The Associations between Visual Attention and Facial Expression Identification in Patients with Schizophrenia.
OBJECTIVE
Visual search is an important attention process that precedes the information processing. Visual search also mediates the relationship between cognition function (attention) and social cognition (such as facial expression identification). However, the association between visual attention and social cognition in patients with schizophrenia remains unknown. The purposes of this study were to examine the differences in visual search performance and facial expression identification between patients with schizophrenia and normal controls, and to explore the relationship between visual search performance and facial expression identification in patients with schizophrenia.


METHODS
Fourteen patients with schizophrenia (mean age=46.36±6.74) and 15 normal controls (mean age=40.87±9.33) participated this study. The visual search task, including feature search and conjunction search, and Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expression of Emotion were administered.


RESULTS
Patients with schizophrenia had worse visual search performance both in feature search and conjunction search than normal controls, as well as had worse facial expression identification, especially in surprised and sadness. In addition, there were negative associations between visual search performance and facial expression identification in patients with schizophrenia, especially in surprised and sadness. However, this phenomenon was not showed in normal controls.


CONCLUSIONS
Patients with schizophrenia who had visual search deficits had the impairment on facial expression identification. Increasing ability of visual search and facial expression identification may improve their social function and interpersonal relationship.
Department of Psychology, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohusiung, Taiwan.
I-Mei
IM
Lin
Department of Human Development, Tzu Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan. ; Institute of Gerontology, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan.
Sheng-Yu
SY
Fan
Department of Psychiatry, Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and Chang Gung University College of Medicine, Kaohusiung, Taiwan.
Tiao-Lai
TL
Huang
Department of Psychology, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohusiung, Taiwan.
Wan-Ting
WT
Wu
Department of Clinical Psychology, Shin-Ann Hospital, Yunlin, Taiwan.
Shi-Ming
SM
Li
Facial expression identification; Schizophrenia; Visual search