Symptom correlates of facial emotion recognition impairment in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND

The ability to facial emotion recognition (FER), a key component of socioemotional competence, is often impaired in schizophrenic disorders. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between emotion recognition performance and symptoms in a group of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

SAMPLING AND METHODS

Seventy-nine patients meeting DSM-IV-TR criteria for schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder and schizoaffective disorder were assessed by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and a FER task. In schizophrenia patients and healthy control subjects, FER performance was compared. In order to avoid a possible confounding role of cognitive impairment, we carried out partial correlations corrected for an index of global cognition.

RESULTS

Patients performed worse than a healthy control group on all negative emotions. Partial correlations showed that cognitive/disorganized symptoms correlated with a worse performance in the FER task, whereas no correlations were found with positive, negative, excitement and depressive symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings support that in schizophrenia FER impairment is specific for negative emotions and that there is a relationship between this deficit and cognitive/disorganized symptoms, regardless of the general cognitive level.