Are neurocognition and facial emotion recognition related in schizophrenia

Introduction Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) show impairments in many social cognition domains including facial emotion recognition (FER). The existence of a relationship association between FER and neurcognitive functioning (NF) remains uncertain. Objectives To investigate the association between ToM functioning and neurocognitive functioning in SCZ. Methods FER was evaluated in 58 patients with stable schizophrenia with a newly validated FER task constructed from photographs of the face of a famous Tunisian actress representing the Ekman's six basic emotions. They also completed a neurocognitive battery comprising the following tests: the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test–Revised (HVLT-R), the Letter Digit Substitution Test (LDST), the Stroop Test (ST), the “Double Barrage” of Zazzo (DBZ), the Modified Card Sorting Test (MCST), Verbal Fluency (VF), the Trail Making Test-Part A (TMT-A) and the Digit Span (DS). Results Patients who performed better in the FER task had better performance in the VF task ( P  = 0.001) and in the immediate recall of the HVLT-R ( P  = 0.021). No correlations were found with the other neurocognitive tests. Conclusions Our results suggest that FER represents an autonomous cognitive function which does not necessarily require good NF.