Kwai Chung Hospital, Kwai Chung, New Territories, Hong Kong.
Psychiatry Res. 2011 Dec 30;190(2-3):172-6. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2011.07.001.
Deficits in facial emotion recognition have been recognised in Chinese patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. This study examined the relationship between chronicity of illness and performance of facial emotion recognition in Chinese with schizophrenia. There were altogether four groups of subjects matched for age and gender composition. The first and second groups comprised medically stable outpatients with first-episode schizophrenia (n=50) and their healthy controls (n=26). The third and fourth groups were patients with chronic schizophrenic illness (n=51) and their controls (n=28). The ability to recognise the six prototypical facial emotions was examined using locally validated coloured photographs from the Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expressions of Emotion. Chinese patients with schizophrenia, in both the first-episode and chronic stages, performed significantly worse than their control counterparts on overall facial emotion recognition, (P<0.001), with specific impairment in identifying surprise, fear and disgust. The level of deficit was similar at the two stages of illness. Findings suggest that impaired recognition of facial emotion did not appear to have worsened over the course of disease progression, suggesting that recognition of facial emotion is a rather stable trait of the illness. The emotion-specific deficit may have implications for understanding the social difficulties in schizophrenia.
在中国被诊断患有精神分裂症的患者中，已经发现他们的面部情绪识别存在缺陷。本研究旨在探讨中国精神分裂症患者的疾病慢性程度与面部情绪识别表现之间的关系。共有四组受试者按年龄和性别构成进行匹配。第一组和第二组包括首发精神分裂症的病情稳定的门诊患者（n=50）及其健康对照组（n=26）。第三组和第四组是慢性精神分裂症患者（n=51）及其对照组（n=28）。使用经过本地验证的来自日本和高加索人的彩色面部表情照片来检查识别六种典型面部表情的能力。无论是首发还是慢性阶段的中国精神分裂症患者，在整体面部情绪识别方面的表现均明显逊于对照组（P<0.001），在识别惊讶、恐惧和厌恶方面尤其存在障碍。在疾病的两个阶段，缺陷的程度相似。研究结果表明，面部表情识别障碍在疾病进展过程中似乎没有恶化，这表明识别面部表情是疾病的一个相对稳定的特征。情绪特异性缺陷可能对理解精神分裂症患者的社交困难具有重要意义。
