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Research Articles
Introduction
Bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SZ) are complex mental disorders characterized by poor psychosocial functioning (Van Rheenen & Rossell, 2014a) and impaired cognition extending across both social and non-social domains (Gogos, Joshua, & Rossell, 2010; Rossell, Van Rheenen, Joshua, O'Regan, & Gogos, 2014; Rossell & Van Rheenen, 2013; Van Rheenen & Rossell, 2013b, 2014b, 2014c; Van Rheenen & Rossell, 2014d). There is a growing literature suggesting that these latter deficits are strongly predictive of the former; with impairments in facial emotion recognition in particular, often cited as a potentially important contributing factor for impaired interpersonal functioning (Brekke, Kay, Lee, & Green, 2005; Kee, Green, Mintz, & Brekke, 2003).
In the SZ literature, there have been some attempts to determine the underlying mechanisms associated with these emotion recognition aberrations, with findings pointing toward a potential role for general cognitive ability as well as perceptual face processing per se (Fakra, Jouve, Guillaume, Azorin, & Blin, 2015; Joshua & Rossell, 2009; Kohler, Bilker, Hagendoorn, Gur, & Gur, 2000; Sergi et al., 2007). In the BD literature, however, there has been far less attention focused on these lines of enquiry (Van Rheenen, Meyer, & Rossell, 2014).
Sufficient processing of visual information and the use of appropriate face processing strategies are a necessary pre-requisite for intact facial emotion recognition. In SZ, impaired performance on face processing tasks suggests that a failure of these prerequisites may at least partially account for some of the facial emotion recognition impairments commonly observed in the disorder (Bortolon, Capdevielle, & Raffard, 2015; Joshua & Rossell, 2009; Rossell et al., 2014; Shin et al., 2008). In BD, no studies have comprehensively investigated the use of typical face processing strategies in and of themselves, although there have been some attempts to address the influence of basic face processing ability in emotion recognition studies in BD (Addington & Addington, 1998; Getz, Shear, & Strakowski, 2003; Van Rheenen & Rossell, 2013a). This generally occurs in the context of control tasks that require the discrimination of gender or identity.
Such tasks, when used as a proxy for face processing ability, are limited since the discrimination of faces can be accomplished on the basis of matching local featural...