Fearful face recognition in schizophrenia: An electrophysiological study

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Emotional expressions are important acts of communication, and impairment in facial emotion recognition has been shown to be related to impairments in social cognition in schizophrenia. We used an event-related potential (ERP) paradigm to identify and delineate the temporal characteristics in the electrophysiological cascade related to fearful facial affect processing in patients with schizophrenia as compared to healthy controls. METHODS: Twenty-four subjects with schizophrenia and 24 individually matched healthy controls participated in an emotion recognition task. Ekman faces displaying neutral and fearful facial expressions were used as stimuli. ERPs were recorded using a 128-channel EEG system. RESULTS: Based on the analysis of Global Field Power (GFP) in the 150-190ms time window both groups differentiated between fearful and neutral faces. Schizophrenia patients showed an additional differential processing of fearful vs. neutral faces in the 330-450ms time window, and this ERP effect correlated with psychopathology. CONCLUSIONS: Both patients and healthy controls differentiate fearful and neutral faces in early phases of emotion processing. Our results also indicate that schizophrenia patients show increased responsivity to fearful faces at a later processing stage. This could be related to the overrating of negative emotions, and the symptomatology associated with fear processing in patients with schizophrenia.