| 1 | Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 2010 Feb 260: 69-76 |
|---|---|
| PMID | 19452191 |
| Title | 18FDG PET study of amygdalar activity during facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia. |
| Abstract | The role of the amygdala during facial emotion recognition (FER) tasks as well as its clinical implications in schizophrenia patients remains unclear. While most of authors have reported hypoactivation, recently it has been suggested that patients may also exhibit hyperactivation. We studied amygdalar response during a previously validated FER task using (18)[F] fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography ((18)FDG-PET) technique in ten right-handed healthy volunteers and 11 right-handed non acute patients with schizophrenia. Both groups underwent two scans on difFERent days in a random order; each consisted of 17 1/2 min of continuous emotional and control tasks. Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) 2 analysis with a region of interest approach was carried out. Left amygdalar hyperactivation among the schizophrenia group was shown in both emotional and control tasks when compared to healthy subjects. The right amygdala showed no difFERential activation in any of the tasks. Patients diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibit a non-task specific amygdalar hyperactivation during a continuous emotional and non-emotional task when compared to matched healthy controls. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 2 | PLoS ONE 2011 -1 6: e25322 |
| PMID | 21998649 |
| Title | Autism spectrum disorders and schizophrenia: meta-analysis of the neural correlates of social cognition. |
| Abstract | Impaired social cognition is a cardinal feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and schizophrenia (SZ). However, the functional neuroanatomy of social cognition in either disorder remains unclear due to variability in primary literature. Additionally, it is not known whether deficits in ASD and SZ arise from similar or disease-specific disruption of the social cognition network. To identify regions most robustly implicated in social cognition processing in SZ and ASD. Systematic review of English language articles using MEDLINE (1995-2010) and reFERence lists. Studies were required to use fMRI to compare ASD or SZ subjects to a matched healthy control group, provide coordinates in standard stereotactic space, and employ standardized facial emotion recognition (FER) or theory of mind (TOM) paradigms. Activation foci from studies meeting inclusion criteria (n = 33) were subjected to a quantitative voxel-based meta-analysis using activation likelihood estimation, and encompassed 146 subjects with ASD, 336 SZ patients and 492 healthy controls. Both SZ and ASD showed medial prefrontal hypoactivation, which was more pronounced in ASD, while ventrolateral prefrontal dysfunction was associated mostly with SZ. Amygdala hypoactivation was observed in SZ patients during FER and in ASD during more complex ToM tasks. Both disorders were associated with hypoactivation within the Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) during ToM tasks, but activation in these regions was increased in ASD during affect processing. Disease-specific difFERences were noted in somatosensory engagement, which was increased in SZ and decreased in ASD. Reduced thalamic activation was uniquely seen in SZ. Reduced frontolimbic and STS engagement emerged as a shared feature of social cognition deficits in SZ and ASD. However, there were disease- and stimulus-specific difFERences. These findings may aid future studies on SZ and ASD and facilitate the formulation of new hypotheses regarding their pathophysiology. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 3 | Psychol Med 2011 May 41: 937-47 |
| PMID | 20810004 |
| Title | Face emotion recognition is related to individual differences in psychosis-proneness. |
| Abstract | Deficits in face emotion recognition (FER) in schizophrenia are well documented, and have been proposed as a potential intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia liability. However, research on the relationship between psychosis vulnerability and FER has mixed findings and methodological limitations. Moreover, no study has yet characterized the relationship between FER ability and level of psychosis-proneness. If FER ability varies continuously with psychosis-proneness, this suggests a relationship between FER and polygenic risk factors. We tested two large internet samples to see whether psychometric psychosis-proneness, as measured by the schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B), is related to difFERences in face emotion identification and discrimination or other face processing abilities. Experiment 1 (n=2332) showed that psychosis-proneness predicts face emotion identification ability but not face gender identification ability. Experiment 2 (n=1514) demonstrated that psychosis-proneness also predicts performance on face emotion but not face identity discrimination. The tasks in Experiment 2 used identical stimuli and task parameters, difFERing only in emotion/identity judgment. Notably, the relationships demonstrated in Experiments 1 and 2 persisted even when individuals with the highest psychosis-proneness levels (the putative high-risk group) were excluded from analysis. Our data suggest that FER ability is related to individual difFERences in psychosis-like characteristics in the normal population, and that these difFERences cannot be accounted for by difFERences in face processing and/or visual perception. Our results suggest that FER may provide a useful candidate intermediate phenotype. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 4 | Psychol Med 2011 May 41: 937-47 |
