Emotion processing and its relationship to social functioning in schizophrenia patients

Schizophrenia patients have demonstrated deficits in affect recognition. Whether this deficit is part of a general difficulty in face perception or a specific problem in affect recognition is debatable. However, there is little research investigating the functional consequences of difficulties in identifying emotion in schizophrenia patients. We tested 20 chronic, medicated schizophrenia patients and 27 normal control participants on a battery of face recognition and affect recognition tasks. A subset of 14 patients was rated on the Social Dysfunction Index. Results demonstrated that schizophrenia patients were less accurate than normal control participants on face recognition, facial affect recognition and vocal affect recognition tasks, but among schizophrenia patients, only affect recognition performance was related to social functioning. These results suggest that schizophrenia patients have general face processing deficits, but affect recognition deficits may lead to more problems in social behavior.