Schizophrenia, Emotion, Empathy, and Metacognition

Patients with schizophrenia are impaired in emotion recognition, especially in the recognition of facial affect (Bonfils, Haas, and Salyers, in press). The investigators assessed emotion associated performance and its relationship with metacognition with three different task. The first task was emotion recognition, the second was emotional perspective-taking, and the last task concerned affective responsiveness. The results revealed that the performance differed among the three empathy tasks. The emotion of happiness was best identified while patients performed on the emotion recognition task. In addition, the patients with schizophrenia performed also the best on the emotion of happiness during the other two tasks. However, the emotion of anger was performed the worst, which might indicate that this emotion may be a specific difficulty in the range of these higher-order empathy tasks. Concerning metacognition, an unexpected finding was found in which patients with schizophrenia in which they reflected on their selves was especially related. Further, it was found that self reflection in the patients was related in a positive way to every specific emotion (Bonfils et al., in press). Lastly, it was stated that metacognition of self reflection may have an important part in proccesses of social cognitive origin.