Impaired facial emotion perception of briefly presented double masked stimuli in violent offenders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders

摘要

Social interactions require decoding of subtle rapidly changing emotional cues in others to facilitate socially appropriate behaviour. It is possible that impairments in the ability to detect and decode these signals may increase the risk for aggression. Therefore, we examined violent offenders with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and compared these with healthy controls on a computerized paradigm of briefly presented double masked faces exhibiting 7 basic emotions. Our hypotheses were that impaired semantic understanding of emotion words and low cognitive ability would yield lowest emotion recognition. SSD exhibited lower accuracy of emotion perception than controls (46.1% compared with 64.5%,  = 0.026), even when considering the unbiased hit rate (22.4% compared with 43%, Z = 2.62,