A Comparative Study on Fear Expression Recognition Characteristics in First-episode Schizophrenic Patients

Objective: To explore the characteristics of fear expression recognition in the patients with first-episode schizophrenia. Methods: Based on the case-control design, the Ekman facial expression database was used to research the subjects’ overall response rate of low / high fear facial expression, accuracy rate of low / high level fear and its response time in the control group (28 cases) and the first-episode schizophrenic patient group (27 cases) with matching gender (p = 0.696), age (p = 0.255) and education level (p = 0.895). Results: The high level fear accuracy rate (50.41 ± 6.18) of case group was lower than that of the control group (68.29 ± 4.27, p = 0.034). The response time (362.84 ± 25.23) of low-level fear of healthy control group was positively correlated with the accuracy rate (21.79 ± 2.28) (r = 0.494, p = 0.008); the negative symptom of case group (23.35 ± 10.56) was negatively correlated with the accuracy rate of high level fear (r = -0.428, p = 0.042). Conclusion: The patients with first-episode schizophrenia have the disorder of high-level fear recognition and the accuracy rate of fear facial expression recognition can reveal the negative symptoms of the patients.