Abstract
Background: Facial affect recognition is the ability of all individuals to recognize basic forms of affective expression reflected on people’s faces. These expressions are happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, and the absence of emotion, also called neutral expression. Patients with schizophrenia present difficulty in recognizing these expressions in themselves and/or in other people. Objective: The objective was to determinate which emotions were confused and for what other emotion they were taken for (misattribution). Method: We included three groups: 34 schizophrenic patients, 34 siblings, and 34 control subjects. All patients attend the schizophrenia clinic, their siblings were those closest in age and gender, and subjects without mental illness were paired by age and gender. We used SCID-I and SCL-90 scales to discard mental illness in siblings and controls. PANSS, CDSS, and CGI were used to measure the severity of the disease in schizophrenic patients. We used the Pictures of Facial Affect developed by Ekman (1976), to evaluate facial affect recognition. Results: Across all groups, the least recognized emotion was fear; in the patients and siblings groups, the most recognized emotion was surprise. In the patient group happiness was mistaken for the neutral face in 13%. The patients mistook anger for neutral face in 5.6%, fear in 5.2%, surprise in 5.0%, and disgust in 4.9 %. Neutral face: only the patients group mistook the neutral face for sadness in 4.6%. Fear was the least recognized emotion; the patient group mistook it for surprise in 42.6% and anger in 6.9 %. The siblings mistook it for surprise in 41.3 %, and the control group also for surprise in 25.4%. Disgust: It was mistaken for anger by patients in 25.6%, siblings in 23.3%, and control subjects in 11.5%. Sadness: it was mistaken for fear in 15.6%, and for neutral faces in 10.9% in the patients group. In the siblings group the sadness was mistaken for fear in 14.1%, and the controls group sadness was mistaken for fear in 11.1%.
Highlights
One of the main dysfunctions caused by schizophrenia occurs in the social area, where patients are socially isolated or show inappropriate social behaviors
We evaluated facial recognition ability in three groups with Pictures of Facial Affects (POFA) developed by Paul Ekman
The schizophrenic patients had lower scores in facial recognition, they had lower social abilities, and a significant proportion of behavioral problems when they were exposed to social scenarios and interactions (Hooker et al, 2002). This supports the presence of basic cognitive failures in patients and their siblings, which has been reported in the literature before (Mandal and Palchoudhury, 1985; Chung and Barch, 2011; Lee et al, 2010; Tse et al, 2011). These outcomes are present in all groups, the worst group to recognition emotion were the patients group, and the best recognition emotion groups were the control subjects
Summary
One of the main dysfunctions caused by schizophrenia occurs in the social area, where patients are socially isolated or show inappropriate social behaviors. It could be considered that these dysfunctions are related to an inadequate processing of social information in patients with schizophrenia. Social cognition is part of the cognitive spectrum in humans and primates It is the study of how people process social information, especially its encoding, storage, retrieval, and application on social situations (Cacioppo et al, 2000). The basic affective expressions of facial recognition are: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, and the absence of emotion or neutral emotion. These emotions are universal and accepted by all cultures. Facial affect recognition is the ability of all individuals to recognize basic forms of affective expression reflected on people’s faces These expressions are happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, anger, and the absence of emotion, called neutral expression. Patients with schizophrenia present difficulty in recognizing these expressions in themselves and/or in other people
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