Are abnormalities in the processing of eyes specific to paranoid schizophrenia?
” Perception 30 ECVP Abstract Supplement Are abnormalities in the processing of eyes specific to paranoid schizophrenia? T A Russell, R Corcoran, R G Morris Patients with schizophrenia have been observed clinically to avoid eye contact. Recent work has demonstrated that paranoid subjects have abnormal viewing strategies (avoiding the eye region) when completing face-recognition tasks. Abnormalities in gaze-direction processing have also been demonstrated for schizophrenia subjects as a heterogeneous group, and particularly paranoid subjects. We sought to further explore eye-region processing in eighteen paranoid schizophrenics, nineteen patients with schizophrenia experiencing passivity phenomena, and thirty controls using a task that required subjects to match open and closed eye pairs. Paranoid subjects made significantly more errors than the control group. They were also significantly slower to complete the task relative to both controls and schizophrenic subjects experiencing passi
