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Emotion processing and its relationship to social functioning in schizophrenia patients.
1Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, 4143 Tolman Hall #5050, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-5050, USA. chooker@socrates.berkley.edu
Psychiatry Research
|October 16, 2002
Summary
Schizophrenia patients show deficits in recognizing emotions and faces. Impaired affect recognition, not general face processing, is linked to social functioning difficulties in schizophrenia.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
- Social Psychology
Background:
- Schizophrenia is characterized by social cognition deficits, including affect recognition.
- The precise nature of these deficits (general face processing vs. specific affect recognition) and their functional impact remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate face and affect recognition abilities in schizophrenia patients.
- To examine the relationship between recognition deficits and social functioning.
Main Methods:
- 20 medicated schizophrenia patients and 27 controls completed face and vocal affect recognition tasks.
- A subset of patients was assessed using the Social Dysfunction Index.
Main Results:
- Schizophrenia patients performed worse than controls on face recognition, facial affect recognition, and vocal affect recognition.
- Within schizophrenia patients, only affect recognition performance correlated with social functioning.
Conclusions:
- Schizophrenia involves general face processing deficits.
- Difficulties in affect recognition appear to be a key factor contributing to social dysfunction in schizophrenia.