Impaired recognition of facial affect in schizophrenia has been
documented extensively (1, 2). Specifically, patients with
first-episode schizophrenia performed worse than patients with
affective psychosis and comparison subjects, particularly in
recognition of fear and sadness (3). The question of whether
emotion-processing performance is a differential deficit
relative to cognitive performance has been debated (4, 5).
Associations of measures related to emotion processing with
illness have been reported, including duration (6, 7), symptoms
(8–12), and social competence (6, 7). The extent to which there
is differential deficit in schizophrenia for processing specific
emotions has not been clarified. Deficits in processing emotions
may relate to dysfunction of mesial temporal regions, which has
been documented in schizophrenia (13, 14). These regions are
involved predominantly in fear recognition (15). There is some
evidence that fear recognition is impaired in schizophrenia (3),
but a specific deficit in fea