Original article

Korean Journal of Schizophrenia Research 2010;13(2):81-88.

정신분열병 환자에서 표정 정서 인식 결핍과 편향

Jong Suk Park, MD1,2, Su Young Lee, MD1,2, Eun Lee, MD1,2 and Suk Kyoon An, MD1,2

Abstract

Objectives:Patients with schizophrenia were extensively reported to show the impairment of the recognition of emotional stimuli. Recently, it was noted that there was a biased attribution to the negative emotional facial stimuli in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to investigate whether patients with schizophrenia show not only the deficits of the emotion recognition but also the bias to threatening emotional facial stimuli.
Methods:Twenty two patients with schizophrenia and 19 normal controls were participated in the emotion recognition task of the facial photographs. The stimuli were selected from standard emotional photographs, which depicting the basic emotions of happy, disgust, sad, anger, surprise, fear, contempt and neutral face. All subjects were asked to recognize the emotional valences of facial stimuli. Participants were instructed to decide whether the faces expressed one of seven target emotions and rate intensity on a 7 point scale (1-7). The dependent measures were hit rate and unbiased hit rate of each emotion and error bias rate (i.e., tendency of erroneous attribution) to each emotion. The attribution rate of each emotion to neutral faces was also calculated. The intensities ratings were also used as dependent measures.
Results:Patients with schizophrenia showed significantly lower unbiased hit rates of disgust, sad, anger, surprise, fear and contempt than control group. Patients with schizophrenia showed significantly higher error bias rates to contempt to emotional faces. The negative symptoms were found to be negatively correlated with the unbiased hit rate of anger and error bias rate to contempt.
Conclusion:Patient with schizophrenia showed deficits of emotion recognition and more biased to contempt to emotional faces. These findings suggest that there was aberrant emotional processing, which reflects the deficits and bias of emotion recognition in schizophrenia. (Korean J Schizophr Res 2010;13:81-88)

Key Words: Schizophrenia,Emotion,Contempt,Deficit,Bias,Facial expression