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Abstract
The performance of schizophrenic in-patients in facial expression identification was
assessed in an acute phase and in a partly remitted phase of the illness. During visual
exploration of the face stimuli, the patient's eye movements were recorded using an
infrared-corneal-reflection technique. Compared to healthy controls, patients demonstrated
a significant deficit in facial-affect recognition. In addition, schizophrenics differed
from controls in several eye movement parameters such as length of mean scan path
and mean duration of fixation. Both the facial-affect recognition deficit and the
eye movement abnormalities remained stable over time. However, performance in facial-affect
recognition and eye movement abnormalities were not correlated. Patients with flattened
affect showed relatively selective scan pattern characteristics. In contrast, affective
flattening was not correlated with performance in facial-affect recognition. Dosage
of neuroleptic medication did not affect the results. The main findings of the study
suggest that schizophrenia is associated with disturbances in primarily unrelated
neurocognitive operations mediating visuomotor processing and facial expression analysis.
Given their time stability, the disturbances might have a trait-like character.