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Relatives of schizophrenia patients show emotion recognition impairments
By Mark Cowen, MedWire News
27 January 2011
Psych Res 2011; 185: 44?48
The unaffected relatives of patients with schizophrenia show impairments in the recognition of certain facial emotions, researchers have found.
"The presence of these deficits in unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients may support the notion that emotional expression processing (EEP) dysfunction is a core feature, because the deficits cannot be attributed to the effects of symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, and emotional withdrawal, or to chronicity," explain Migdyrai Mart?n Reyes (Cuban Neurosciences Center, Havana City, Cuba) and team.
The findings come from a study of 93 patients with paranoid schizophrenia, 110 unaffected first-degree relatives of patients, and 109 mentally healthy controls without a family history of schizophrenia.
All of the participants underwent a facial emotional recognition test using a computer morphing technique to present the dynamic expressions of six basic emotions (happy, surprized, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted) presented in 21 successive frames of increasing intensity.
Each participant was required to press a button when they recognized an emotion and their sensitivity and accuracy were assessed. Sensitivity was defined as the average number of stages of intensity viewed before correct recognition. Accuracy was calculated as the proportion of correct recognitions for each emotional expression.
As expected, the researchers found that the schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse on the recognition test in all emotion domains compared with unaffected relatives and controls.
But the researchers also found that unaffected relatives had poorer sensitivity and accuracy for the recognition of disgust and fearful expressions than controls.
There were no significant differences between unaffected relatives and controls regarding the ability to recognize other facial expressions of emotion, however.
Reyes and team conclude in the journal Psychiatry Research: "The presence of EEP deficit in unaffected relatives of probands supports the hypothesis that emotion recognition deficits may be especially sensitive to the genetic liability to schizophrenia and represent a potential endophenotypic marker."
Abstract
By Mark Cowen, MedWire News
27 January 2011
Psych Res 2011; 185: 44?48
The unaffected relatives of patients with schizophrenia show impairments in the recognition of certain facial emotions, researchers have found.
"The presence of these deficits in unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients may support the notion that emotional expression processing (EEP) dysfunction is a core feature, because the deficits cannot be attributed to the effects of symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, and emotional withdrawal, or to chronicity," explain Migdyrai Mart?n Reyes (Cuban Neurosciences Center, Havana City, Cuba) and team.
The findings come from a study of 93 patients with paranoid schizophrenia, 110 unaffected first-degree relatives of patients, and 109 mentally healthy controls without a family history of schizophrenia.
All of the participants underwent a facial emotional recognition test using a computer morphing technique to present the dynamic expressions of six basic emotions (happy, surprized, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted) presented in 21 successive frames of increasing intensity.
Each participant was required to press a button when they recognized an emotion and their sensitivity and accuracy were assessed. Sensitivity was defined as the average number of stages of intensity viewed before correct recognition. Accuracy was calculated as the proportion of correct recognitions for each emotional expression.
As expected, the researchers found that the schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse on the recognition test in all emotion domains compared with unaffected relatives and controls.
But the researchers also found that unaffected relatives had poorer sensitivity and accuracy for the recognition of disgust and fearful expressions than controls.
There were no significant differences between unaffected relatives and controls regarding the ability to recognize other facial expressions of emotion, however.
Reyes and team conclude in the journal Psychiatry Research: "The presence of EEP deficit in unaffected relatives of probands supports the hypothesis that emotion recognition deficits may be especially sensitive to the genetic liability to schizophrenia and represent a potential endophenotypic marker."
Abstract
