Impairments in biological motion perception reflect affective disturbance in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis.

Background: Social cognitive impairments are common in individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR) for psychosis. Emotion recognition, a key component of social cognition, has been extensively examined in the CHR population, primarily with facial emotion recognition tasks, which have consistently demonstrated impairments. However, we have a limited understanding of whether the perception of broad bodily movements, known as biological motion processing (BM), contributes to emotion recognition impairment in this population. Methods: All participants completed the Point Light Walker (PLW) task, a paradigm that isolates body movement, to assess performance on BM processing. This study included 63 participants (34 CHR, 29 healthy controls (HC)). Symptom severity and functioning was measured by the Structured Interview for Prodromal Syndromes (SIPS), and the Negative Symptoms Inventory-Psychosis Risk (NSI-PR). Accuracy and response times (RTs) on the PLW were compared between groups using independent Results: Linear regressions were used to examine associations with symptom severity. CHR individuals showed reduced fear recognition ( Conclusion: These findings suggest that CHR individuals may experience subtle impairments in recognizing fear and processing threat/high-arousal emotions. Consequently, impaired BM recognition and processing of fear might serve as an early indicator of psychosis risk.