ABSTRACT
Patients with schizophrenia have difficulty recognising the emotion that corresponds to a given facial expression. According to signal detection theory, two separate processes are involved in facial emotion perception: a sensory process (measured by sensitivity which is the ability to distinguish one facial emotion from another facial emotion) and a cognitive decision process (measured by response criterion which is the tendency to judge a facial emotion as a particular emotion). It is uncertain whether facial emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia are primarily due to impaired sensitivity or response bias. In this study, we hypothesised that individuals with schizophrenia would have both diminished sensitivity and different response criteria in facial emotion recognition across different emotions compared with healthy controls. Twenty-five individuals with a DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia were compared with age and IQ matched healthy controls. Participants performed a "yes-no" task by indicating whether the 88 Ekman faces shown briefly expressed one of the target emotions in three randomly ordered runs (happy, sad and fear). Sensitivity and response criteria for facial emotion recognition was calculated as d-prime and In(beta) respectively using signal detection theory. Patients with schizophrenia showed diminished sensitivity (d-prime) in recognising happy faces, but not faces that expressed fear or sadness. By contrast, patients exhibited a significantly less strict response criteria (In(beta)) in recognising fearful and sad faces. Our results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have a specific deficit in recognising happy faces, whereas they were more inclined to attribute any facial emotion as fearful or sad.
Subject(s)
Emotions , Facial Expression , Pattern Recognition, Visual , Schizophrenia/diagnosis , Schizophrenic Psychology , Signal Detection, Psychological , Adult , Decision Making , Discrimination, Psychological , Fear , Female , Generalization, Stimulus , Humans , Intelligence , Male , Middle Aged , Psychiatric Status Rating Scales , Reaction Time , Reference ValuesABSTRACT
We aimed to investigate cerebellar structural abnormalities and their functional significance in patients with schizophrenia. Forty right-handed men with schizophrenia and 40 sex, age and handedness matched controls underwent a volumetric magnetic resonance scan with 1 mm3 isotropic spatial resolution. Cerebellar grey- and white-matter volumes were analysed using voxel-based morphometry. Patients with schizophrenia completed a battery of neuropsychological tests assessing sustained attention (continuous performance test), memory (Hopkins memory test) and executive function (verbal fluency and Wisconsin card sorting tests). Patients with schizophrenia exhibited significantly increased cerebellar vermis white-matter volume compared with controls. By contrast, total cerebellar volume, and grey- and white-matter volumes of cerebellar hemispheres were not significantly different between groups. Increased vermis white-matter volume in patients was associated with poor verbal fluency performance. We concluded that increased white-matter in the cerebellar vermis, possibly suggesting anomalous connectivity, may be associated with verbal executive dysfunction in men with chronic schizophrenia.
Subject(s)
Cerebellum/pathology , Image Processing, Computer-Assisted , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Schizophrenia/diagnosis , Adult , Chronic Disease , Humans , Male , Psychiatric Status Rating Scales , Reference Values , Schizophrenic Language , Verbal Behavior/physiologyABSTRACT
The ordering of words in category fluency lists is indicative of the semantic distance between items in conceptual memory. Several studies have concluded from structural analyses of such data, using cluster analysis or multidimensional scaling, that the semantic memory of patients with schizophrenia is more disorganized than that of controls. Previous studies have based their analyses on a measure of average interitem dissimilarity devised by A. S. Chan et al. (1993). Here the authors derive a new and improved method of determining dissimilarity and show that when this measure is applied to the fluency lists of patients with schizophrenia, the average pattern of organization for the animal category has similar structure to that of controls, but with greater variability between individuals.
Subject(s)
Memory/physiology , Schizophrenic Language , Schizophrenic Psychology , Adult , Algorithms , Antipsychotic Agents/therapeutic use , Cluster Analysis , Cognition/physiology , Data Interpretation, Statistical , Humans , Male , Neuropsychological Tests , Psycholinguistics , Psychometrics , Sample Size , Schizophrenia/drug therapy , SemanticsABSTRACT
Breaking bad news is a difficult task faced daily by the busy doctor. This article draws on some of the literature on the topic and offers some practical advice on how to break bad news.
