Recognition and identification of facial stimuli by schizophrenics and patients with affective disorders

Schizophrenics have been shown to manifest a significant deficit in identifying facial expressions of emotion. The present study sought to determine whether this deficit lay at the level of decoding facial cues of emotion, or whether it is specific to the process of labelling emotional faces. The latter specific deficit would be consistent with the hypothesis of left-hemisphere dysfunction in schizophrenia. Samples of schizophrenics, patients with affective disorders and normal controls were tested on a battery of facial tasks that had previously been shown to be capable of distinguishing between patients with left- and right-hemisphere lesions. The battery was comprised of four tests: facial discrimination, emotion discrimination, emotion labelling, and a multiple choice emotion task. The performance of affective patients fell midway between that of schizophrenics and normals on all the tasks. Schizophrenics performed significantly below normals on all but the facial discrimination task, and below affective patients on the emotion labelling task. There were no other significant group differences in performance. The performance pattern manifested by schizophrenics across the four tasks is not comparable to that shown by patients with unilateral brain damage. These results indicate that previously reported emotion identification deficits in schizophrenia were not solely a function of the labelling requirements of the tasks. Instead it appears that schizophrenics, although capable of deciphering facial cues of identity, are impaired in the ability to extract salient emotional cues from faces.