Influence of emotional contexts on facial emotion attribution in schizophrenia

•The presence of emotional contexts (positive or negative) triggers a bias towards misattributions of negative emotions to neutral faces in patients with schizophrenia.•However, in the presence of neutral contexts responses of patients and controls did not differ.•Patients and controls provided identical ratings of valence to faces and contexts.•These results provide new evidence on the role of contextual modulation of emotion recognition in schizophrenia that might be used to inform improved intervention programs in the domain of social cognition. Recent emotion recognition studies in schizophrenia have reported misattribution of emotional content to emotionally neutral faces. While in these studies faces are presented in the absence of any contextual reference, in daily life facial expressions are typically perceived within a specific situational context. However, there is no evidence on the possible modulatory role of contextual aids on emotion attribution to neutral faces. We address this issue in the present study. Thirty schizophrenia patients and thirty paired controls performed an emotion categorization task (by choosing one among six labels of emotions) with neutral target faces that were superimposed on affectively positive, negative or neutral scenes. In presence of positive contexts, patients categorized neutral faces as happy and fearful more frequently than controls. When negative contexts were present, patients also categorized neutral faces as fearful more frequently than controls. However, in the presence of neutral contexts patients and controls did not differ in their categorization pattern. These results suggest that explicit presence of a neutral context seems to compensate for the bias showed by patients. With the purpose of correcting emotion misattribution in schizophrenia, emotionally neutral contexts might be incorporated to treatments aimed at improving social cognition performance in this patient population.