Perception of facial and vocal affect by people with schizophrenia in early and late stages of illness.

BACKGROUND: Emotion recognition impairments have been demonstrated in schizophrenia, but few studies have examined whether these reflect generalised or specific perceptual deficits or are associated with illness course.

AIMS: To examine the nature of emotion recognition abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia at different stages of illness.

METHOD: We examined the performance of 50 in-patients with early-stage schizophrenia, 50 with chronic schizophrenia and 50 healthy controls on the Benton Facial Recognition Test, Facial Emotion Recognition Test and Voice Emotion Recognition Test.

RESULTS: Patients with chronic schizophrenia were significantly more impaired than other groups on the emotional tasks, even after controlling for impairments in non-emotional stimuli. Individual emotion recognition accuracy for the two sensory modalities was not significantly positively correlated for either group with schizophrenia.

CONCLUSIONS: Emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia are trait features of the disorder and increase with illness duration.