The Investigation of Facial Affect Recognition in People with Psychological Symptoms Based on SCL-90-R Scale

Considering the importance of facial emotion recognition in social interactions and the conflicting results of the previous studies that have evaluated the emotion recognition in healthy individuals with psychiatric symptom distress, the present study aimed to investigate the relationship between facial emotion recognition and psychiatric symptom distress as indexed by the SCL-90-R scale.
The sample size was 60 that consisted of 31 subjects with clinical symptoms and 29 healthy individuals as the control group. The Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) Form was chosen to determine the level of psychiatric symptom distress, and the facial emotion recognition was examined by 42 images of facial emotion picture (Ekman & frieze,1976) that measured 6 different emotional states (sadness, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and the neutral state).
Findings: The results of data analysis indicated that the participants with depression symptoms had difficulty in recognizing disgust, happiness and neutral state; however, the participants with anxiety symptoms had better performance in recognizing fear.
The findings indicated that different symptoms, which are due to different underlying neurobiological and cognitive functions, influence emotion recognition in different ways.