Perception of emotion and neurocognitive functioning in schizophrenia: what's the link?

In schizophrenia, relatively little is known about the association between deficits in emotion perception and basic neurocognitive functioning. The present study examined perception of emotion and a discrete set of neurocognitive functions in 28 treatment-resistant schizophrenic patients. Measures of emotion perception included a facial emotion identification test (still photographs presented on videotape), a voice emotion identification test (audiotape), and an affect perception test (brief interpersonal vignettes presented on videotape). Measures of neurocognitive functioning were selected based on hypothesized relationships to perception of emotion. These measures included: (a) Span of Apprehension task, a measure of early visual processing, visual scanning, and iconic read-out; (b) Degraded-Stimulus Continuous Performance Test, a measure of visual vigilance; and (c) Digit Span Distractibility Test, a measure of immediate or working memory. Among these measures, performance on the Span of Apprehension strongly correlated with performance on all three emotion perception tasks. The associations between perception of emotion and the other two measures were in the same direction, but were significantly smaller than those of the Span of Apprehension. These findings implicate the importance of early perceptual processing (i.e. visual scanning) in the ability of schizophrenic individuals to perceive emotion.