Fusiform gyrus volume reduction associated with impaired facial expressed emotion recognition and emotional intensity recognition in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis

Abstract

Impaired social cue perception such as emotional recognition is a prominent feature in patients with schizophrenia, adversely affecting psychosocial outcomes and worsening clinical manifestations of the disease. However, few structural neuroimaging studies have investigated both facial emotion recognition and emotion intensity recognition in schizophrenia. Ninety patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis and fifty healthy controls underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging. The gray matter volumes of emotion recognition areas such as the bilateral caudal anterior cingulate cortex, rostral anterior cingulate cortex, fusiform gyrus, insula, amygdala, and hippocampus, were compared between patients and controls. Emotional recognition levels and symptom severities were examined. Group analysis showed that the gray matter volumes of the patients were significantly smaller in left hippocampus and fusiform gyrus compared with healthy controls. A correlation analysis revealed that larger left fusiform gyrus volume was associated with better facial emotion recognition and emotional intensity recognition in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis. Additionally, left fusiform gyrus volumes showed a significant negative correlation with the negative symptom scores at baseline. These findings suggest that gray matter abnormalities in the left fusiform gyrus are associated with impaired social emotion recognition and severity of negative symptoms at baseline in patients with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis.