Facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia

A broad range of deficits in interpersonal skills characterizes schizophrenia. A natural way to tackle these deficits is to explore the ability of schizophrenic patients to process stimuli that have a well-established psychosocial content: faces, for instance. Schizophrenia deficits in facial recognition and discrimination have been studied extensively and most investigators have pointed out that patients with schizophrenia perform less well than non-patients and psychiatric controls in numerous facial paradigms, including facial identity, emotion and age recognition tests. The extent of the schizophrenic deficit suggests the alteration of a processing mechanism common to all kinds of facial information and the configural information extraction process has then been regarded as a probable candidate. Nevertheless, only a few studies directly tested the hypothesis. In what follows, we draw a general schema of the schizophrenia deficit in facial processing, next we present a series of studies investigating the putative implication of configural information in the abnormal processing of facial emotion in the disease. (C) 2008 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.