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.