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.