Wenjun Weng, a researcher affiliated with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of Manitoba, said researchers were “shocked by the results,” but the results weren’t entirely unexpected.
“While the idea is that the brain changes during schizophrenia are similar to those seen in other brain disorders,” Weng said in an email, “the nature of these brain changes remain unclear.”
In the new study, the researchers wanted to see what happens when people with schizophrenia undergo training in how to detect fear that is unrelated to other types of fear.
They found that the study participants improved their ability to recognize this type of facial expression of distress.
“Our results suggest that the improvements are not simply an improvement in understanding their own fear responses, but in recognizing that the expression that represents their fear is not the face you might expect to detect,” Weng said.
Researchers also note that this type of training may still require time to develop, as they said it’s important that the learning is not merely applied to a certain amount of time.
“Because the face and facial expression recognition task used in the current study is typically taken up at once, any training that takes longer than about a week would have little effect on the improvements observed in the current study,” the researchers said.
“Additionally, the current training in the present study was well received, and had been observed by participants who were previously healthy, and thus we can suggest that the training may have been beneficial to their anxiety.”
The researchers say that more studies can be done to look at a broad range of anxiety disorders, looking at the underlying brain mechanisms that cause these changes.
And in future studies involving schizophrenia patients and “normal” controls, the researchers say they’d like to see whether the trainee would show significant improvements in recognizing different types of emotional expressions, when they were asked to perform the facial expression recognition task.