The other-race effect in face processing among African American and Caucasian individuals with schizophrenia.
OBJECTIVE
Studies of emotion recognition abilities in schizophrenia show greater impairment for non-Caucasians with schizophrenia compared with Caucasians. These studies, however, included only Caucasian faces as stimuli. There is evidence from healthy individuals for a performance disadvantage on face memory and emotion recognition when processing faces from a different ethnicity. The authors sought to measure the "other-race effect" in schizophrenia, which could account for previous findings and provide information about sensitivity to such social cues in patients.


METHODS
The study included 540 participants from four groups: African Americans with schizophrenia (N=135), Caucasians with schizophrenia (N=135), African American community comparison subjects (N=135), and Caucasian community comparison subjects (N=135). All participants completed face recognition and facial emotion identification tasks that included both Caucasian and African American faces as stimuli.


RESULTS
Although comparison participants performed better than individuals with schizophrenia across all tasks, both comparison participants and participants with schizophrenia exhibited a strong and significant other-race effect for face memory and emotion recognition. The magnitude of the other-race effect did not differ between these two groups.


CONCLUSIONS
These findings reveal an intact other-race effect in patients with schizophrenia and highlight a methodological concern in the measurement of face processing abilities in schizophrenia, namely, that findings of greater impairment in African American patients are spurious when Caucasian faces are used as stimuli. Despite overall impairments in face memory and emotion recognition, the presence of a normative other-race effect in schizophrenia may reflect typical experiences with faces during development.
Pinkham
Amy E
AE
Department of Neuropsychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, 10th Floor, Gates Pavilion, Philadelphia 19104, USA. amypi@upenn.edu
Sasson
Noah J
NJ
Calkins
Monica E
ME
Richard
Jan
J
Hughett
Paul
P
Gur
Raquel E
RE
Gur
Ruben C
RC
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001741:Black or African American / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D019260:Expressed Emotion; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000453:epidemiology*; D012938:Social Perception; D044465:White People / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*