Schizophrenia is linked to broad difficulty reading emotions from body language and faces
Reading emotions from body language and facial expressions helps people navigate social life. A study in Germany found that men with schizophrenia were less accurate at both, using displays in which faces and bodies were reduced to moving dots.
A recent German study of 28 men with schizophrenia revealed that these individuals struggled more than healthy men in accurately interpreting emotions from both body movements and facial expressions. The authors, from the University of Tübingen, published their findings in the journal Schizophrenia.
The researchers employed point-light displays, which depicted bodies and faces using only a handful of moving dots placed on joints or facial features. Despite the simplified nature of these displays, healthy individuals generally performed better at recognizing emotions in such visuals than those with schizophrenia.
Interestingly, the study found a connection between how well men with schizophrenia read emotions from body movements and how well they read them from faces. This link did not exist in healthy men. The authors suggest that schizophrenia may impair a shared set of mental processes involved in reading both faces and bodies, leading to overall difficulties in social cognition.
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