Differences in emotion recognition between nonimmersive versus immersive virtual reality: preliminary findings in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

Deficits in social cognition may impair emotional processing and facial emotional recognition (FER) in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia. FER is generally explored using photographs or images of static faces that do not fully capture the complexity of real-life facial stimuli. To overcome this limitation, we developed a set of dynamic virtual faces depicting six basic emotions (i.e. happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise) and a neutral expression suitable for presentation in immersive and nonimmersive virtual realities. This study presents preliminary findings on the differences in FER accuracy from a frontal view between immersive and nonimmersive virtual realities among patients experiencing a relapse of schizophrenia ( n = 10), a manic phase of BD ( n = 10), and a group of healthy controls (HCs) ( n = 10). As a secondary objective, we compare the FER accuracy across these three groups. Patients with schizophrenia and BD showed similar accuracy in recognizing emotions in immersive and nonimmersive virtual reality settings. However, patients with schizophrenia exhibited lower FER accuracy than HCs in both settings. Individuals with BD showed intermediate accuracy between those with schizophrenia and HCs, although these differences were not statistically significant. Notably, recognition of negative emotions was significantly impaired in both groups of patients.