Emotion recognition via facial expression and affective prosody in schizophrenia: a methodological review

Disturbances in affect recognition may be one of the most pervasive and serious aspects of the schizophrenic patient's interpersonal problems. Interest in the decoding of emotional information in schizophrenia has focused on facial affect recognition with 29 experimental papers on that topic published since 1987. A smaller literature exists on the topic of recognition of affect in speech and there are at least seven studies, which have examined both face and voice perception in the same individuals with schizophrenia. This paper includes a comprehensive analysis of the schizophrenia facial affect recognition research over the past decade and the schizophrenia literature on affective prosody, and provides the first review of the schizophrenia literature on multichannel emotion recognition research. The weight of evidence would suggest that individuals with schizophrenia experience problems in the perception of emotional material; however, the specificity, extent, and nature of the deficits are unclear. Emotion recognition research in schizophrenia should be informed by the general literature on emotion recognition with serious attention paid to methodological issues.