Unit of Psychiatry, NESMOS Department (Neurosciences, Mental Health and Sense Organs), Sant'Andrea Hospital, Rome, Italy.
Psychopathology. 2014;47(1):65-70. doi: 10.1159/000350453. Epub 2013 Jun 18.
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.
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.
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.
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.
面部情绪识别（FER）能力是社会情感能力的一个关键组成部分，而在精神分裂症障碍患者中，这种能力往往受损。本研究旨在探讨一组精神分裂症谱系障碍患者的情绪识别表现与症状之间的关系。
79 名符合 DSM-IV-TR 精神分裂症、分裂情感障碍和精神分裂症谱系障碍标准的患者接受了阳性和阴性综合征量表和 FER 任务的评估。在精神分裂症患者和健康对照组中，比较了 FER 表现。为了避免认知障碍的可能混杂作用，我们进行了针对整体认知指数的部分相关校正。
患者在所有负性情绪上的表现均劣于健康对照组。部分相关显示，认知/紊乱症状与 FER 任务表现较差相关，而与阳性、阴性、兴奋和抑郁症状无关。
我们的研究结果支持精神分裂症患者 FER 损伤是负性情绪特异性的，并且这种缺陷与认知/紊乱症状之间存在关系，而与一般认知水平无关。
