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Updated: May 8, 2026

Conscious and Non-conscious Representations of Emotional Faces in Asperger's Syndrome
Published on: July 31, 2016
Familiarity and face emotion recognition in patients with schizophrenia
Guillermo Lahera1, Sara Herrera, Cristina Fernández
1Department of Psychiatry, Príncipe de Asturias University Hospital, University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain.
Objective:
To assess the emotion recognition in familiar and unknown faces in a sample of schizophrenic patients and healthy controls.
Methods:
Face emotion recognition of 18 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia (DSM-IVTR) and 18 healthy volunteers was assessed with two Emotion Recognition Tasks using familiar faces and unknown faces. Each subject was accompanied by 4 familiar people (parents, siblings or friends), which were photographed by expressing the 6 Ekman's basic emotions. Face emotion recognition in familiar faces was assessed with this ad hoc instrument. In each case, the patient scored (from 1 to 10) the subjective familiarity and affective valence corresponding to each person.
Results:
Patients with schizophrenia not only showed a deficit in the recognition of emotions on unknown faces (p=.01), but they also showed an even more pronounced deficit on familiar faces (p=.001). Controls had a similar success rate in the unknown faces task (mean: 18 +/- 2.2) and the familiar face task (mean: 17.4 +/- 3). However, patients had a significantly lower score in the familiar faces task (mean: 13.2 +/- 3.8) than in the unknown faces task (mean: 16 +/- 2.4; p<.05). In both tests, the highest number of errors was with emotions of anger and fear. Subjectively, the patient group showed a lower level of familiarity and emotional valence to their respective relatives (p<.01).
Conclusions:
The sense of familiarity may be a factor involved in the face emotion recognition and it may be disturbed in schizophrenia.
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