Virtual Reality Lab - Universitat de Barcelona

Virtual Reality (VR) arises as a useful tool in facial emotion recognition tasks and Socials Skills training. This paper studies the facial emotion recognition skills on a control group of 15 healthy individuals and a clinical group of 15 individuals who suffer from a mental disease within schizophrenic spectrum. Control group is matched with clinical group in age, sex and studies level. His performance is assessed with photographs and virtual avatars, also within different emotions that facial stimuli can show. Possible correlations between alexithymia (identification and expressions of self-feelings and emotions deficit), affect dimensions and subjects performance are also calculated.

Results obtained seem to indicate that alexithymia and affect dimensions are not related with facial emotion recognition skills, against previous studies. In spite of the absence of differences between RV and photo control-group performance, there are differences in the clinical group. Focusing on emotion by group level, control group presents significant differences in sadness, disgust and anger, whereas clinical group only differs in anger. These results are analyzed and compared with other studies.