| PMID | 20810004 |
| Title | Face emotion recognition is related to individual differences in psychosis-proneness. |
| Abstract | Deficits in face emotion recognition (FER) in schizophrenia are well documented, and have been proposed as a potential intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia liability. However, research on the relationship between psychosis vulnerability and FER has mixed findings and methodological limitations. Moreover, no study has yet characterized the relationship between FER ability and level of psychosis-proneness. If FER ability varies continuously with psychosis-proneness, this suggests a relationship between FER and polygenic risk factors. We tested two large internet samples to see whether psychometric psychosis-proneness, as measured by the schizotypal Personality Questionnaire-Brief (SPQ-B), is related to difFERences in face emotion identification and discrimination or other face processing abilities. Experiment 1 (n=2332) showed that psychosis-proneness predicts face emotion identification ability but not face gender identification ability. Experiment 2 (n=1514) demonstrated that psychosis-proneness also predicts performance on face emotion but not face identity discrimination. The tasks in Experiment 2 used identical stimuli and task parameters, difFERing only in emotion/identity judgment. Notably, the relationships demonstrated in Experiments 1 and 2 persisted even when individuals with the highest psychosis-proneness levels (the putative high-risk group) were excluded from analysis. Our data suggest that FER ability is related to individual difFERences in psychosis-like characteristics in the normal population, and that these difFERences cannot be accounted for by difFERences in face processing and/or visual perception. Our results suggest that FER may provide a useful candidate intermediate phenotype. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 5 | Front Psychol 2012 -1 3: 98 |
| PMID | 22493587 |
| Title | A comparison of facial emotion processing in neurological and psychiatric conditions. |
| Abstract | Patients sufFERing from various neurological and psychiatric disorders show difFERent levels of facial emotion recognition (FER) impairment, sometimes from the early phases of the disease. Investigating the relative severity of deficits in FER across difFERent clinical and high-risk populations has potential implications for the diagnosis and treatment of these diseases, and could also allow us to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of emotion perception itself. To investigate the role of the dopaminergic system and of the frontotemporal network in FER, we reanalyzed and compared data from four of our previous studies investigating FER performance in patients with frontotemporal dysfunctions and/or dopaminergic system abnormalities at difFERent stages. The performance of patients was compared to the performance obtained by a specific group of matched healthy controls using Cohen's d effect size. We thus compared emotion and gender recognition in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), Alzheimer's disease (AD) at the mild dementia stage, major depressive disorder, Parkinson's disease treated by l-DOPA (PD-ON) or not (PD-OFF), remitted schizophrenia (SCZ-rem), first-episode schizophrenia treated by antipsychotic medication (SCZ-ON), and drug-naïve first-episode schizophrenia (SCZ-OFF), as well as in unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia (SIB). The analyses revealed a pattern of difFERential impairment of emotion (but not gender) recognition across pathological conditions. On the one hand, dopaminergic medication seems not to modify the moderate deficits observed in SCZ and PD groups (ON vs. OFF), suggesting that the deficit is independent from the dopaminergic system. On the other hand, the observed increase in effect size of the deficit among the aMCI, AD, and FTD groups (and also among the SIB and SCZ-rem groups) suggests that the deficit is dependent on neurodegeneration of the frontotemporal neural networks. Our transnosographic approach combining clinical and high-risk populations with the impact of medication provides new information on the trajectory of impaired emotion perception in neuropsychiatric conditions, and on the role of the dopaminergic system and the frontotemporal network in emotion perception. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 6 | Psychol Med 2012 Oct 42: 2157-66 |
| PMID | 22370095 |
| Title | Facial emotion recognition in adolescents with psychotic-like experiences: a school-based sample from the general population. |
