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Emotional Face Perception: Event-Related Potentials (ERPS) Contribution to Differentiate Schizophrenia and Autism Spectrum Disorders in Adolescents

Valérie Bonnard, Emmanuelle DOR, Andreia Santos, Michel Benoit and Florence Askenazy

Early onset schizophrenia (EOS) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) share similarities in the area of social cognition and emotion processing. It remains unclear whether these similarities come from shared or disorder-specific mechanisms and pathways. This study compared three groups of adolescents matched for age and verbal IQ: 18 adolescents with EOS (mean age=15 ± 1.6), 19 adolescents with ASD (mean age=15 ± 2.1) and 20 typically developing (TD) adolescents (mean age=14 ± 1.7). All groups completed an implicit emotional face perception task while visual ERPs (P100 and N170 components) were recorded. Both EOS and ASD adolescents showed impairments in emotion processing, but distinct patterns emerged in each disorder. These findings support the need for distinct early intervention approaches.