David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Emotion misrecognition impacts schizophrenia patients? psychosocial function
By Eleanor McDermid
20 February 2009
Eur Psychiatry 2009; 24: 27?32
The ability to recognize facial emotions remains impaired in patients with stable schizophrenia, impacting on their psychosocial functioning, research shows.
Alex Hofer (Medical University Innsbruck, Austria) and colleagues studied 40 schizophrenia outpatients who had been stable in terms of symptoms and medication for at least 6 months.
?We therefore were able to study the persistent impairments associated with schizophrenia, rather than the transient changes associated with episodes of psychotic relapse,? the team notes in the journal European Psychiatry.
The patients were significantly poorer than 40 age-, gender-, and education-matched controls at recognizing facial expressions depicting disgust, sadness, surprise, and happiness. They also tended to be worse at recognizing fear and anger.
Patients were best at recognizing happiness, followed by anger, surprise, disgust, fear, and sadness. They most often misinterpreted disgust as anger (20.0%), sadness as anger (17.9%), and fear as surprise (16.1%).
The patients? emotion recognition ability increased in line with their level of education and declined in line with their age. Certain aspects of emotion recognition also correlated with the patients? function and affective symptoms.
Specifically, correct recognition of surprise correlated negatively with psychopathologic symptoms on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and with the severity of negative symptoms, while correct recognition of fear correlated positively with the severity of depression/anxiety.
Correct recognition of disgust was positively associated with the likelihood of patients being in employment at the time of the test, and with their Global Assessment of Functioning scale scores. Patients who misidentified fear as surprise had a reduced probability of being in a stable relationship.
The researchers speculate that ?both cognitive impairment and emotion recognition disabilities contribute to the problem of unemployment in patients with schizophrenia.?
They say: ?Future studies should simultaneously assess emotion recognition abilities and neurocognitive functioning.?
By Eleanor McDermid
20 February 2009
Eur Psychiatry 2009; 24: 27?32
The ability to recognize facial emotions remains impaired in patients with stable schizophrenia, impacting on their psychosocial functioning, research shows.
Alex Hofer (Medical University Innsbruck, Austria) and colleagues studied 40 schizophrenia outpatients who had been stable in terms of symptoms and medication for at least 6 months.
?We therefore were able to study the persistent impairments associated with schizophrenia, rather than the transient changes associated with episodes of psychotic relapse,? the team notes in the journal European Psychiatry.
The patients were significantly poorer than 40 age-, gender-, and education-matched controls at recognizing facial expressions depicting disgust, sadness, surprise, and happiness. They also tended to be worse at recognizing fear and anger.
Patients were best at recognizing happiness, followed by anger, surprise, disgust, fear, and sadness. They most often misinterpreted disgust as anger (20.0%), sadness as anger (17.9%), and fear as surprise (16.1%).
The patients? emotion recognition ability increased in line with their level of education and declined in line with their age. Certain aspects of emotion recognition also correlated with the patients? function and affective symptoms.
Specifically, correct recognition of surprise correlated negatively with psychopathologic symptoms on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and with the severity of negative symptoms, while correct recognition of fear correlated positively with the severity of depression/anxiety.
Correct recognition of disgust was positively associated with the likelihood of patients being in employment at the time of the test, and with their Global Assessment of Functioning scale scores. Patients who misidentified fear as surprise had a reduced probability of being in a stable relationship.
The researchers speculate that ?both cognitive impairment and emotion recognition disabilities contribute to the problem of unemployment in patients with schizophrenia.?
They say: ?Future studies should simultaneously assess emotion recognition abilities and neurocognitive functioning.?
