Decoupling of spontaneous facial mimicry from emotion recognition in schizophrenia.

Past research indicates that spontaneous mimicry facilitates the decoding of others' emotions, leading to enhanced social perception and interpersonal rapport. Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) show consistent deficits in emotion recognition and expression associated with poor social functioning. Given the prominence of blunted affect in schizophrenia, it is possible that spontaneous facial mimicry may also be impaired. However, studies assessing automatic facial mimicry in schizophrenia have yielded mixed results. It is therefore unknown whether emotion recognition deficits and impaired automatic facial mimicry are related in schizophrenia. SZ and demographically matched controls (CO) participated in a dynamic emotion recognition task. Electromyographic activity in muscles responsible for producing facial expressions was recorded during the task to assess spontaneous facial mimicry. SZ showed deficits in emotion identification compared to CO, but there was no group difference in the predictive power of spontaneous facial mimicry for avatar's expressed emotion. In CO, facial mimicry supported accurate emotion recognition, but it was decoupled in SZ. The finding of intact facial mimicry in SZ bears important clinical implications. For instance, clinicians might be able to improve the social functioning of patients by teaching them to pair specific patterns of facial muscle activation with distinct emotion words.

The acceptability and feasibility of a novel virtual reality based social skills training game for schizophrenia: Preliminary findings.

Social impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia that presents a major barrier toward recovery. Some of the psychotic symptoms are partly ameliorated by medication but the route to recovery is hampered by social impairments. Since existing social skills interventions tend to suffer from lack of availability, high-burden and low adherence, there is a dire need for an effective, alternative strategy. The present study examined the feasibility and acceptability of Multimodal Adaptive Social Intervention in Virtual Reality (MASI-VR) for improving social functioning and clinical outcomes in schizophrenia. Out of eighteen patients with schizophrenia who enrolled, seventeen participants completed the pre-treatment assessment and 10 sessions of MASI-VR, but one patient did not complete the post-treatment assessments. Therefore, the complete training plus pre- and post-treatment assessment data are available from sixteen participants. Clinical ratings of symptom severity were obtained at pre- and post-training. Retention rates were very high and training was rated as extremely satisfactory for the majority of participants. Participants exhibited a significant reduction in overall clinical symptoms, especially negative symptoms following 10 sessions of MASI-VR. These preliminary results support the feasibility and acceptability of a novel virtual reality social skills training program for individuals with schizophrenia.

Extraction of Emotional Information via Visual Scanning Patterns: A Feasibility Study of Participants with Schizophrenia and Neurotypical Individuals.

Emotion recognition impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia (SZ), present throughout all stages of this condition, and leads to poor social outcome. However, the underlying mechanisms that give rise to such deficits have not been elucidated and hence, it has been difficult to develop precisely targeted interventions. Evidence supports the use of methods designed to modify patterns of visual attention in individuals with SZ in order to effect meaningful improvements in social cognition. To date, however, attention-shaping systems have not fully utilized available technology (e.g., eye tracking) to achieve this goal. The current work consisted of the design and feasibility testing of a novel gaze-sensitive social skills intervention system called MASI-VR. Adults from an outpatient clinic with confirmed SZ diagnosis (n=10) and a comparison sample of neurotypical participants (n=10) were evaluated on measures of emotion recognition and visual attention at baseline assessment, and a pilot test of the intervention system was evaluated on the SZ sample following five training sessions over three weeks. Consistent with the literature, participants in the SZ group demonstrated lower recognition of faces showing medium intensity fear, spent more time deliberating about presented emotions, and had fewer fixations in comparison to neurotypical peers. Furthermore, participants in the SZ group showed significant improvement in the recognition of fearful faces post-training. Preliminary evidence supports the feasibility of a gaze-sensitive paradigm for use in assessment and training of emotion recognition and social attention in individuals with SZ, thus warranting further evaluation of the novel intervention.