Chambon Valérian, Baudouin Jean-Yves, Franck Nicolas
Institut des Sciences Cognitives, UMR-CNRS 5015, 67, bd Pinel, 69 675 Bron Cedex, Lyon, France.
Neuropsychologia. 2006;44(12):2437-44. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.04.008. Epub 2006 Jun 23.
The schizophrenia deficit in facial emotion recognition could be accounted for by a deficit in processing the configural information of the face. The present experiment was designed to further test this hypothesis by studying the face-inversion effect in a facial emotion recognition task. The ability of 26 schizophrenic patients and 26 control participants to recognize facial emotions on upright and upside-down faces was assessed. Participants were told to state whether faces expressed one of six possible emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, neutrality) in two sessions, one with upright faces and the other with upside-down faces. Discriminability and the decision criterion were computed. The results indicated that the schizophrenic patients were impaired in upright facial emotion discrimination by comparison with the controls. They also exhibited an inversion effect similar to the controls. However, whereas controls tended to adopt a more conservative criterion for all emotions and a liberal criterion for neutrality when the faces were upside-down, schizophrenic patients presented a decision criterion pattern that was similar for the two orientations and similar to controls in upside-down emotion recognition. The lack of a decision criterion shift was associated with positive symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, and bizarre behavior. Moreover, positive and negative symptoms were associated with inversion effect on discriminability; the more severe the symptoms, the weaker the inversion effect. We conclude that individuals with schizophrenia do process the configural information of the face. However, further investigations are needed to assert whether this information is of good quality in schizophrenia.
精神分裂症患者在面部表情识别方面的缺陷可能是由于处理面部构型信息的能力不足所致。本实验旨在通过研究面部表情识别任务中的面部倒置效应来进一步验证这一假设。评估了26名精神分裂症患者和26名对照参与者识别正立和倒置面部表情的能力。参与者被告知分两个阶段说出面部是否表达了六种可能情绪中的一种（快乐、愤怒、厌恶、恐惧、悲伤、中性），一个阶段是正立面部，另一个阶段是倒置面部。计算了辨别力和决策标准。结果表明，与对照组相比，精神分裂症患者在正立面部表情辨别方面存在缺陷。他们也表现出与对照组相似的倒置效应。然而，当面部倒置时，对照组倾向于对所有情绪采用更保守的标准，对中性表情采用宽松的标准，而精神分裂症患者呈现出一种在两种取向中相似且在倒置表情识别中与对照组相似的决策标准模式。决策标准缺乏变化与妄想、幻觉和怪异行为等阳性症状相关。此外，阳性和阴性症状与辨别力的倒置效应相关；症状越严重，倒置效应越弱。我们得出结论，精神分裂症患者确实能够处理面部的构型信息。然而，需要进一步研究来确定在精神分裂症中这种信息的质量是否良好。
