Differences in Facial Emotion Recognition between First Episode Psychosis, Borderline Personality Disorder and Healthy Controls
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Date
2016-07-28Author
González de Artaza Lavesa, Maider
Bustamante Madariaga, Sonia
Orgaz Barnier, Pablo
Osa Fernández, Luis
Angosto, Virxinia
Valverde, Cristina
Bilbao, Amaia
Madrazo, Aranzazu
Van Os, Jim
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PLOS ONE 11(7) : (2016) // Article ID e0160056
Abstract
Background
Facial emotion recognition (FER) is essential to guide social functioning and behaviour for interpersonal communication. FER may be altered in severe mental illness such as in psychosis and in borderline personality disorder patients. However, it is unclear if these FER alterations are specifically related to psychosis. Awareness of FER alterations may be useful in clinical settings to improve treatment strategies. The aim of our study was to examine FER in patients with severe mental disorder and their relation with psychotic symptomatology.
Materials and Methods
Socio-demographic and clinical variables were collected. Alterations on emotion recognition were assessed in 3 groups: patients with first episode psychosis (FEP) (n = 64), borderline personality patients (BPD) (n = 37) and healthy controls (n = 137), using the Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, Structured Interview for Schizotypy Revised and Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences scales were used to assess positive psychotic symptoms. WAIS III subtests were used to assess IQ.
Results
Kruskal-Wallis analysis showed a significant difference between groups on the FER of neutral faces score between FEP, BPD patients and controls and between FEP patients and controls in angry face recognition. No significant differences were found between groups in the fear or happy conditions. There was a significant difference between groups in the attribution of negative emotion to happy faces. BPD and FEP groups had a much higher tendency to recognize happy faces as negatives. There was no association with the different symptom domains in either group.
Conclusions
FEP and BPD patients have problems in recognizing neutral faces more frequently than controls. Moreover, patients tend to over-report negative emotions in recognition of happy faces. Although no relation between psychotic symptoms and FER alterations was found, these deficits could contribute to a patient's misinterpretations in daily life.
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2016 Catalan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.