A study of men in Germany found that those diagnosed with schizophrenia were less accurate than healthy men at recognizing emotions from both facial expressions and body movements. The researchers used short videos in which faces and figures were represented by moving dots, removing cues such as clothing and body shape. The paper was published in Schizophrenia.
The study included 28 men with schizophrenia or related disorders recruited from inpatient units at University Hospital Tübingen and 28 age-matched healthy men from the local community. Participants had an average age of 32. Most of the patients had paranoid schizophrenia, while eight had schizoaffective disorder. Nearly all were taking medication, and more than half had other conditions, mostly involving substance use.
In the body task, participants watched two-second clips of walking figures represented by 15 dots and judged whether the movement showed anger or was emotionally neutral. In the face task, they watched two-second clips made from 50 dots and identified expressions of happiness or anger. Researchers measured both accuracy and response time.
The men with schizophrenia identified emotions less accurately in both tasks and responded more slowly. On the face task, they were correct about 59% of the time, compared with 76% among healthy participants. On the body task, accuracy was about 55% for the schizophrenia group and 63% for the healthy group; random guessing would yield 50%.
Both groups found the body task harder than the face task. Angry walking was difficult to identify for everyone, and the groups did not differ on that measure. However, the men with schizophrenia were less accurate at recognizing neutral walking. On the face task, they were less accurate at identifying both happy and angry expressions.
The researchers characterized the difficulty as broad rather than limited to particular emotions: the two groups showed a similar pattern of which emotions were easier or harder to recognize, but the schizophrenia group performed less accurately overall. Within that group, participants who did better at reading emotions from bodies also tended to do better with faces. The same relationship was not found among healthy participants. In both groups, faster responses on one task tended to accompany faster responses on the other.
The authors suggest the results may reflect shared mental processes involved in interpreting emotional signals from faces and bodies. They caution, however, that the study was small and tested only a limited set of emotions. Since it included only men, the findings cannot establish whether the same pattern applies to women with schizophrenia. Medication use and other conditions among participants may also have influenced performance, and the study could not determine whether the difficulties were specific to social cognition or part of broader cognitive challenges associated with schizophrenia.
Sources: PsyPost.