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S076-2

Facial Emotion Recognition Impairment in Schizophrenia: A Differential or
Generalized Deficits to Negative Emotions?

Seung-Hee Won

Department of Psychiatry, Kyungpook National University Hospital, Daegu, Korea

Background/Objective: Schizophrenia is characterized by deficits in cognitive control and
impairments in emotion processing. People with schizophrenia perform poorly when recognizing
facial expressions of emotion, particularly negative emotions such as fear. This finding has been
taken as evidence of a negative emotion specific deficit. Emotion–cognition interaction processes, a
recent study suggested that people with schizophrenia are predominantly impaired in cognitive
control and the maintenance of emotional representations rather than in the evaluation of the
emotional content itself. Although much is known about cognitive control and emotion perception
deficits in schizophrenia, little is known of how these deficits interact and specific to emotional
valences. This study assessed the nature and extent of the interaction between cognitive control
mechanisms and emotion attribution processes in people with schizophrenia.

Method: 35 schizophrenia subjects and 35 group-matched healthy controls performed a verbal
emotional go/no-go task and facial labeling task. Associations and differences among the negative vs.
neutral vs. positive emotional valenced conditions in each tasks were compared between groups.

Result: Schizophrenia subjects showed that the aberrant brain responses in the neural network
involved in cognition–emotion interaction, particularly when faced with negatively valenced
material.

Conclusion: Our results showed that schizophrenia is associated with the failure of the frontal
circuitry to regulate goal-directed behaviour based on emotional attributions may contribute to
deficits in psychosocial functioning in daily life.