Accurate Encoding and Decoding of Emotional Facial Expressions in Schizophrenia

This is a study of the encoding and decoding of emotional facial expressions by people diagnosed as schizophrenic. The results of most previous investigations have shown that schizophrenics are worse than other psychiatric and normal comparison groups at adopting and recognizing facial expressions o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychiatry (Washington, D.C.) Vol. 60; no. 3; pp. 197 - 210
Main Authors: Flack, William F., Cavallaro, Lorraine A., Laird, James D., Miller, Daniel R.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, NY Routledge 01.10.1997
Guilford
William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects:
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Analysis of Variance
Anger
Biological and medical sciences
Case-Control Studies
Decision making
Decoding
Disgust
Emotions
Encoding
Facial Expression
Facial expressions
Groups
Happiness
Humans
Medical sciences
Mental depression
Middle Aged
Multivariate Analysis
Patients
Photography
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Psychoses
Research subjects
Sadness
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenic Psychology
Social Perception
Social situations
Human
Psychosis
Coding
Schizophrenia
Cognition
Emotion emotionality
Decoding
Face
Interpretation
Facial expression
ISSN:0033-2747, 1943-281X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This is a study of the encoding and decoding of emotional facial expressions by people diagnosed as schizophrenic. The results of most previous investigations have shown that schizophrenics are worse than other psychiatric and normal comparison groups at adopting and recognizing facial expressions of emotion. This study is the first in which both abilities were tested within the same group of outpatient subjects. In contrast to earlier findings, the results of this study indicate that this group of schizophrenics was equally proficient, as compared with unipolar depressive and normal medical control subjects, in the encoding and decoding of facial expressions of anger, sadness, fear, happiness, disgust, and surprise. Encoding and decoding responses in all three groups were largely unrelated. Some of the potential explanatory factors for these unusual findings include the older age of this sample and the use of a rating procedure in the decoding task that is more similar to the nature of decoding decisions made in social situations than those typically used by other investigators. The general conclusion that schizophrenics are deficient relative to comparison groups in the encoding and decoding of emotional facial expressions is not supported by these results.
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ISSN:0033-2747
1943-281X
DOI:10.1080/00332747.1997.11024798