Automatic processing of facial emotion in schizophrenia with and without affective negative symptoms

It is assumed that people spontaneously evaluate any incoming stimulus as pleasant or unpleasant. The evaluative response appears to structure perception and to have direct links to emotional states.

To investigate the automatic processing of face valence a sequential priming task based on emotional face stimuli was administered to schizophrenia patients with a flat affect expression, schizophrenia patients suffering from anhedonia, schizophrenia patients not suffering from anhedonia or flat affect, and healthy controls. The Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (Andreasen, 1989) was applied to evaluate affective symptoms and categorize patients into groups.

Schizophrenia patients without affective negative symptoms exhibited reversed priming effects similar to that of healthy subjects. In contrast, flat affect patients and anhedonic patients showed only a prime effect due to negative facial valence. In the flat affect patient group, negative prime faces facilitated the evaluation of target faces, whereas in the anhedonic patient group negative prime faces tended to inhibit the evaluation of subsequent target faces.

The present findings support the idea that chronic schizophrenia patients extract automatically the valence of emotional facial expression but they also suggest processing differences between schizophrenia patients as a function of affective symptoms.