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Intranasal oxytocin increases facial expressivity, but not ratings of trustworthiness, in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Blunted facial affect is a common negative symptom of schizophrenia. Additionally, assessing the trustworthiness of faces is a social cognitive ability that is impaired in schizophrenia. Currently available pharmacological agents are ineffective at improving either of these symptoms, despite their clinical significance. The hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin has multiple prosocial effects when administered intranasally to healthy individuals and shows promise in decreasing negative symptoms and enhancing social cognition in schizophrenia. Although two small studies have investigated oxytocin's effects on ratings of facial trustworthiness in schizophrenia, its effects on facial expressivity have not been investigated in any population. METHOD:We investigated the effects of oxytocin on facial emotional expressivity while participants performed a facial trustworthiness rating task in 33 individuals with schizophrenia and 35 age-matched healthy controls using a double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over design. Participants rated the trustworthiness of presented faces interspersed with emotionally evocative photographs while being video-recorded. Participants' facial expressivity in these videos was quantified by blind raters using a well-validated manualized approach (i.e. the Facial Expression Coding System; FACES). RESULTS:While oxytocin administration did not affect ratings of facial trustworthiness, it significantly increased facial expressivity in individuals with schizophrenia (Z = -2.33, p = 0.02) and at trend level in healthy controls (Z = -1.87, p = 0.06). CONCLUSIONS:These results demonstrate that oxytocin administration can increase facial expressivity in response to emotional stimuli and suggest that oxytocin may have the potential to serve as a treatment for blunted facial affect in schizophrenia.

SUBMITTER: Woolley JD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6939989 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Intranasal oxytocin increases facial expressivity, but not ratings of trustworthiness, in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

Woolley J D JD Chuang B B Fussell C C Scherer S S Biagianti B B Fulford D D Mathalon D H DH Vinogradov S S

Psychological medicine 20170116 7

<h4>Background</h4>Blunted facial affect is a common negative symptom of schizophrenia. Additionally, assessing the trustworthiness of faces is a social cognitive ability that is impaired in schizophrenia. Currently available pharmacological agents are ineffective at improving either of these symptoms, despite their clinical significance. The hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin has multiple prosocial effects when administered intranasally to healthy individuals and shows promise in decreasing neg ...[more]

PMID: 28091349

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Project description:Individuals with schizophrenia show deficits both in facial emotion recognition and context processing (Kohler, C.G., Walker, J.B., Martin, E.A., Healey, K.M., Moberg, P.J., 2010. Facial emotion perception in schizophrenia: a meta-analytic review. Schizophr. Bull. 36, 1009-1019). Recent evidence suggests context information can affect facial emotion recognition (Aviezer, H., Bentin, S., Hassin, R.R., Meschino, W.S., Kennedy, J., Grewal, S., Esmail, S., Cohen, S., Moscovitch, M., 2009. Not on the face alone: perception of contextualized face expressions in Huntington's disease. Brain 132, 1633-1644). Thus, individuals with schizophrenia may have deficits in facial emotion processing, at least in part, due to impairments in processing context information (Green, M.J., Waldron, J.H., Coltheart, M., 2007. Emotional context processing is impaired in schizophrenia. Cogn. Neuropsychiatry 12, 259-280.). We used a novel experimental task, the Emotion Context Processing Task (ECPT) to examine the influences of emotional context (IAPS pictures) on the processing of subtle surprised faces in schizophrenia. One of the task conditions included a manipulation designed to determine whether enhancing attention to the context (by requiring a categorization judgment on the context pictures) would facilitate the influence of context on facial emotion processing in schizophrenia. In addition, we tested whether deficits on a non-social context processing would predict deficits in the influence of context on facial emotion processing in schizophrenia. We administered the Dot Probe Expectancy Task (a non-social context processing task) and the ECPT to individuals with schizophrenia (n=35) and healthy controls (n=32). Individuals with schizophrenia showed an intact influence of context information on facial emotion recognition. The manipulation designed to enhance attention to emotional context reduced the effect of context for both groups. In schizophrenia, better processing of non-social context was associated with a stronger influence of context on valence ratings of facial expressions in the negative context condition. These results suggest in schizophrenia, similar mechanisms may influence the processing of context for both social and non-social information.

Dataset Information

Intranasal oxytocin increases facial expressivity, but not ratings of trustworthiness, in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

Publications

Intranasal oxytocin increases facial expressivity, but not ratings of trustworthiness, in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.

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