Abstract
Background: Abnormal visual scanpaths to faces and facial expressions in schizophrenia
may underlie schizophrenic subjects’ disturbed interpersonal communication. This study
is the first to examine the specificity of these impairments to schizophrenia, by
including an affective disorder psychiatric control group.
Methods: The visual scanpath performance of 65 schizophrenia, 52 affective disordered,
and 61 control subjects were compared in two experiments. In the “face recognition”
experiment, subjects viewed four identifiable (non-degraded) neutral faces versus
four matched non-identifiable (degraded) control faces. In the “facial affect recognition”
experiment, subjects viewed positive (happy), negative (sad), and neutral (control)
facial emotion stimuli. Concurrent behavioral tasks were face matching (face recognition)
and expression matching (facial affect recognition), each under two multiple-choice
conditions (7 or 3 options).
Results: Scanpath disturbances were most apparent in schizophrenia subjects, who maintained
a comparatively “restricted” scanpath style to all face stimuli. Schizophrenics subjects
also showed the greatest recognition difficulties, particularly for neutral and happy
faces. Scanpath parameters for affective disorder subjects differed only from the
schizophrenia (but not the control) group, except for attention to facial features
where they generally avoided facial features in all expressions and showed the greatest
attentional problems of all groups for degraded faces.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that a global restriction of visual scanpaths is
specific to schizophrenic psychosis and might be a trait marker for this disorder,
whereas scanpath abnormalities in affective disorder might instead reflect severe
state-based (or discrete) attentional disturbances.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
February 1,
2002
Received in revised form:
September 26,
2001
Received in revised form:
January 24,
2002
Received:
April 16,
2001
Identification
Copyright
© 2002 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
