Investigating facial affect processing in psychosis: a study using the Comprehensive Affective Testing System

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Facial affect processing (FAP) deficits are frequently reported in schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD), but direct comparisons and the influence of symptom severity remain debated.
• Existing research shows variable effect sizes and limited direct comparisons between SZ and BD groups regarding FAP.

Purpose of the Study:

• To directly compare FAP deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) patients against healthy controls (HC).
• To investigate the impact of psychotic and mood symptoms on FAP performance in these patient groups.

Main Methods:

• Recruitment of SZ, BD, and HC groups.
• Administration of a validated battery of four FAP subtests: affect discrimination, name affect, select affect, and match affect.
• Analysis of accuracy across subtests and correlation with symptom severity.

Main Results:

• Both SZ and BD groups exhibited lower accuracy than HC on FAP tasks.
• SZ patients showed impairments across three subtests, while BD patients were specifically impaired on the 'match affect' subtest, a high cognitive load task.
• FAP performance in psychosis patients correlated with positive symptom and mania severity.

Conclusions:

• Facial affect processing deficits are a consistent finding in schizophrenia, independent of methodology.
• Facial affect processing deficits in bipolar disorder are more subtle and task-specific, particularly on cognitively demanding tasks.
• Further research is needed to replicate findings in bipolar disorder patients.