The association between childhood trauma and facial emotion recognition in patients with stable schizophrenia

Abstract

Introduction

The impairment of facial emotion recognition (FER) among patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) is a significant feature of the illness. Childhood trauma (CT) is reported with a high prevalence in SCZ and is considered one of its risk factors.

Objectives

To investigate the relationship between FER and CT in SCZ.

Methods

Fifty-eight outpatients with stable SCZ completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire retrospectively assessing five types of childhood trauma (emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and emotional and physical neglect). They also completed a newly developed and validated FER task constructed from photographs of the face of a famous Tunisian actress and evaluating the ability to correctly identify Ekman's six basic facial emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear and surprise).

Results

Patients with higher scores of CT performed significantly worse in FER task. Our results suggest that the presence of sexual abuse is specifically correlated to a poor identification of anger (P = 0.02) and disgust (P = 0.03) while the presence of emotional abuse and physical neglect are correlated to a poor identification of happiness and sadness.

Conclusions

CT may represent one of the causes of the FER deficits in schizophrenia. Further studies are necessary to confirm the link between specific kinds of childhood trauma and deficits in the recognition of discrete emotions.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.