Impaired facial affect labeling and discrimination in patients with deficit syndrome schizophrenia

Social and affective disturbances have long been thought to be core to schizophrenia. Deficits in accurately identifying and discriminating facial displays of emotion may be central components of the functional and social abnormalities seen in schizophrenia; however, their relationship with negative symptoms is less clear. The current study examined facial affect labeling and discrimination performance in a sample of 15 patients meeting criteria for deficit syndrome schizophrenia, 26 schizophrenia patients who do not meet criteria for the deficit syndrome, and 22 healthy controls. Results indicated that deficit schizophrenia patients displayed significantly greater facial affect labeling and discrimination difficulties than non-deficit patients and controls, as well as poorer performance on a basic visuoperceptual face processing task, suggesting that problems with facial affect processing may be mediated by a more general impairment in visuoperceptual processing. However, within this more generalized pattern of impairment, deficit syndrome patients were uniquely characterized by processing positive faces less accurately than negative faces. These findings suggest that abnormalities in processing facial emotion are associated with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, with a unique deficit in the processing of positive emotions that stand out in the broader context of generalized impairment.