Thirty-two videorecorded interviews were conducted by two interviewers with eight patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. Each patient was interviewed four times: three weekly interviews by the first interviewer and one additional interview by the second interviewer. 64 selected sequences where the patients were speaking about psychotic experiences were scored for facial affective behaviour with Emotion Facial Action Coding System (EMFACS). In accordance with previous research, the results show that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia express negative facial affectivity. Facial affective behaviour seems not to be dependent on temporality, since within-subjects ANOVA revealed no substantial changes in the amount of affects displayed across the weekly interview occasions. Whereas previous findings found contempt to be the most frequent affect in patients, in the present material disgust was as common, but depended on the interviewer. The results suggest that facial affectivity in these patients is primarily dominated by the negative emotions of disgust and, to a lesser extent, contempt and implies that this seems to be a fairly stable feature. 1. Introduction Studies of facial behaviour have shown a clear reduction of facial expressiveness and of facial affective expressiveness in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia [1–11]. The reduction of facial expressiveness is especially prominent in the upper face [12] and has also been observed while patients are confronted with emotional stimuli [6, 10, 12, 13] as well as when they are imitating emotional stimuli [14]. Interestingly, most findings point at the conclusion that reduction of facial expressiveness is not correlated with impaired emotional experience [8, 10, 11]. The patients’ capacity for emotional recognition is also reduced [11], a very robust finding according to a recent review [15]. However, facial emotional expressiveness is also reduced in patients with depression [6, 12], but patients with schizophrenia are still distinguished in this respect from patients with depression, Parkinson’s disease, and right hemisphere brain damage [10] since their diminished expressiveness is more prominent. Furthermore, patients with schizophrenia have been found to limit their facial affective repertoire to mainly negative affective expressions [7, 11, 16], an observation that may be present even before the clinical onset of psychosis [17]. Contempt was found to be the most frequent affect shown by these patients [5, 7, 18] and they showed significantly less happiness compared to healthy subjects [5]. Healthy
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