Abstract
People with schizophrenia or subclinical schizotypal traits exhibit impaired recognition of facial expressions. However, it remains unclear whether the detection of emotional facial expressions is impaired in people with schizophrenia or high levels of schizotypy. The present study examined whether the detection of emotional facial expressions would be associated with schizotypy in a non-clinical population after controlling for the effects of IQ, age, and sex. Participants were asked to respond to whether all faces were the same as quickly and as accurately as possible following the presentation of angry or happy faces or their anti-expressions among crowds of neutral faces. Anti-expressions contain a degree of visual change that is equivalent to that of normal emotional facial expressions relative to neutral facial expressions and are recognized as neutral expressions. Normal expressions of anger and happiness were detected more rapidly and accurately than their anti-expressions. Additionally, the degree of overall schizotypy was negatively correlated with the effectiveness of detecting normal expressions versus anti-expressions. An emotion–recognition task revealed that the degree of positive schizotypy was negatively correlated with the accuracy of facial expression recognition. These results suggest that people with high levels of schizotypy experienced difficulties detecting and recognizing emotional facial expressions.
Highlights
Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe psychiatric condition characterized by positive, royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R
Several studies have shown that individuals with high schizotypal traits show impairments recognizing facial expressions and that the degree of impairment is positively correlated with the levels of schizotypy measure [6,12,13,14,15]. These findings reveal that the impairment in the processing of facial expressions is an associated feature of schizophrenia symptom and schizotypal traits
On the assumption that detecting emotional facial expressions in complex environments serves as a starting point for initiating meaningful interaction, we investigated whether the detection of emotional facial expression versus neutral expressions was associated with the levels of schizotypy in the general population
Summary
Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe psychiatric condition characterized by positive (e.g. delusion and hallucination), royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R. Negative (e.g. flat affect and anhedonia), and/or disorganized (e.g. thought disorder) symptoms [1]. It 2 has been proposed that schizophrenia is located at the extreme end of a spectrum of psychotic symptoms and that the opposite end includes a non-clinical general population with schizotypy [2,3]. Schizotypy represents a personality structure composed of psychological factors that are similar to those of schizophrenia in terms of positive, negative and disorganized symptom domains [4]. The study of schizotypy allows us to investigate the psychological mechanisms associated with schizophrenia and related characteristics under cognitively demanding tasks, because schizotypal traits are distributed across the general population [7]
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