Processing and recognition of facial affect in schizophrenia

A deficit in the recognition of facial affect has been well documented in people with schizophrenia. Our 1995 research with normal subjects showed that hemispheric bias for processing facial affect is related to accuracy of recognition of facial affect. We tested whether this relationship holds in a sample of 25 people with schizophrenia who completed tasks of identification of facial affect and chimeric facial affect. Subjects with a left visual-field bias were significantly more accurate in identifying one facial emotion (sad) than were other subjects. Individual differences in hemispheric advantage for processing affect appears to be an important variable related to functional brain capacity within different populations.