The task itself is straightforward: a face is presented that is either neutral or expressing an emotion and the participant chooses the appropriate label from an array of options. In our first implementation of the test, we used only happy and sad expressions and found substantial deficits in people with schizophrenia (Heimberg et al., 1992). In depression we found a specific deficit of misidentifying neutral emotions as sad (Gur et al., 1992). Subsequent implementation of the task extended the emotional expressions to include anger, fear and disgust (Gur et al., 2002; Figure 1). In this format the test was administered with functional MRI and in large-scale genetic studies.
