EEG-correlates of facial affect recognition and categorisation of blurred faces in schizophrenic patients and healthy volunteers M. Streit * , W. Wo Èlwer, J. Brinkmeyer, R. Ihl, W. Gaebel Department of Psychiatry, University of Du Èsseldorf, Bergische Landstraûe 2, D-40629 Du Èsseldorf, Germany Received 17 September 1999; accepted 28 February 2000 Abstract The ability to recognise emotional expressions of faces and the ability to categorise blurred and non-blurred faces and complex objects was tested in 16 schizophrenic in-patients and 16 healthy volunteers. EEGs were recorded during performance of the tasks and event-related potentials were compared between groups. Patients performed worse than healthy volunteers in recognition of facial affect but not in categorisation of blurred faces. Furthermore, within a 180±250 ms latency range patients showed reduced amplitudes during affect recognition compared with controls but not during categorisation of blurred faces. Amplitudes recorded at frontal electrode sites were associated with performance in facial affect recognition. These results provide a ®rst clue to the neurophysiological basis of the widely reported facial affect recognition de®cit in schizophrenic patients. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Emotion; Event-related potentials; Facial affect recognition; Schizophrenia 1. Introduction De®cits in the recognition of facial expressions of emotions in schizophrenic patients have been widely described in the literature Morrison et al., 1988). Results of recent longitudinal studies show that these de®cits remain stable in the course of the illness, even in remitted states Wo Èlwer et al., 1996; Streit et al., 1997; Addington and Addington, 1998). Furthermore, schizophrenic patients perform worse than patients with bipolar disorders Addington and Addington, 1998), major depression Gaebel and Wo Èlwer, 1992), anxiety disorders Mandal and Rai, 1987) and substance abuse Bell et al., 1997). These ®ndings point to the assumption that the neural basis of facial affect recognition de®cits might be critically related to the pathophysiology of schizophrenic disorders. Nevertheless, knowledge about neurophy- siological substrates of those de®cits in schizophrenia is very small yet. Studies in healthy subjects based on measurements of cerebral blood ¯ow George et al., 1993; Morris et al., 1998; Taylor et al., 1998) and blood oxygenation Phillips et al., 1998; Sprengelmeyer et al., 1998) demonstrate that several cortical and subcortical brain regions are critically involved in the evaluation of facial expressions of emotion. Event-related potential ERP) studies provide important information regarding the time course of neurophysiological processes. However, the ERP database of studies on facial emotion recognition is still small and the results are not completely consis- tent Vanderploeg et al., 1987; Laurian et al., 1991), probably due to different stimulus characteristics, task Schizophrenia Research 49 2001) 145±155 0920-9964/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0920-996400)00041-4 www.elsevier.com/locate/schres * Corresponding author. Tel.: 149-211-922-3475; fax: 149-211- 922-2020. E-mail address: streit@uni-duesseldorf.de M. Streit).