Processing emotional expression and facial identity in schizophrenia

Previous studies showed that schizophrenic patients have a deficit in facial information processing. The purpose of the present study was to test the abilities of patients with schizophrenia and normal controls in emotion and identity matching when these two dimensions were varied orthogonally. Subjects (20 schizophrenic patients and 20 controls) had to report if two faces had the same emotion or belonged to the same person. When the task concerned one type of information (i.e. emotion or identity), the other one was either constant (same person or same emotion) or changed (different person or different emotion). Schizophrenic patients performed worse than controls for both kinds of facial information. Their deficit was more important when the secondary factor was changed. In particular, they performed at chance level when they had to match one emotion expressed by two distinct persons. Finally, correlation analysis indicated that performance/deficit in identity and emotion matching co-varied and that in such tasks performance is negatively correlated with the severity of negative symptoms in patients. Schizophrenic patients present a generalised deficit for accessing facial information. A facial emotion and an identity-processing deficit are related to negative symptoms. Implications for face-recognition models are discussed.