| Abstract | Psychotic symptoms, also termed psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) in the absence of psychotic disorder, are common in adolescents and are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia-spectrum illness in adulthood. At the same time, schizophrenia is associated with deficits in social cognition, with deficits particularly documented in facial emotion recognition (FER). However, little is known about the relationship between PLEs and FER abilities, with only one previous prospective study examining the association between these abilities in childhood and reported PLEs in adolescence. The current study was a cross-sectional investigation of the association between PLEs and FER in a sample of Irish adolescents. The Adolescent Psychotic-Like Symptom Screener (APSS), a self-report measure of PLEs, and the Penn Emotion Recognition-40 Test (Penn ER-40), a measure of facial emotion recognition, were completed by 793 children aged 10-13 years. Children who reported PLEs performed significantly more poorly on FER (?=-0.03, p=0.035). Recognition of sad faces was the major driver of effects, with children performing particularly poorly when identifying this expression (?=-0.08, p=0.032). The current findings show that PLEs are associated with poorer FER. Further work is needed to elucidate causal relationships with implications for the design of future interventions for those at risk of developing psychosis. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 7 | Schizophr. Res. 2013 Jan 143: 65-9 |
| PMID | 23218561 |
| Title | Emotion recognition impairment is present early and is stable throughout the course of schizophrenia. |
| Abstract | Individuals with schizophrenia experience problems in the perception of emotion throughout the course of the disorder. Few studies have addressed the progression of the deficit over time. The present investigation explores face emotion recognition (FER) performance throughout the course of schizophrenia. The aim of the study was to test the hypotheses that: 1) FER impairment was present in ultra high-risk (putatively prodromal) individuals, and that 2) impairment was stable across the course of the illness. Forty-three individuals with a putative prodromal syndrome, 50 patients with first episode of schizophrenia, 44 patients with multi-episode schizophrenia and 86 unaffected healthy control subjects were assessed to examine emotion recognition ability. ANCOVA analysis adjusted for possible confounder factors and subsequent planned contrasts with healthy controls was undertaken. The results revealed deficits in recognition of sadness and disgust in prodromal individuals, and of all negative emotions in both first-episode and multi-episode patients. Furthermore, there were no significant difFERences between clinical groups. Within the framework of the neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia, our results suggest the presence of emotional recognition impairment before the onset of full-blown psychosis. Moreover, the deficit remains stable over the course of illness, fitting the pattern of a vulnerability indicator in contrast to an indicator of chronicity or severity. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 8 | Psychopathology 2014 -1 47: 65-70 |
| PMID | 23796958 |
| Title | Symptom correlates of facial emotion recognition impairment in schizophrenia. |
| Abstract | The ability to facial emotion recognition (FER), a key component of socioemotional competence, is often impaired in schizophrenic disorders. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between emotion recognition performance and symptoms in a group of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Seventy-nine patients meeting DSM-IV-TR criteria for schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder and schizoaffective disorder were assessed by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and a FER task. In schizophrenia patients and healthy control subjects, FER performance was compared. In order to avoid a possible confounding role of cognitive impairment, we carried out partial correlations corrected for an index of global cognition. Patients performed worse than a healthy control group on all negative emotions. Partial correlations showed that cognitive/disorganized symptoms correlated with a worse performance in the FER task, whereas no correlations were found with positive, negative, excitement and depressive symptoms. Our findings support that in schizophrenia FER impairment is specific for negative emotions and that there is a relationship between this deficit and cognitive/disorganized symptoms, regardless of the general cognitive level. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 9 | Psychopathology 2014 -1 47: 65-70 |
| PMID | 23796958 |
| Title | Symptom correlates of facial emotion recognition impairment in schizophrenia. |
| Abstract | The ability to facial emotion recognition (FER), a key component of socioemotional competence, is often impaired in schizophrenic disorders. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between emotion recognition performance and symptoms in a group of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Seventy-nine patients meeting DSM-IV-TR criteria for schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder and schizoaffective disorder were assessed by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and a FER task. In schizophrenia patients and healthy control subjects, FER performance was compared. In order to avoid a possible confounding role of cognitive impairment, we carried out partial correlations corrected for an index of global cognition. Patients performed worse than a healthy control group on all negative emotions. Partial correlations showed that cognitive/disorganized symptoms correlated with a worse performance in the FER task, whereas no correlations were found with positive, negative, excitement and depressive symptoms. Our findings support that in schizophrenia FER impairment is specific for negative emotions and that there is a relationship between this deficit and cognitive/disorganized symptoms, regardless of the general cognitive level. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 10 | Schizophr Bull 2014 Mar 40: 460-8 |
