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. 2007 Aug;94(1-3):253-63.
doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2007.05.001. Epub 2007 Jun 20.

Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: when and why does it go awry?

Bruce I Turetsky  1 , Christian G Kohler, Tim Indersmitten, Mahendra T Bhati, Dorothy Charbonnier, Ruben C Gur
Affiliations

Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia: when and why does it go awry?

Bruce I Turetsky et al. Schizophr Res. 2007 Aug.

Abstract

Objective: Schizophrenia patients demonstrate impaired emotional processing that may be due, in part, to impaired facial emotion recognition. This study examined event-related potential (ERP) responses to emotional faces in schizophrenia patients and controls to determine when, in the temporal processing stream, patient abnormalities occur.

Method: 16 patients and 16 healthy control participants performed a facial emotion recognition task. Very sad, somewhat sad, neutral, somewhat happy, and very happy faces were each presented for 100 ms. Subjects indicated whether each face was "Happy", "Neutral", or "Sad". Evoked potential data were obtained using a 32-channel EEG system.

Results: Controls performed better than patients in recognizing facial emotions. In patients, better recognition of happy faces correlated with less severe negative symptoms. Four ERP components corresponding to the P100, N170, N250, and P300 were identified. Group differences were noted for the N170 "face processing" component that underlies the structural encoding of facial features, but not for the subsequent N250 "affect modulation" component. Higher amplitude of the N170 response to sad faces was correlated with less severe delusional symptoms. Although P300 abnormalities were found, the variance of this component was explained by the earlier N170 response.

Conclusion: Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate abnormalities in early visual encoding of facial features that precedes the ERP response typically associated with facial affect recognition. This suggests that affect recognition deficits, at least for happy and sad discrimination, are secondary to faulty structural encoding of faces. The association of abnormal face encoding with delusions may denote the physiological basis for clinical misidentification syndromes.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest

None of the authors have any actual or potential conflicts of interest that could inappropriately influence, or be perceived to influence, this work.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Examples of the facial emotion stimuli, ranging in valence and intensity from VS (left), through N (center), to VH (right).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Grand average common-average referenced ERP data for patients and controls from selected channels, for VS, N, and VH stimulus conditions.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Above, time course and scalp topography of the grand averaged GFP in both normal and schizophrenia subjects during emotional face recognition. Below, two-dimensional scalp topography of each ERP component including the P100, N170, N250, and P300.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Mean ± SD of the arc sine transform of the number of correctly identified emotions for each category of emotional face stimuli.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Mean ± SD GFP of the N170 response during perception of emotional faces in normal and schizophrenia subjects.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Mean ± SD GFP of the P300 response during perception of emotional faces in normal and schizophrenia subjects.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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