title: Prosody recognition and audiovisual emotion matching in schizophrenia: the contribution of cognition and psychopathology.
abstract: This study aimed to evaluate the ability to decode emotion in the auditory and audiovisual modality in a group of patients with schizophrenia, and to explore the role of cognition and psychopathology in affecting these emotion recognition abilities. Ninety-four outpatients in a stable phase and 51 healthy subjects were recruited. Patients were assessed through a psychiatric evaluation and a wide neuropsychological battery. All subjects completed the comprehensive affect testing system (CATS), a group of computerized tests designed to evaluate emotion perception abilities. With respect to the controls, patients were not impaired in the CATS tasks involving discrimination of nonemotional prosody, naming of emotional stimuli expressed by voice and judging the emotional content of a sentence, whereas they showed a specific impairment in decoding emotion in a conflicting auditory condition and in the multichannel modality. Prosody impairment was affected by executive functions, attention and negative symptoms, while deficit in multisensory emotion recognition was affected by executive functions and negative symptoms. These emotion recognition deficits, rather than being associated purely with emotion perception disturbances in schizophrenia, are affected by core symptoms of the illness.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Psychiatric Section, University of Turin, Via Cherasco, 11, 10126 Turin, Italy.
authors.forename: Filomena
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Castagna
authors.forename: Cristiana
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Montemagni
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Maria Milani
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Rocca
authors.forename: Paola
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rocca
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Casacchia
authors.forename: Filippo
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Bogetto
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003071:Cognition; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012938:Social Perception; D013060:Speech; D057190:Stroop Test; D013637:Tape Recording; D014743:Videotape Recording