Symptom Correlates of Static and Dynamic Facial Affect Processing in Schizophrenia: Evidence of a Double Dissociation?

Schizophrenia patients have been shown to be compromised in their ability to recognize facial emotion. This deficit has been shown to be related to negative symptoms severity. However, to date, most studies have used static rather than dynamic depictions of faces. Nineteen patients with schizophreni...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Schizophrenia bulletin 2010-07, Vol.36 (4), p.680-687
Main Authors: JOHNSTON, Patrick J, ENTICOTT, Peter G, MAYES, Angela K, HOY, Kate E, HERRING, Sally E, FITZGERALD, Paul B
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Affect
Biological and medical sciences
Decision Making
Discrimination (Psychology)
Facial Expression
Female
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Middle Aged
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Psychiatric Status Rating Scales
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Psychoses
Psychotic Disorders - diagnosis
Psychotic Disorders - psychology
Regular
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia - diagnosis
Schizophrenic Psychology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Schizophrenia patients have been shown to be compromised in their ability to recognize facial emotion. This deficit has been shown to be related to negative symptoms severity. However, to date, most studies have used static rather than dynamic depictions of faces. Nineteen patients with schizophrenia were compared with seventeen controls on 2 tasks; the first involving the discrimination of facial identity, emotion, and butterfly wings; the second testing emotion recognition using both static and dynamic stimuli. In the first task, the patients performed more poorly than controls for emotion discrimination only, confirming a specific deficit in facial emotion recognition. In the second task, patients performed more poorly in both static and dynamic facial emotion processing. An interesting pattern of associations suggestive of a possible double dissociation emerged in relation to correlations with symptom ratings: high negative symptom ratings were associated with poorer recognition of static displays of emotion, whereas high positive symptom ratings were associated with poorer recognition of dynamic displays of emotion. However, while the strength of associations between negative symptom ratings and accuracy during static and dynamic facial emotion processing was significantly different, those between positive symptom ratings and task performance were not. The results confirm a facial emotion-processing deficit in schizophrenia using more ecologically valid dynamic expressions of emotion. The pattern of findings may reflect differential patterns of cortical dysfunction associated with negative and positive symptoms of schizophrenia in the context of differential neural mechanisms for the processing of static and dynamic displays of facial emotion.
ISSN:0586-7614
1745-1701
DOI:10.1093/schbul/sbn136