva samples from which we extracted DNA, performed genotyping and computed polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia (SZ), bipolar disorder (BD), and major depressive disorder (MD). Study Results: A worse ability to globally recognize facial emotion expressions was found in patients compared with controls [B= −1.5 (0.6), 95% CI −2.7 to −0.3], with evidence for stronger effects on negative emotions (fear [B = −3.3 (1.1), 95% CI −5.3 to −1.2] and anger [B = −2.3 (1.1), 95% CI −4.6 to −0.1]) than on happiness [B = 0.3 (0.7), 95% CI −1 to 1.7]. Pooling all participants, and controlling for confounds including case/control status, facial anger recognition was associated significantly with Schizophrenia Polygenic Risk Score (SZ PRS) [B = −3.5 (1.7), 95% CI −6.9 to −0.2]. Conclusions: Psychosis is associated with impaired recognition of fear and anger, and higher SZ PRS is associated with worse facial anger recognition. Our findings provide evidence that facial emotion recognition of anger might play a role as an intermediate phenotype for psychosis.
Schizophrenia Research, 2014
Both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (BD) have consistently been associated with deficits in facial affect recognition (FAR). These impairments have been related to various aspects of social competence and functioning and are relatively stable over time. However, individuals in remission may outperform patients experiencing an acute phase of the disorders. The present study directly contrasted FAR in symptomatically remitted patients with schizophrenia or BD and healthy volunteers and investigated its relationship with patients' outcomes. Compared to healthy control subjects, schizophrenia patients were impaired in the recognition of angry, disgusted, sad and happy facial expressions, while BD patients showed deficits only in the recognition of disgusted and happy facial expressions. When directly comparing the two patient groups individuals suffering from BD outperformed those with schizophrenia in the recognition of expressions depicting anger. There was no significant association between affect recognition abilities and symptomatic or psychosocial outcomes in schizophrenia patients. Among BD patients, relatively higher depression scores were associated with impairments in both the identification of happy faces and psychosocial functioning. Overall, our findings indicate that during periods of symptomatic remission the recognition of facial affect may be less impaired in patients with BD than in those suffering from schizophrenia. However, in the psychosocial context BD patients seem to be more sensitive to residual symptomatology.
Schizophrenia Research, 2014
Aims: Recent research has shown emotion recognition to be impaired in individuals at ultra-high risk (UHR) for developing a psychotic disorder compared to healthy controls. This longitudinal study aimed to examine whether disturbed emotion recognition measured in UHR participants at baseline predicts transition to a psychotic disorder within 12 months. Methods: Thirty-seven UHR participants aged 13-22 years participated in the study. At baseline participants completed face and prosody emotion recognition tasks, as well as measures of psychopathology, functioning, and IQ. Transition to a psychotic disorder over 12 months was the primary outcome. A series of Cox regressions was performed with emotion recognition as the predictor variable, while controlling for covariates, with time to transition to a psychotic disorder as the dependent variable. Results: Eleven (29.7%) of the 37 participants transitioned to a psychotic disorder over the 12-month follow-up period. Total face or prosody emotion recognition accuracy was not predictive of transition to a psychotic disorder. However, examination of recognition of specific emotions, while controlling for positive, negative and global symptoms and functioning, revealed that accuracy in identifying neutral (p = .037) and fearful (p = .015) emotion predicted transition to a psychotic disorder. Specifically, lower accuracy in identifying neutral emotion and higher accuracy in identifying fearful emotion were predictive of transition to a psychotic disorder within 12 months. Examination of the separate modalities revealed that this finding held for face but not for prosody emotion recognition. Conclusion: These findings suggest that emotion recognition abilities may be prognostic for the development of psychotic disorders, but further studies are needed.