Emotional Experience in Patients With Schizophrenia Revisited: Meta-analysis of Laboratory Studies

Our understanding of the emotion deficits in schizophrenia is limited. Findings from studies employing trait emotion instruments suggest that patients have attenuated levels of positive emotion (ie, anhedonia) and increased levels of negative emotion. Conversely, patients and controls have not stati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Schizophrenia bulletin 2010-01, Vol.36 (1), p.143-150
Main Authors: Cohen, Alex S., Minor, Kyle S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Biological and medical sciences
Emotions
Female
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Psychoses
Reading
Reference Values
Regular
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia - diagnosis
Schizophrenic Psychology
Semantics
Social Behavior
Social Environment
Taste
Visual Perception
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Summary:Our understanding of the emotion deficits in schizophrenia is limited. Findings from studies employing trait emotion instruments suggest that patients have attenuated levels of positive emotion (ie, anhedonia) and increased levels of negative emotion. Conversely, patients and controls have not statistically differed in their subjective reactions to positive or negative valenced stimuli in most laboratory studies to date. Further obfuscating this issue is the fact that many of these laboratory studies are underpowered and a handful of emotion induction studies have found evidence of anhedonia. We conducted a meta-analysis of 26 published studies employing laboratory emotion induction procedures in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Patients did not differ from controls when strictly rating their subjective hedonic reactions to the stimuli. However, they reported experiencing relatively strong aversion to both positive and neutral stimuli (Hedges D = .72 and .64, respectively). These findings were not the result of demonstrable sample or methodological differences across studies. Patients' ability to experience hedonic emotion is preserved, although they also show relatively strong, simultaneously occurring aversive emotion when processing laboratory stimuli considered by others to be pleasant or neutral.
ISSN:0586-7614
1745-1701
DOI:10.1093/schbul/sbn061