Virtual faces as a tool to study emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia

Studies investigating emotion recognition in patients with schizophrenia predominantly presented photographs of facial expressions. Better control and higher flexibility of emotion displays could be afforded by virtual reality (VR). VR allows the manipulation of facial expression and can simulate social interactions in a controlled and yet more naturalistic environment. However, to our knowledge, there is no study that systematically investigated whether patients with schizophrenia show the same emotion recognition deficits when emotions are expressed by virtual as compared to natural faces. Twenty schizophrenia patients and 20 controls rated pictures of natural and virtual faces with respect to the basic emotion expressed (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutrality). Consistent with our hypothesis, the results revealed that emotion recognition impairments also emerged for emotions expressed by virtual characters. As virtual in contrast to natural expressions only contain major emotional features, schizophrenia patients already seem to be impaired in the recognition of basic emotional features. This finding has practical implication as it supports the use of virtual emotional expressions for psychiatric research: the ease of changing facial features, animating avatar faces, and creating therapeutic simulations makes validated artificial expressions perfectly suited to study and treat emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia.