A generalised deficit can account for problems in facial emotion recognition in schizophrenia

Neuroimaging research has shown localised brain activation to different fac ial expressions. This. along with the finding that schizophrenia patients p erform poorly in their recognition of negative emotions. has raised the sug gestion that patients display an emotion specific impairment. We propose th at this asymmetry in performance reflects task difficulty gradations. rathe r than aberrant processing in neural pathways subserving recognition of spe cific emotions, A neural network model is presented, which classifies facia l expressions on the basis of measurements derived from human faces. After training. the network showed an accuracy pattern closely resembling that of healthy subjects. Lesioning of the network led to an overall decrease in t he network's discriminant capacity, with the greatest accuracy decrease to fear. disgust and anger stimuli. This implies that the differential pattern of impairment in schizophrenia patients can be explained without having to Postulate impairment or specific processing modules for negative emotion r ecognition. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.