Evaluating auditory semantic and prosodic content, lexical acquisition, and facial identification as perceptual...

Emotion recognition is essential for both general wellbeing and social relationships. This ability is compromised in individuals suffering from schizophrenia. However, not all aspects of emotion recognition have been evaluated in previous literature.

The present study aimed to evaluate emotion recognition through auditory semantic and prosodic content, lexical acquisition and facial identification in individuals suffering from schizophrenia compared to healthy individuals.

This cross-sectional study included 50 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia along with age and handedness matched 50 healthy individuals were assessed using Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI), Verbal Adult Intelligence Scale (VAIS), Scale for Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), Scale for Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS), and Extrapyramidal Symptoms Rating Scale (ESRS). Four types of emotion recognition tasks were presented to the participants - lexical, visual (static facial images and dynamic videos), and auditory. Autonomic functions were evaluated that included testing of systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP) and pulse rate (PR) of the participants before and after the completion of each emotion recognition task.

There were differences in performance observed for people with schizophrenia when compared to healthy individuals. This was noticeable across all the different types of perceptual dimensions - lexical, visual (static facial images and dynamic videos), and auditory. Additionally, after completing an emotion detection task, there was a change in autonomic functioning that was significantly more pronounced in people with schizophrenia.

The findings indicate that individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty in emotion recognition for all perceptual modalities.