Background:
Investigations into facial affect processing in schizophrenia have produced variable results; some studies indicate no differences in performance, while others have shown impaired performance in patients. Variations in methodology such as the use of different stimuli, different target emotions and differing levels of task difficulty may be responsible for these inconsistent findings. The current study investigated task performance on four emotion-processing tasks in two different groups of patients with psychosis and a group of healthy controls. All four tasks used the same stimuli and target emotions but manipulated task difficulty.
Method:
Age- and premorbid-IQ-matched patients with schizophrenia (n = 37), patients with bipolar disorder (n = 32) and healthy controls (n = 45) completed the affect discrimination, name affect, select affect and match affect subtests from the Comprehensive Affective Testing System (CATS; Froming et al. 2003).
Results:
Results indicated no significant differences in performance on the affect discrimination and name affect subtests. On the select affect subtest, patients with schizophrenia were significantly impaired compared with both other groups. On the match affect subtest, patients with schizophrenia were the most impaired, followed by the bipolar group.
Conclusions:
The results indicated that as task complexity increases, performance decreases, making the difference between psychosis groups and healthy controls more evident, with patients with schizophrenia showing the greatest impairment. Some subsets of the CATS may be insensitive to the subtle differences in performance between groups. Future studies should explore facial emotion processing with greater number of stimuli and include a facial processing control task.
