Effects of presentation modality and valence on affect recognition performance in schizophrenia and healthy controls

The majority of affect recognition research has used visual stimuli, with only a minority of studies examining auditory affect recognition, and fewer still comparing affect recognition across presentation modalities. In the current study, we evaluated affect recognition between 45 outpatients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 56 healthy community controls on an auditory-only affect recognition task, as compared to a multichannel (videotape) version of the same task. We further examined between-group performance differences on auditory versus multichannel presentation modalities for a subset of positive and negative valence items. Results indicated that: 1) in general, healthy controls performed better than schizophrenia patients on affect recognition; 2) schizophrenia patients benefited less from a multichannel task presentation than did healthy controls, and 3) schizophrenia patients did not significantly differ from healthy controls on positive-valenced items presented in the auditory modality. These findings suggest the importance of carefully considering presentation modality and affective valence when assessing affect recognition in schizophrenia.