
- Past Issues
- e-Submission
-
2021 Impact Factor 1.766
5-Year Impact Factor 1.674
Editorial Office
- +82-01-9989-7744
- kbiolpsychiatry@gmail.com
- https://www.biolpsychiatry.or.kr/
2021 Impact Factor 1.766
5-Year Impact Factor 1.674
Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry 2011;18(4):239-44. Published online: Apr, 1, 2011
Objectives:Schizophrenic patients have been shown to be impaired in both emotional self-awareness and recognition of others’ facial emotions. Alexithymia refers to the deficits in emotional self-awareness. The relationship between alexithymia and recognition of others’ facial emotions needs to be explored to better understand the characteristics of emotional deficits in schizophrenic patients.
Methods:Thirty control subjects and 31 schizophrenic patients completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20-Korean version (TAS-20K) and facial emotion recognition task. The stimuli in facial emotion recognition task consist of 6 emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral). Recognition accuracy was calculated within each emotion category. Correlations between TAS-20K and recognition accuracy were analyzed.
Results:The schizophrenic patients showed higher TAS-20K scores and lower recognition accuracy compared with the control subjects. The schizophrenic patients did not demonstrate any significant correlations between TAS-20K and recognition accuracy, unlike the control subjects.
Conclusions:The data suggest that, although schizophrenia may impair both emotional self-awareness and recognition of
others' facial emotions, the degrees of deficit can be different between emotional self-awareness and recognition of
others' facial emotions. This indicates that the emotional deficits in schizophrenia may assume more complex features.
Keywords Alexithymia;Facial emotion;Emotion recognition;Schizophrenia.