Emotional processing impairment is one of the core symptoms in patients with schizophrenia and is one of the key factors predicting clinical treatment outcomes in these patients. To date, however, most of these studies were limited to patients with schizophrenia and all of them were generated from western countries. Given that emotion perception and processing are subjected to cultural influence or variations, very little is known about the brain activation associated with non-psychotic siblings of patients with schizophrenia. Dr. Raymond Chan’s team at the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology has attempted to explore whether this type of perception is a potential biological marker of schizophrenia. Drs. Huijie Li and Raymond Chan administered a functional imaging paradigm to patients with schizophrenia, their non-psychotic siblings, and healthy controls and asked them to judge emotional valence of three types of faces (including happy, fearful, and neutral). Their findings showed that non-psychotic siblings shared some similar dysfunctions in processing facial expressions as their psychotic probands, the two groups both showed abnormal activation in the social brain neural circuit (such as precentral and superior frontal gyri) during facial emotion processing, and such abnormal activation lied between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. These findings suggest that genetically at-risk individuals such as non-psychotic siblings may demonstrate attenuated impairment of facial emotion processing, which may be a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia.

This study was supported partially by the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-R-131& KSCX2-EW-J-8), the National Basic Research Programme of China (973 Program) (2007CB512302/5), a grant from the Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation China (81088001), and the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, Institute of Psychology.

This study has been published in Schizophrenia Research

Li, H. J., Chan, R. C. K.*, Gong, Q. Y., Liu, Y., Liu, S. M., Shum, D., Ma, Z. L. (2012). Facial emotion processing in patients with schizophrenia and their non-psychotic siblings: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Schizophrenia Research, 134 , 143–150.