Facial expression and sex recognition in schizophrenia and depression

Impaired facial expression recognition in schizophrenia patients contributes to abnormal social functioning and may predict functional outcome in these patients. Facial expression processing involves individual neural networks that have been shown to malfunction in schizophrenia. Whether these patients have a selective deficit in facial expression recognition or a more global impairment in face processing remains controversial.

To investigate whether patients with schizophrenia exhibit a selective impairment in facial emotional expression recognition, compared with patients with major depression and healthy control subjects.

We studied performance in facial expression recognition and facial sex recognition paradigms, using original morphed faces, in a population with schizophrenia (n=29) and compared their scores with those of depression patients (n=20) and control subjects (n=20).

Schizophrenia patients achieved lower scores than both other groups in the expression recognition task, particularly in fear and disgust recognition. Sex recognition was unimpaired.

Facial expression recognition is impaired in schizophrenia, whereas sex recognition is preserved, which highly suggests an abnormal processing of changeable facial features in this disease. A dysfunction of the top-down retrograde modulation coming from limbic and paralimbic structures on visual areas is hypothesized.