Episodic memory for emotional and nonemotional words in schizophrenia

Abstract

Deficits in the outward expression of emotion have long been recognised as a symptom of schizophrenia. However, recent research suggests that patients with schizophrenia may not have deficits in subjective emotional experience, in that they report experiencing intact levels of affect when presented with emotional stimuli. Relatively little is known about other aspects of emotional processing in schizophrenia, such as memory for emotionally valenced information, or how this might be related to either subjective emotional experience or facial emotion expressivity in schizophrenia. To address these questions, we administered an incidental‐encoding task for emotional verbal stimuli followed by recall and recognition tasks to 27 patients with schizophrenia and 28 healthy controls. Overall, patients demonstrated worse recall than controls, although they did not display worse recognition. Nonetheless, patients and controls displayed similar patterns of memory for emotional words in all tasks. However, patients with blunted affect did not show the usual memory benefit for emotionally laden words during the recall and recognition tasks, even though they rated emotional words similarly to nonblunted patients and controls.