Journal of International Psychiatry

Objective: To investigate the characteristics of fear expression recognition in the first-episode schizophrenia patients. Methods: Adopting case-control design, this study using Ekman facial expression of emotion base investigate high and low level fear recognition ability in 27 first-episode schizophrenia patients and 28 healthy controls with matching sex, age and educational level, analyse general response rate of facial expression emotion, correct rate of high and low fear recognition and its response time. Results: The patients’ high level fear recognition accurate rate(50.41±6.18) was lower than that of the control group(68.29±4.27，P=0.034). The response time of the low level fear in the healthy control group(362.84±25.23) was positively correlated with the accuracy rate(21.79±2.28)(r=0.494，P=0.008). The patients’ negative score of PANSS(23.35±10.56) was negatively correlated with the accuracy of high level fear recognition(r =-0.428，P=0.042). Conclusion: First-episode schizophrenia patients have high level fear recognition disorder, which indicates that fear recognition ability reveals the negative symptoms of first-episode schizophrenia patients.

first-episode schizophrenia; expression recognition; reaction time; fear expression