Emotion perception deficit is a core impairment of patients with schizophrenia. Although there is a consensus that patients with schizophrenia have certain deficits in perceiving and expressing facial emotions, previous studies of facial emotion perception in schizophrenia do not present consistent results.

The evidence is mixed regarding whether patients with schizophrenia have a general facial emotion perception deficit (a deficit in facial emotion perception plus a more basic deficit in facial processing) or specific facial emotion perception deficits (deficits only in facial emotion perception tasks).

In order to clarify this confusion, Drs. Raymond Chan and Huijie Li from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Lab have adopted a meta-analytic approach to address this issue. A total of 28 facial emotion perception studies were included for this analysis. These studies use differential deficit designs to examine whether patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a general deficit or specific deficits in facial emotion perception.

A significant mean effect size is found for total facial emotion perception (d = -0.85). Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate impaired ability to perform corresponding control tasks, and the mean effect size is -0.70. The current findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have moderately to severely impaired perception of facial emotion.

This study was partially supported by grants from the Research Initiation Fund of the 100-Scholar Programme (O7CX031003), the Research Fund (KSCX2-YW-R-131) of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation of China (30770723) and the National Basic Research Programme (973 Programme No. 2007CB512302 and 2007CB512305).

This paper is now available online in Psychiatry Research

Chan, R. C. K.*, Li, H., Cheung, E. F. C., Gong, Q. (2010). Impaired facial emotion perception in schizophrenia: A meta-analysis. Psychiatry Research, 20i: 10.1016/j.psychres.2009.03.035.