Facial emotion recognition in patients with violent schizophrenia

Background: People with schizophrenia are more likely considered to be violent than the general population. Besides some well described symptoms, patients with schizophrenia have problems in recognizing basic facial emotions which could underlie the misinterpretation of others' intentions that could lead to violent behaviors. We aimed to investigate the facial emotion recognition ability in violent or non-violent patients with schizophrenia. Methods: The severity in both groups was evaluated according to the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. A computer-based test included the photos of four male and four female models with happy, surprised, fearful, sad, angry, disgusted, and neutral facial expressions from Ekman & Friesen's series has been performed to groups. Totally, 41 outpatients with violent schizophrenia and 35 outpatients with non-violent schizophrenia participated in the study. Results: The mean age of violent schizophrenia group was 41.50+/-7.56, and control group's mean age was 39.94+/-6.79 years. There were no significant differences between groups among reaction time for each emotion while recognizing them (p>0.05). In addition, the accuracy rate of answers towards facial emotion recognition test for each emotion and the distribution misidentifications were not significantly different between groups (p>0.05). Conclusions: The facial emotion recognition in violent schizophrenia is lacking and we found that the facial emotion recognition ability in violent schizophrenia seems to be a trait feature of the illness. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.