Facial emotion discrimination: III. Behavioral findings in schizophrenia

Emotional discrimination was studied in patients with schizophrenia (n = 20) and matched controls. Performance of the emotion-discrimination tasks in the schizophrenic patients was impaired, relative to their performance of an age-discrimination task. Performance patterns in the patient group could also be reliably distinguished from those of normal controls. The impairment was associated with the severity of both emotional and nonemotional symptoms specific to schizophrenia, but not with the severity of nonspecific symptoms. The deficit associated with schizophrenia is more marked than that reported for depression (Gur et al., 1992), particularly for the emotion-discrimination tasks, and showed no difference between "happy" discrimination and "sad" discrimination. The main difficulty in patients with schizophrenia is the assignment of emotional valence to neutral faces. The magnitude of the deficit underscores the salience of emotional impairment in schizophrenia, and its relation to cognitive dysfunction in this disorder merits further scrutiny.