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BMC Psychiatry
Published in: BMC Psychiatry 1/2015

Open Access 01-12-2015 | Research article

The relationship between facial emotion recognition and executive functions in first-episode patients with schizophrenia and their siblings

Published in: BMC Psychiatry | Issue 1/2015

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Abstract

Background

Although many studies have examined executive functions and facial emotion recognition in people with schizophrenia, few of them focused on the correlation between them. Furthermore, their relationship in the siblings of patients also remains unclear. The aim of the present study is to examine the correlation between executive functions and facial emotion recognition in patients with first-episode schizophrenia and their siblings.

Methods

Thirty patients with first-episode schizophrenia, their twenty-six siblings, and thirty healthy controls were enrolled. They completed facial emotion recognition tasks using the Ekman Standard Faces Database, and executive functioning was measured by Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Hierarchical regression analysis was applied to assess the correlation between executive functions and facial emotion recognition.

Results

Our study found that in siblings, the accuracy in recognizing low degree ‘disgust’ emotion was negatively correlated with the total correct rate in WCST (r = −0.614, p = 0.023), but was positively correlated with the total error in WCST (r = 0.623, p = 0.020); the accuracy in recognizing ‘neutral’ emotion was positively correlated with the total error rate in WCST (r = 0.683, p = 0.014) while negatively correlated with the total correct rate in WCST (r = −0.677, p = 0.017). People with schizophrenia showed an impairment in facial emotion recognition when identifying moderate ‘happy’ facial emotion, the accuracy of which was significantly correlated with the number of completed categories of WCST (R2 = 0.432, P < .05). There were no correlations between executive functions and facial emotion recognition in the healthy control group.

Conclusions

Our study demonstrated that facial emotion recognition impairment correlated with executive function impairment in people with schizophrenia and their unaffected siblings but not in healthy controls.
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Metadata
Title
The relationship between facial emotion recognition and executive functions in first-episode patients with schizophrenia and their siblings
Publication date
01-12-2015
Published in
BMC Psychiatry / Issue 1/2015
Electronic ISSN: 1471-244X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-015-0618-3

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