• Macquarie Home »
• Faculty of Human Sciences »
• IHCBS »
• MACCS »
• Research »
• Research Projects

Emotion remediation for Schizophrenia

We know that sometimes people with schizophrenia find it difficult to recognize facial expressions of emotion. Work by Dr. Green has shown that in part this may be due to abnormal visual processing strategies. That is, people with schizophrenia tend to avoid the feature areas of the face and use an extended visual scanning strategy when decoding emotions, particularly negative ones such as fear and anger.

In this project we are using the Micro Expression Training Tool (see www.emotionsrevealed.com) to train people with schizophrenia to be better at reading facial emotions. Below are some of the scan paths from a patient who took part taken part in the training. By looking at the ones with neutral in the title, you can see that the path is quite similar before and after training. In contrast, for two patients there are before (pre) and after (post) videos for angry faces. Here you can clearly see that prior to training the scan path is quite extended and ranges over the face, avoiding the eye region. After training this pattern is normalised, that is, an inverted triangle scanning pattern is seen which takes in the eyes, nose and mouth regions.

This study has also recently featured on Australian prime-time news.

To view these movies you will need Quicktime 7 from Apple Computer.