The aim of this essay is to investigate how paranoid and non-paranoid schizophrenic patients differ in the processing of emotional facial expressions from healthy individuals, and how this could lead to deficits in the area of social cognition. Researchers have conducted many behavioral and neuroimaging studies on facial emotion processing and emotion recognition in schizophrenia. Several studies have shown that individuals with schizophrenia have deficits in recognizing and processing emotional facial stimuli. It is known that patients with different subtypes of schizophrenia also show differences in facial emotion processing. It has also been shown that patients with schizophrenia uses different strategies in the processing of emotional faces compared to healthy individuals.

<p>The aim of this essay is to investigate how paranoid and non-paranoid schizophrenic patients differ in the processing of emotional facial expressions from healthy individuals, and how this could lead to deficits in the area of social cognition. Researchers have conducted many behavioral and neuroimaging studies on facial emotion processing and emotion recognition in schizophrenia. Several studies have shown that individuals with schizophrenia have deficits in recognizing and processing emotional facial stimuli. It is known that patients with different subtypes of schizophrenia also show differences in facial emotion processing. It has also been shown that patients with schizophrenia uses different strategies in the processing of emotional faces compared to healthy individuals.</p>

The facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is a measure of the cheekbone width divided by the height of the face from the upper lip to the brows. The metric is hypothesised to have evolved as an intra-sexual competition mechanism in males, where large fWHRs are thought to signal both threat and aggression. The fWHR is suggested to subtly resemble angry facial expressions, which, in turn, also signal threat. The late positive potential (LPP) and the vertex positive potential (VPP) are two event-related potentials (ERPs) especially sensitive to emotional content. Studies have also found that viewing angry compared to neutral facial expressions elicit a stronger response on the LPP. However, no study has tested how responses to the fWHR and angry facial expressions elicit changes in the LPP or VPP. In this study, participants firstly rated how threatening faces were with either low or high fWHRs with neutral or angry facial expressions. Secondly, EEG-activity was recorded during a picture-viewing task of the same faces. In the first task, participants rated the faces with angry facial expressions as more threatening compared to all other faces, regardless of fWHR, although the high fWHRs were rated as more threatening than the low fWHRs. In the second task, LPP and VPP mean amplitudes were significantly higher for the angry, high fWHR face compared to all other faces tested. This suggests that an additive effect of both angry facial expressions and high fWHRs together creates the highest threat level in both subjective ratings as well as in ERP mean amplitudes. Further ERP research is needed on the relationship between fWHRs and anger to establish how the two features work both separately and together.

The current paper examined the relationship between frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) and threatening face stimuli. Participants were presented with threatening faces, and this was compared to non-threatening (neutral) faces, on the assumption that the threatening faces would trigger a withdrawal motivation and a corresponding decrease in state FAA scores. The EEG data used in the present analysis was taken from an earlier study at the University of Skövde, consisting of twenty-eight participants with no reported current ongoing neurological or psychiatric illnesses, or epilepsy. Based on the paired samples t-test there was no significant statistical difference between participants’ FAA scores in the threatening and non-threatening conditions. The relatively small sample of the present study may be a contributing factor. Furthermore, threatening face images may elicit weaker responses than non-facial images such as threatening images of domestic violence or natural disasters. In the future, the field of FAA may benefit from investigating the connection between FAA and non-facial threatening and non-threatening images, instead of faces.