A small study conducted in Germany has found that men with schizophrenia are less accurate than their healthy peers at recognising emotions from both body movements and facial expressions depicted as simple moving dots. The experiment, carried out at University Hospital Tübingen, involved 28 men with schizophrenia or related disorders and 28 healthy men, and the researchers published their findings in the journal Schizophrenia.
Global impairment in social cognition among men with schizophrenia
Understanding others’ emotions, intentions and social signals is a fundamental social skill. The study notes that in typical people the brain merges information from faces, body movements and other cues to infer what someone may be feeling. In schizophrenia, this process can become less reliable, particularly for social information conveyed through nonverbal cues.
Researchers sought to know whether the difficulty is global—affecting all tasks and emotions—or selective, and whether performance on face and body tasks is related. They focused on men to minimise variability in the condition’s presentation between genders.
The participants comprised 28 men diagnosed with schizophrenia or related disorders and 28 age-matched healthy men, with an average age of 32. Most patients had paranoid schizophrenia, eight had schizoaffective disorder, and nearly all were on medication. More than half had comorbid conditions, principally substance use.
In the body task, participants watched 2-second videos of a walking figure made of 15 white dots placed on the head, neck, pelvis and major joints of an otherwise invisible body. Across 144 trials, they indicated whether the walker’s movement expressed anger or was emotionally neutral. The walkers were recorded from four actors (two men and two women).
In the face task, participants viewed 2-second videos of faces represented by 50 white dots and judged whether each face expressed happiness or anger. This task included 108 trials featuring six actors (three men and three women). Researchers measured both accuracy and reaction time.
Men with schizophrenia were less accurate than healthy men on both tasks, with a notably larger gap for the facial expressions. On the face task, accuracy was about 59% for the schizophrenia group versus 76% for controls; on the body task, accuracy was about 55% versus 63%, where 50% would reflect random guessing. Participants in both groups were slower to respond on both tasks.
Both groups recognised emotions from faces more accurately than from bodies. The body task proved difficult for everyone, particularly for angry walkers where the two groups did not differ; however, men with schizophrenia were less accurate when recognising neutral walking. On the face task, those with schizophrenia struggled more with happy and angry expressions.
The researchers describe the impairment as global because the schizophrenia group exhibited the same overall pattern as the healthy participants, simply at a lower level of accuracy. Among the schizophrenia group, those more accurate on the body task tended also to be more accurate on the face task, a link not observed among healthy men. In both groups, faster responders on one task tended to respond quickly on the other.
“For SZ [schizophrenia] patients, inferring social signals from dynamic faces and bodies may be rather challenging in terms of neurocognitive mechanisms, which is reflected in the tight link in recognition accuracy. Along with previous data on inferring emotions in the eyes collected in the same cohort, this work provides novel insights into the specific global aberrations in social cognition in SZ and offers a blueprint for the development of strategies for the targeted treatment of gender-specific mental disorders,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of social cognition in people with schizophrenia. However, the authors caution that the sample was relatively small and the range of emotions limited; results from larger studies using a broader set of emotions might differ.
The study included only men, so it remains unknown whether the findings apply to women with schizophrenia. Nearly all participants were on medication, and many had other conditions that could have influenced performance. It also remains unclear whether the difficulties reflect problems specific to social cognition or broader cognitive impairments associated with schizophrenia.
The paper, “Reading body and face language in male schizophrenia,” was authored by Annika Resch, Alexander N. Sokolov, Patrick Steinwand, Andreas J. Fallgatter and Marina A. Pavlova.
