Sara Cordeiro successfully defended her master's thesis entitled “Emotions in Motion: Representational moment for dynamic facial expressions in schizotypy traits.”
In her thesis, Sara applied a behavioural paradigm to study the effect of schizotypy traits – a personality structure characterized by psychological factors that resemble the positive, disorganized and negative symptoms of schizophrenia – on the anticipation of emotional states of happiness or anger with based on subtle changes in the facial expression of male and female avatars. Contrary to expectations, no effects of schizotypy traits were observed. However, curiously, there was a greater emotional anticipation of anger than happiness, particularly in the presence of male avatars. This suggests a stronger tendency to anticipate a potential threat in male stimuli, which is in line with the face perception literature that points to an association between anger and masculinity.
Thus, although no effect of schizotypal traits was observed, it might be the case that changes in emotional anticipation occur in the clinical manifestation of schizophrenia solely, instead of in a subclinical dimension. This effect needs to be explored in future studies – something that Sara mentioned throughout her discussion!
Sara's thesis was supervised by Prof. Sandra C. Soares and co-supervised by Prof. Nuno de Sá Teixeira, with the collaboration of doctoral student Joana Grave, and with the discussion of Doctor Nuno Madeira from the Coimbra Hospital and University Center.
