title: Facial affect recognition in early and late-stage schizophrenia patients.
abstract: Prior studies have shown deficits in social cognition and emotion perception in first-episode psychosis (FEP) and multi-episode schizophrenia (MES) patients. These studies compared patients at different stages of the illness with only a single control group which differed in age from at least one clinical group. The present study provides new evidence of a differential pattern of deficit in facial affect recognition in FEP and MES patients using a double age-matched control design. Compared to their controls, FEP patients only showed impaired recognition of fearful faces (p=.007). In contrast to this, the MES patients showed a more generalized deficit compared to their age-matched controls, with impaired recognition of angry, sad and fearful faces (ps<.01) and an increased misattribution of emotional meaning to neutral faces. PANSS scores of FEP patients on Depressed factor correlated positively with the accuracy to recognize fearful expressions (r=.473). For the MES group fear recognition correlated positively with negative PANSS factor (r=.498) and recognition of sad and neutral expressions was inversely correlated with disorganized PANSS factor (r=-.461 and r=-.541, respectively). These results provide evidence that a generalized impairment of affect recognition is observed in advanced-stage patients and is not characteristic of the early stages of schizophrenia. Moreover, the finding that anomalous attribution of emotional meaning to neutral faces is observed only in MES patients suggests that an increased attribution of salience to social stimuli is a characteristic of social cognition in advanced stages of the disorder.
authors.affiliation: Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Electronic address: mvromero@ucm.es.
authors.forename: María Verónica
authors.initials: MV
authors.lastname: Romero-Ferreiro
authors.affiliation: Complutense University of Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Luis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Aguado
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Instituto de Investigación Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre (i+12), Avda. de Córdoba s/n, 28041 Madrid, Spain.
authors.forename: Javier
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rodriguez-Torresano
authors.affiliation: Complutense University of Madrid, Spain; Department of Psychiatry, Instituto de Investigación Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre (i+12), Avda. de Córdoba s/n, 28041 Madrid, Spain; Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), Spain.
authors.forename: Tomás
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Palomo
authors.affiliation: Complutense University of Madrid, Spain; Department of Psychiatry, Instituto de Investigación Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre (i+12), Avda. de Córdoba s/n, 28041 Madrid, Spain; Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), Spain.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rodriguez-Jimenez
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, Hospital Infantil Universitario Niño Jesús, Avda. Menéndez Pelayo, N° 65, 28009 Madrid, Spain; The National University of Distance Education, Spain.
authors.forename: José Luis
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Pedreira-Massa
mesh_terms: D000208:Acute Disease; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002648:Child; D002908:Chronic Disease; D018450:Disease Progression; D004644:Emotions; D000066499:Facial Recognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D011581:Psychological Tests; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012559:Schizophrenia; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Emotion recognition; First episode psychosis; Schizophrenia; Social cognition; Staging