MedWire News: People with schizophrenia not only have problems recognising emotions in others, but also have a reduced ability to understand and manage their emotions compared with mentally healthy people, research suggests.

Furthermore, this reduced ‘emotional intelligence’ has a significant negative impact on the ability of schizophrenia patients to live independently and function in social situations.

Lead researcher Dr Kimmy Kee, from the University of California in Los Angeles, USA, and colleagues explain that previous studies on emotion in schizophrenia patients have mainly focused on emotion perception – the ability to identify specific emotions in other people from their facial expressions and voices.

However, they add that schizophrenia patients may have problems with other aspects of emotional intelligence, such as the understanding, regulation and use of emotions.

To investigate, the team used a specifically designed test to assess various aspects of emotion processing in 50 outpatients with schizophrenia and 39 mentally healthy people without the condition.

Analysis revealed that the schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse on the test than the other participants, particularly on aspects of the test relating to understanding, managing and identifying emotions.

Furthermore, lower scores on the emotional intelligence test were associated with increased schizophrenia symptoms and a reduced ability to function independently in the community, notes the team.

Writing in the journal Schizophrenia Research, Dr Kee and colleagues conclude: “Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits across multiple domains of emotion processing. These deficits have significant links with clinical symptoms of schizophrenia and with how patients function in their daily lives.” They add that methods aimed at improving the ability of schizophrenia patients to identify, understand and manage their emotions may also help to improve their ability to live independently in the community.