Relation between emotional face memory and social anhedonia in schizophrenia

There is an interest in investigating the relation between emotional memory impairments in schizophrenia and specific symptom dimensions. We explored potential links between emotional memory and social anhedonia severity in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy individuals.

Twenty-nine patients with schizophrenia and 27 matched healthy individuals completed the Chapman Revised Social Anhedonia Scale and then performed an emotional face recognition memory task involving happy, sad and neutral face expressions. We calculated emotional memory performance using 2 independent measures: the discrimination accuracy index Pr and the response bias Br. We also measured valence ratings of the face stimuli. We performed correlation analyses using the inter-individual variability in social anhedonia severity and the individual score obtained for each memory performance variable and for each face valence rating condition.

Patients with schizophrenia reported higher levels of social anhedonia compared with healthy individuals. They also showed lower recognition accuracy for faces compared with healthy participants. We found no significant correlation between social anhedonia severity and any of the memory performance variables for both patients with schizophrenia and healthy individuals. Regarding potential links between social anhedonia severity and face valence ratings, we found that individuals with elevated social anhedonia had a tendency to rate the face stimuli as more negative.

Our negative finding may be partly explained by a lack of statistical power owing to our small patient sample. In addition, our patient sample had unusually high estimated IQ scores, which highlights potential issues regarding the generalization of our findings. Finally, we used a yes-no recognition memory task with a very short retention interval delay.

Our results suggest that social anhedonia is not directly linked to emotional memory deficits and biases and does not interfere with the modulatory effect of positively valenced emotion on memory.