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Homayouni Meymandi M, Hadianfard H. A Comparison of Facial Emotion Recognition in Schizophrenia Patients, their Unaffected First-Degree Relatives and Normal Individuals. Advances in Cognitive Sciences 2016; 17 (4) :13-21
URL: http://icssjournal.ir/article-1-354-en.html

Introduction: Considerable attention has focused on aspects of social cognition (including emotion recognition) as potential determinants of social dysfunction in schizophrenia. Recent research endeavors have consistently indicated that schizophrenia patients are less competent in perceiving emotions compared to healthy controls. On the other hand, it has been well-documented that emotion processing in different individuals can be attributed to their genetic factors and biological relatives of schizophrenia patients are likely to have potential impairments in emotion perception. Thereupon, this study attempted to compare facial affect recognition in schizophrenia patients, their unaffected first- degree relatives and normal individuals.
Method: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 78 participants. A computer-based version of the emotion recognition task, using Ekman’s photo set, was used to assess their facial emotion recognition.
Results: Normal individuals and schizophrenia patients had respectively the best and the worst performance on the task. Regarding sadness recognition, relatives and schizophrenia patients, were less competent than normal individuals. However, their relatives’ performance on anger recognition was similar to that of normal individuals; and both groups performed better than schizophrenia patients. The performance of schizophrenia relatives fell between the patient and control groups during the recognition of neutral faces. All such these differences were statistically significance.
Conclusion: Our results corroborated the previous findings suggesting that schizophrenia patients and their unaffected first-degree relatives tend to have deficits when performing facial emotion recognition tasks. Besides, the findings confirmed the notion that emotion types potentially influence the emotion recognition across schizophrenic and healthy individuals.