| PMID | 23378011 |
| Title | Misperceptions of facial emotions among youth aged 9-14 years who present multiple antecedents of schizophrenia. |
| Abstract | Similar to adults with schizophrenia, youth at high risk for developing schizophrenia present difficulties in recognizing emotions in faces. These difficulties might index vulnerability for schizophrenia and play a role in the development of the illness. Facial emotion recognition (FER) impairments have been implicated in declining social functioning during the prodromal phase of illness and are thus a potential target for early intervention efforts. This study examined 9- to 14-year-old children: 34 children who presented a triad of well-replicated antecedents of schizophrenia (ASz), including motor and/or speech delays, clinically relevant internalizing and/or externalizing problems, and psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), and 34 typically developing (TD) children who presented none of these antecedents. An established FER task (ER40) was used to assess correct recognition of happy, sad, angry, fearful, and neutral expressions, and facial emotion misperception responses were made for each emotion type. Relative to TD children, ASz children presented an overall impairment in FER. Further, ASz children misattributed neutral expressions to face displaying other emotions and also more often mislabeled a neutral expression as sad compared with healthy peers. The inability to accurately discriminate subtle difFERences in facial emotion and the misinterpretation of neutral expressions as sad may contribute to the initiation and/or persistence of PLEs. Interventions that are effective in teaching adults to recognize emotions in faces could potentially benefit children presenting with antecedents of schizophrenia. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 11 | Psychiatry Investig 2015 Apr 12: 235-41 |
| PMID | 25866525 |
| Title | Korean facial emotion recognition tasks for schizophrenia research. |
| Abstract | Despite the fact that facial emotion recognition (FER) tasks using Western faces should be applied with caution to non-Western participants or patients, there are few psychometrically sound and validated FER tasks featuring Easterners' facial expressions for emotions. Thus, we aimed to develop and establish the psychometric properties of the Korean Facial Emotion Identification Task (K-FEIT) and the Korean Facial Emotion Discrimination Task (K-FEDT) for individuals with schizophrenia. The K-FEIT and K-FEDT were administered to 42 Korean individuals with schizophrenia to evaluate their psychometric properties. To test the convergent and divergent validities, the Social Behavior Sequencing Task (SBST) and hinting task were administered as social-cognitive measures, and the Trail Making Test (TMT)-A and -B were administered as neurocognitive measures. Average accuracy on the K-FEIT and K-FEDT were 63% and 74%, respectively, and internal consistencies of the K-FEIT and K-FEDT were 0.82 and 0.95, respectively. The K-FEIT and K-FEDT were significantly correlated with SBST and Hinting Task, but not with TMT-A and B. Following replication studies in a larger sample, the K-FEIT and K-FEDT are expected to facilitate future studies targeting facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia in Korea. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |
| 12 | PLoS ONE 2015 -1 10: e0134936 |
| PMID | 26252525 |
| Title | Intrinsic Functional Connectivity in Salience and Default Mode Networks and Aberrant Social Processes in Youth at Ultra-High Risk for Psychosis. |
| Abstract | Social processes are key to navigating the world, and investigating their underlying mechanisms and cognitive architecture can aid in understanding disease states such as schizophrenia, where social processes are highly impacted. Evidence suggests that social processes are impaired in individuals at ultra high-risk for the development of psychosis (UHR). Understanding these phenomena in UHR youth may clarify disease etiology and social processes in a period that is characterized by significantly fewer confounds than schizophrenia. Furthermore, understanding social processing deficits in this population will help explain these processes in healthy individuals. The current study examined resting state connectivity of the salience (SN) and default mode networks (DMN) in association with facial emotion recognition (FER), an integral aspect of social processes, as well as broader social functioning (SF) in UHR individuals and healthy controls. Consistent with the existing literature, UHR youth were impaired in FER and SF when compared with controls. In the UHR group, we found increased connectivity between the SN and the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the DMN relative to controls. In UHR youth, the DMN exhibited both positive and negative correlations with the somatosensory cortex/cerebellum and precuneus, respectively, which was linked with better FER performance. For SF, results showed that sensory processing links with the SN might be important in allowing for better SF for both groups, but especially in controls where sensory processing is likely to be unimpaired. These findings clarify how social processing deficits may manifest in psychosis, and underscore the importance of SN and DMN connectivity for social processing more generally. |
| SCZ Keywords | schizophrenia, schizophrenic, schizotypal |