Tholl Sarah, Sojer Christian A, Schmidt Stephanie N L, Mier Daniela
Department of Psychology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2024 Aug 29;15:1284595. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1284595. eCollection 2024.
Emotion recognition impairments and a tendency to misclassify neutral faces as negative are common in schizophrenia. A possible explanation for these deficits is aberrant salience attribution. To explore the possibility of salience driven emotion recognition deficits, we implemented a novel facial emotion salience task (FEST).
Sixty-six healthy participants with variations in psychometric schizotypy completed the FEST. In the FEST, we manipulated physical salience (FEST-1: contrast, FEST-2: saturation) of emotionally salient (positive, i.e., happy and negative, i.e., fearful) and non-salient (neutral) facial expressions.
When salience was high (increased contrast), participants recognized negative facial expressions faster, whereas neutral faces were recognized more slowly and were more frequently misclassified as negative. When salience was low (decreased saturation), positive expressions were recognized more slowly. These measures were not associated with schizotypy in our sample.
Our findings show that the match between physical and emotional salience influences emotion recognition and suggest that the FEST is suitable to simulate aberrant salience processing during emotion recognition in healthy participants.
情绪识别障碍以及将中性面孔误分类为负面情绪的倾向在精神分裂症中很常见。这些缺陷的一个可能解释是异常的显著性归因。为了探究显著性驱动的情绪识别缺陷的可能性，我们实施了一项新颖的面部情绪显著性任务（FEST）。
66名具有不同心理测量学精神分裂症特征的健康参与者完成了FEST。在FEST中，我们操纵了情绪显著（积极，即快乐；消极，即恐惧）和非显著（中性）面部表情的物理显著性（FEST-1：对比度，FEST-2：饱和度）。
当显著性较高（对比度增加）时，参与者更快地识别出负面面部表情，而中性面孔被识别得更慢，并且更频繁地被误分类为负面。当显著性较低（饱和度降低）时，积极表情被识别得更慢。在我们的样本中，这些测量结果与精神分裂症特征无关。
我们的研究结果表明，物理显著性和情绪显著性之间的匹配会影响情绪识别，并表明FEST适合模拟健康参与者在情绪识别过程中的异常显著性处理。
