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Intact implicit processing of facial threat cues in schizophrenia
Shasteen, Jonathon R. Pinkham, Amy E. Kelsven, Skylar Ludwig, Kelsey Payne, B. Keith Penn, David L.
Shasteen, Jonathon R.
Pinkham, Amy E.
Kelsven, Skylar
Ludwig, Kelsey
Payne, B. Keith
Penn, David L.
Abstract
An emerging body of research suggests that people with schizophrenia retain the ability to implicitly perceive facial affect, despite well-documented difficulty explicitly identifying emotional expressions. It remains unclear, however, whether such functional implicit processing extends beyond emotion to other socially relevant facial cues. Here, we constructed two novel versions of the Affect Misattribution Procedure, a paradigm in which affective responses to primes are projected onto neutral targets. The first version included three face primes previously validated to elicit varying inferences of threat from healthy individuals via emotion-independent structural modification (e.g., nose and eye size). The second version included the threat-relevant emotional primes of angry, neutral, and happy faces. Data from 126 participants with schizophrenia and 84 healthy controls revealed that although performing more poorly on an assessment of explicit emotion recognition, patients showed normative implicit threat processing for both non-emotional and emotional facial cues. Collectively, these results support recent hypotheses postulating that the initial perception of salient facial information remains intact in schizophrenia, but that deficits arise at subsequent stages of contextual integration and appraisal. Such a breakdown in the stream of face processing has important implications for mechanistic models of social cognitive impairment in schizophrenia and treatment strategies aiming to improve functional outcome.
Keywords
implicit vs. explicit processing, threat perception, emotion recognition, affect misattribution
Date
2016
Type
Journal article
Journal
Schizophrenia Research
Book
Volume
170
Issue
1
Page Range
150-155
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Behavioural and Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as green open access
License
File Access
Open
Controlled
Controlled