Do hallucinations and delusions distort the perception of fear on face in patients with schizophrenia?
25 August 2010
Emotions are written all over our faces, but read by our brains; we are just beginning to understand how this may occur.
The appropriate recognition of facial emotion helps us to communicate effectively and understand each other. Patients with schizophrenia have difficulties in recognising emotions and this makes them more likely to misunderstand other people.
One of the primal emotions is fear, and a fearful face usually signals danger and threat. Researchers from the Cognition Schizophrenia and Imaging (CSI) Laboratory at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), King’s College London, studied how the perception of fear is linked to classic symptoms of schizophrenia, delusions and hallucinations (also called reality distortion syndrome), which are considered to arise as misunderstandings in perception.
They used brain imaging to scan patients on two separate occasions while the patients were viewing fearful faces. During the second scanning the delusions and hallucinations of the patients were less severe.
The researchers found that the improvement in delusions and hallucinations was related with increased activation in “emotional” frontal brain regions, such as anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortices.
'What we found was that presence of hallucinations and delusions distorted the way the brain reacted to fear - and the more severe these symptoms the greater the distortion' said Dr Shergill, senior author of the research report.
Dr Panagiota Michalopoulou, who led the study said: 'The research shows the neurobiological basis of delusions and hallucinations, in other words, the print of delusions and hallucinations in the brain. Such findings, if confirmed by larger longitudinal studies, could be used to define the therapeutic effect of antipsychotics and to evaluate future interventions.'
The paper 'The effects of reality distortion syndrome on salient stimuli processing in patients with schizophrenia: An fMRI study' is published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging Volume 183, 2010, pp 93-98. The authors are: Panagiota G. Michalopoulou, Vincent P. Giampietro, Lucy A. Morley, Adnan Azim, Shitij Kapur, Lefteris Lykouras and Sukhwinder S. Shergil