What is emotional processing in schizophrenia?

Emotional processing in schizophrenia refers to the ability to perceive, interpret and use emotions adaptively, affecting social cognition and everyday functioning.

What is the Mayer-Salovey emotional intelligence model?

The Mayer-Salovey model defines emotional intelligence as four skills: emotional identification, facilitation, understanding and management.

Which tests assess emotional processing in schizophrenia?

Common assessment tools include Pictures of Facial Affect, FEIT, PERE, FEDT, Voice Emotion Identification, BLERT, FEEST, prosody tasks and the MSCEIT.

What does the MSCEIT assess and how is it structured?

The MSCEIT contains 141 items across eight tasks, yielding scores for emotional perception, facilitation, understanding and management, plus total, experiential and strategic emotional intelligence. It shows good psychometric properties in schizophrenia samples.

What emotional deficits occur in schizophrenia?

Deficits include impaired recognition of negative emotions—especially fear and disgust—tendency to label neutral faces as negative, and reduced time analyzing facial features during recognition tasks.

Which brain regions are linked to emotional processing abnormalities in schizophrenia?

Neuroimaging associates emotional processing abnormalities with structural changes in the fusiform gyrus, temporo-medial sulcus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex.

Emotional processing in schizophrenia

Doctor of Psychology Carlos Rebolleda talks to us about the emotional processing in schizophrenia.

The term emotional processing in schizophrenia, refers to an individual’s ability to perceive and use different emotions adaptively (Green and Horan, 2010).

The emotional intelligence, defined as a set of four components (emotional identification, emotional facilitation, emotional understanding and emotional management) (Mayer and Salovey, 1997) has become a reference model for the study of emotional processing.

Assessment of emotional processing

There are currently various measures commonly used to assess some areas of emotional processing; the most relevant are the following:

Pictures of Facial Affect (Ekman, 1976): This instrument consists of a total of 110 photographs of faces showing one of the six basic emotions. The task is to identify the emotion expressed by each of the faces.
Facial Emotion Identification Task (FEIT) (Kerr and Neale, 1993): It uses 19 photographs of faces showing one of the six basic emotions. After the presentation of each one, the emotion displayed by the face shown must be identified.
Emotion Recognition Assessment Test (PERE) (Gil-Sanz et al., 2017): Composed of 56 photographs showing the different basic emotions. It consists of identifying the emotion in each of the presented photographs.
Facial Emotion Discrimination Test (FEDT) (Kerr and Neale, 1993): includes 30 pairs of photographs of people of the same sex. The photographs are presented two by two and it must be decided whether both faces are expressing the same emotion.
Voice Emotion Identification Test (Kerr and Neale, 1993): It consists of 21 neutral-content sentences spoken by male and female voices with an intonation intended to convey one of the six basic emotions. After presenting each sentence, the participant is asked to identify the emotion with which it was spoken.
The Bell- Lysaker Emotion Recognition Task (BLERT) (Bell, Bryson and Lysaker, 1997). It consists of 21 videos in which an actor delivers three monologues of neutral content using one of the six basic emotions. After showing each video, the participant is asked which emotion they believe the actor used to deliver the monologue.

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Facial Expression of Emotion: Stimuli and Test (FEEST) (Young, Perrett, Calder, Sprengelmeyer and Ekman, 2002). The task consists of identifying the emotions shown in 60 photographs of faces. After each photograph, which shows one of the basic emotions, the participant must choose which of these six emotions is represented.
Prosody Task (Pijnenborg, Whitaar, Van den Bosch and Brower, 2007). It consists of 16 neutral-content sentences recorded along with eight syllabic structures pronounced, on the one hand, neutrally and, on the other hand, using five of the six basic emotions, specifically distress, fear, sadness, joy and surprise. The subjects must identify the emotion with which these sentences and syllabic structures are spoken.
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) (Mayer, Salovey and Caruso, 2002). Designed to assess emotional intelligence understood as an ability. It is an ability test whose responses represent real-world approaches to solving emotional problems.

What does it consist of?

The test is composed of 141 items divided into eight tasks (faces, pictures, facilitation, sensations, changes, combinations, emotional management, emotional relationships) that provide scores in each of the four main areas of emotional intelligence according to Mayer and Salovey’s (1997) model (emotional perception, emotional facilitation, emotional understanding, emotional management).

It also allows obtaining a total emotional intelligence score, as well as scores in the two areas (experiential and strategic) that constitute that quotient. Kee et al. (2009) verified the good psychometric properties of the test in a sample of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Deficits in schizophrenia

The most significant deficits in schizophrenia are related to the perception of negative emotions. For example, Kohler et al. (2003) found difficulties in patients diagnosed with schizophrenia in recognizing fear and disgust; also in recognizing faces that could be categorized as neutral, since they generally tend to identify such expressions as negative emotions.

Deficits in emotional processing are present across the different phases of the illness, and they are found to be more severe in patients in acute phases of the disorder. Thus, Comparelli et al. (2013) found these deficits in patients at high risk of developing schizophrenia, in those experiencing a first episode and, finally, in those who show a chronic profile.

In some studies (Green and Phillips, 2004; Russell, Green, Simpson and Coltheart, 2008; Williams, Loughland, Gordon and Davidson, 1999) it has been found that most individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia spend less time than subjects without the disorder analyzing facial features in emotion recognition tasks.

Finally, neuroimaging studies have found structural abnormalities in several brain areas that have generally been associated with emotional processing. These abnormalities are located in the fusiform gyrus, the temporo-medial sulcus, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex (Marwick and Hall, 2008).

Bibliography

Bell, M. D., Bryson, G., and Lysaker, P. (1997). Positive and negative affect recognition in schizophrenia: a comparison with substance abuse and normal control subjects. Psychiatry Research, 73(1), 73-82.
Comparelli, A., De Carolis, A., Corigliano, V., Di Pietro, S., Trovini, G., Granese, C.,…and Girardi, P. (2013). Symptom correlates of facial emotion recognition impairment in schizophrenia. Psychopathology, 47(1), 65-70.
Ekman, P. (1976). Pictures of facial affect. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
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