Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-kwt9d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T22:29:48.892Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Facial emotion processing in psychosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2014

N Joshua,
A O'Regan and
S Rossell
N Joshua
Affiliation:
Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
A O'Regan
Affiliation:
Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
S Rossell
Affiliation:
Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Information

Type
Abstracts from ‘Brainwaves’— The Australasian Society for Psychiatric Research Annual Meeting 2006, 6–8 December, Sydney, Australia
Information
Acta Neuropsychiatrica , Volume 18 , Issue 6 , December 2006, pp. 294
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Blackwell Munksgaard

Background:

Investigations into facial affect processing in schizophrenia have produced variable results; some studies indicate no differences in performance, while others have shown impaired performance in patients. Variations in methodology such as the use of different stimuli, different target emotions and differing levels of task difficulty may be responsible for these inconsistent findings. The current study investigated task performance on four emotion-processing tasks in two different groups of patients with psychosis and a group of healthy controls. All four tasks used the same stimuli and target emotions but manipulated task difficulty.

Method:

Age- and premorbid-IQ-matched patients with schizophrenia (n = 37), patients with bipolar disorder (n = 32) and healthy controls (n = 45) completed the affect discrimination, name affect, select affect and match affect subtests from the Comprehensive Affective Testing System (CATS; Froming et al. 2003).

Results:

Results indicated no significant differences in performance on the affect discrimination and name affect subtests. On the select affect subtest, patients with schizophrenia were significantly impaired compared with both other groups. On the match affect subtest, patients with schizophrenia were the most impaired, followed by the bipolar group.

Conclusions:

The results indicated that as task complexity increases, performance decreases, making the difference between psychosis groups and healthy controls more evident, with patients with schizophrenia showing the greatest impairment. Some subsets of the CATS may be insensitive to the subtle differences in performance between groups. Future studies should explore facial emotion processing with greater number of stimuli and include a facial processing control task.