Abstract

This article examines facial expression labeling deficits in each of three major psychiatric illnesses: schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder, and shows that these illnesses can be distinguished by different patterns of facial expression labeling abnormalities. The expansion of functional neuroimaging techniques to the study of psychiatric illnesses facilitates understanding of the neural basis of the facial emotion abnormalities in each of these illnesses that in turn may help provide a cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the pathophysiological basis of these different illnesses. Furthermore, these techniques are applied to the study of neural system abnormalities in individuals in the early stages of these illnesses. A description of the main findings from such studies in these three psychiatric illnesses in adulthood, youth, and at risk populations is included. The article concludes with an integration of these findings toward development of neural models of abnormal facial expression perception for each of these illnesses.