Schizophrenia patients appear to have “normal” responses to emotional stimuli. Recent researches have now established that deficits in emotional functioning associated with the ‘Schizophrenic disorder’ may involve the integration of emotion and cognition for adaptive functioning.

It is now an established fact that one of the major causes of persistent functional disability in schizophrenia is emotional functioning disturbance. But it is not clear which specific aspects of emotional functioning are impaired in patients with the condition.

Dr.Ellen Herbner and colleague researchers at the ‘University of Illinois at Chicago, USA’, conducted detailed study and experiments to derive these results recently. Findings of this study have been published in the recent issue of the journal “Schizophrenia Research”.

During the investigative research, the researchers asked 34 schizophrenia patients and 35 demographically matched mentally healthy individuals to give ratings for 131 pictures selected from the ‘International Affective Picture System (IAPS)’ library that covered a wide range of emotional arousal and valence levels.

In addition to that the patients were assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale and the Heinrichs-Carpenter Quality of Life Scale, and they completed physical and social anhedonia self-report scales.

Researchers observed that across the full spectrum of valence and arousal levels, the self-reported responses to emotional stimuli were drastically similar in schizophrenia patients and healthy individuals, and highly correlated, at r values of 0.98 for valance ratings and 0.95 for arousal ratings.

The research team also examined the degree of synchronization and relationship between emotional experience and measures of other aspects of emotional functioning. It took an account of estimated premorbid intellectual functioning, performance on emotional response correlated with anhedonia self-report, emotional perception, negative symptoms, and quality of life measures.

However, the correlations could only be partially established. The only significant relationship with the picture results was found between higher physical anhedonia scores and more negative ratings of positively valenced IAPS stimuli.
“In addition to confirming the normal emotional experience of individuals with schizophrenia at the moment of exposure to stimuli, the present finding shows that clinical evidence of emotional dysfunction is apparently unrelated to any disturbance in immediate emotional experience of events”, said in the research paper in the journal.

Dr.Ellen Herbner added in the concluding statement, “An important practical implication of our findings is that IAPS visual emotional stimuli seem suitable to elicit emotional reactions in psycho physiological or functional imaging studies of the neural substrate for emotional experience in schizophrenia, since the initial psychological responses to the stimuli appear unimpaired”.

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