Abstract
Background: 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.
Methods: 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.
Results: 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.
Conclusions: 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.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
February 15,
2000
Received in revised form:
December 7,
1999
Received:
June 14,
1999
Identification
Copyright
© 2000 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
