The accurate recognition of facial expressions is important for social interaction and interpersonal relationships. Many psychiatric disorders are characterized by social difficulties, including problems in recognizing the emotions of others. The disorders of autism, schizophrenia, depression, social anxiety, and borderline personality disorder all involve difficulties in social cognition, which include deficits in recognizing emotions. However, the nature of these difficulties within and between psychiatric disorders is not well understood. One problem is that differences in the methodologies and samples utilized within emotion research often make it difficult to make comparisons across studies and disorders. Despite these differences, some commonalities in deficits for perceiving emotional expressions have been noted within psychopathology, which include differences in processing of emotions involving negative valence. This may suggest dysfunction of a primary emotion system centered on the amygdala in the brain, although the exact nature of this dysfunction may vary between some disorders.