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Vocal and Facial Emotion Decoding Difficulties Relating to Social and Thought Problems: Highlighting Schizotypal Personality Disorder

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Abstract

Successful social interaction depends on the ability to decode emotion in the nonverbal behaviors of others. Because relationship difficulties are paramount in adolescents with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), we predicted that adolescents with SPD would (1) make more emotion decoding errors than adolescents with other personality disorders (OPD) or non-psychiatric controls (NPC); and (2) exhibit more social and thought problems than OPD or NPC adolescents. Further, we predicted greater emotion decoding errors for all adolescents would relate to concurrent and future social problems, thought problems, and social reasoning deficits. SPD adolescents made more errors than OPD and NPC adolescents in decoding voices but not faces (except in specific emotion categories). For all adolescents, vocal errors correlated with greater social problems, and facial and vocal errors correlated with greater thought difficulties concurrently and a year later.

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Notes

  1. When medication status was added to this model, the omnibus F was still significant, F(3, 35) = 4.29, p = .01, η 2p  = .27. However, not having a medication that day was also a significant predictor of thought problems, F(1, 35) = 4.81, p = .04, η 2p  = .12, and diagnostic group no longer showed a main effect, F(2, 35) = 2.27, p = .12, η 2p  = .12.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Colleen Byrne, Ph.D., and Kym Hurley, Ph.D., for their helpful contributions to earlier analyses of these data during their graduate work at Emory University.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Miami University, Middletown Campus, 4200 North University Boulevard, Middletown, OH, 45042, USA

    Virginia B. Wickline

  2. Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Stephen Nowicki, Annie M. Bollini & Elaine F. Walker

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  1. Virginia B. Wickline
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Wickline, V.B., Nowicki, S., Bollini, A.M. et al. Vocal and Facial Emotion Decoding Difficulties Relating to Social and Thought Problems: Highlighting Schizotypal Personality Disorder. J Nonverbal Behav 36, 59–77 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0125-2

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