Facial emotion recognition in patients with schizophrenia and their siblings.
BACKGROUND
Deficits in recognition of facial emotions have been widely reported in patients with schizophrenia. Previous studies that examined recognition of facial emotions in relatives of patients with schizophrenia brought out inconsistent results.


OBJECTIVE
In this study, we aimed to examine facial emotion identification and discrimination abilities in patients with schizophrenia and their healthy siblings to find out whether familial vulnerability to schizophrenia is associated with deficits in facial emotion recognition.


METHODS
Patients with schizophrenia (n=57), their unaffected biological siblings (n=58) and healthy controls (n=58) were included in the study. The three groups did not differ significantly for gender, age and education level. All the participants were evaluated with the Facial Emotion Identification Test (FEIT) and Facial Emotion Discrimination Test (FEDT).


RESULTS
Patients with schizophrenia performed significantly worse than controls on FEIT and FEDT. Siblings performed significantly better than patients and significantly worse than controls on FEIT and FEDT.


CONCLUSIONS
Impaired performance of siblings on facial emotion identification and discrimination tasks provides evidence for the hypothesis that facial emotion recognition deficits are transmitted in families and may represent a heritable endophenotype of schizophrenia.
Erol
Almila
A
Clinic of Psychiatry, Ataturk Education and Research Hospital, Izmir, Turkey. aerol@superonline.com
Mete
Levent
L
Sonmez
Ipek
I
Unal
Elif Keles
EK
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D010054:Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale; D019260:Expressed Emotion; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010468:Perceptual Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D035781:Siblings