Facial emotion and orientation-matching in schizophrenia patients and normal controls

Abstract

Schizophrenia (SZ) patients exhibit deficits in recognition and identification of facial emotional expressions but it is unclear whether these deficits result from abnormal affective processing or an impaired ability to process complex visual stimuli such as faces. SZ and matched healthy controls (CO) participated in two computerized visual matching tasks (facial emotional expression and orientation). Accuracy and reaction time were recorded. Clinical symptoms were also assessed in the patients. SZ were less accurate on both facial emotion and orientation matching tasks compared with CO but there was no diagnosis-by-task interaction. Clinical symptoms of SZ were associated with deficits on the matching tasks and social functioning was correlated with emotion matching errors across both groups. SZ have general deficits in processing of faces, which is in turn associated with worse symptoms and reduced social functioning.