Schizophrenia-spectrum disorders are characterized by deficits in social domains. Extant research has reported an impaired ability to perceive emotional faces in schizophrenia. Yet, it is unclear if these deficits occur already in the access to visual awareness. To investigate this question, 23 people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 22 healthy controls performed a breaking continuous flash suppression task with fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Response times were analysed with generalized linear mixed models. People with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders were slower than controls in detecting faces, but did not show emotion-specific impairments. Moreover, happy faces were detected faster than neutral and fearful faces, across all participants. Although caution is needed when interpreting the main effect of group, our findings may suggest an elevated threshold for visual awareness in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, but an intact implicit emotion perception. Our study provides a new insight into the mechanisms underlying emotion perception in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.

精神分裂症谱系障碍的特征是社会领域的缺陷。现有研究报告称，精神分裂症患者感知情绪面孔的能力受损。然而，尚不清楚这些缺陷是否已经出现在获得视觉意识的过程中。为了调查这个问题，23 名精神分裂症或分裂情感障碍患者和 22 名健康对照者用恐惧、快乐和中性的面孔执行了打破连续的闪光抑制任务。使用广义线性混合模型分析响应时间。患有精神分裂症谱系障碍的人在识别面部方面比对照组慢，但没有表现出特定于情绪的障碍。此外，在所有参与者中，快乐面孔比中性面孔和恐惧面孔的检测速度更快。尽管在解释组的主效应时需要谨慎，我们的研究结果可能表明精神分裂症谱系障碍的视觉意识阈值升高，但内隐情绪知觉完好无损。我们的研究为精神分裂症谱系障碍中情绪感知的潜在机制提供了新的见解。