[Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: an electrophysiological review]

Deficits in social cognition in schizophrenia have been shown to be among the main factors predicting functional impairment. Facial emotion perception is a basic component of social cognition and other higher-level social cognitive processes. In our review we aim to give an overview of findings investigating the electrophysiological correlates of facial emotion recognition, and summarize previous findings relating to the nature of the deficit in schizophrenia as compared to healthy controls. Disentangling early and late components of emotion processing as indexed by event-related brain potentials allows for a better understanding of whether impairment of facial emotion processing is due to deficits in the early structural encoding of faces, or whether it is related to later deficits associated with the encoding of the emotional content. Findings in the field of social cognition in schizophrenia are of both clinical and pharmacological importance, as on one side they carry the potential to improve cognitive therapeutic interventions, and on the other to develop targets aiming at the improvement of social deficits in schizophrenia.