Modulation of affective face processing deficits in Schizophrenia by congruent emotional sounds

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder resulting in prominent impairments in social functioning. Thus, clinical research has focused on underlying deficits of emotion processing and their linkage to specific symptoms and neurobiological dysfunctions. Although there is substantial research investigating impairments in unimodal affect recognition, studies in schizophrenia exploring crossmodal emotion processing are rare. Therefore, event-related potentials were measured in 15 patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy controls while rating the expression of happy, fearful and neutral faces and concurrently being distracted by emotional or neutral sounds. Compared with controls, patients with schizophrenia revealed significantly decreased P1 and increased P2 amplitudes in response to all faces, independent of emotion or concurrent sound. Analyzing these effects with regard to audiovisual (in)congruence revealed that P1 amplitudes in patients were only reduced in response to emotionally incongruent stimulus pairs, whereas similar amplitudes between groups could be observed for congruent conditions. Correlation analyses revealed a significant negative correlation between general symptom severity (Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale-V4) and P1 amplitudes in response to congruent audiovisual stimulus pairs. These results indicate that early visual processing deficits in schizophrenia are apparent during emotion processing but, depending on symptom severity, these deficits can be restored by presenting concurrent emotionally congruent sounds.