Emotion perception and functional outcome in schizophrenia: the importance of negative valence and fear

A substantial body of work has demonstrated that persons with schizophrenia have a deficit in the perception of emotional stimuli. More recently this deficit has been linked to poor functional outcomes (FO) in this group. The current research investigated the perception of emotional stimuli in a group of 64 schizophrenia patients and 65 matched healthy controls. In the patient group, across two different emotion perception tasks and a social perception task, small deficits were found in the perception of negative, positive and neutrally valenced stimuli. Only the ability to perceive negative and neutrally valenced stimuli significantly correlated with a set of FO measures in the patients, with one task indicating these associations were strongest for the perception of fear. Subsequent regression modelling, controlling for the effects of symptomatology, demonstrated that for each of the three tasks, the measure of negative valence perception accounted for a similar but small amount (4%) of the variance seen in the functional status of the patients.