IEPA 11

Louise Birkedal Glenthøj1,2, Birgitte Fagerlund2,3, Nikolaj Bak2,3, Carsten Hjorthøj1, Tina Dam Kristensen1,2, Christina Wenneberg1,2, Joseph Ventura4, Jens Richardt Møllegaard Jepsen2,3,5, Merete Nordentoft1,2; 1Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen, 2Centre for Clinical Intervention and Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research, CINS, 3Centre for Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research (CNSR), Mental Health Centre Glostrup, Copenhagen University Hospital, 4UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, CA, 5Child and Adolescent Mental Health Centre, Mental Health Services, Capital Region of Denmark, University of Copenhagen
               
Objective: Emotion recognition is an aspect of social cognition that may be a key predictor of functioning and transition to psychosis in individuals at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis. UHR individuals exhibit deficits in accurately identifying facial emotions, but other potential anomalies in facial emotion recognition are largely unexplored. This study aimed to extend current knowledge on emotion recognition deficits in UHR individuals by examining 1) whether UHR would display significantly slower facial emotion recognition than healthy controls, 2) whether an association between emotion recognition accuracy and emotion recognition latency is present in UHR, 3) the relationships between emotion recognition accuracy, neurocognition and psychopathology in UHR, 4) the relation between emotion recognition accuracy, latency, and real life functioning in UHR. Results: UHR did not display impairments in speed of emotion recognition compared to healthy controls. Correlational analyses revealed significant, negative correlations between emotion recognition accuracy and response latency on the emotions happiness (r=-.47, p˂.01) and sadness (r=-.33, p˂.01) in UHR. A multiple regression analysis demonstrated sustained attention to be associated with overall emotion recognition ability along with level of attenuated psychotic symptoms in UHR. Lastly, we found emotion recognition processing speed, but not accuracy, to be consistently related to functioning measures. Conclusion: Our findings indicate that impairments in sustained attention may be an important contributor to emotion recognition deficits in UHR. Additionally, training of social cognitive processing speed may be of particular relevance in cognitive remediation programs aimed at improving real life functioning in UHR individuals.