Past Issues

Objective: Patients with schizophrenia perform generally worse on various
nonverbal emotional measures than healthy participants. But inconsistency of
emotion-specifi c diffi culties has been observed among different ethnicities and
cultures. Using native stimuli may help minimize these potential confounding factors.
Thus, the objective of this study was to apply a culturally suitable, dual modality
nonverbal instrument with native stimuli to examine emotional recognition
defi cits in Han Chinese patients with schizophrenia in Taiwan. Method: We developed
the Diagnostic Analysis of Non-verbal Aaccuracy-2-Taiwan to evaluate nonverbal
emotion recognition accuracy. We compared emotion cognition and cognitive
reservoir between 26 patients with schizophrenia and 39 healthy study
participants. Results: Patients with schizophrenia displayed less accuracy in negative
emotion recognition, especially signifi cantly less anger for both facial (p <
0.01) and prosodic (p < 0.01) emotions, and signifi cantly less fear expression (p <
0.05) for prosodic modality compared to healthy study participants. Conclusion:
Emotion-specifi c defi cits might present across different cultures. Prosodic emotion
recognition defi cit, and specifi cally anger rather than fear or else recognition, may
be a more culture-specifi c defi cit for in schizophrenia in ethnic Han population.
Culturally suitable stimuli might provide a more delicate measurement of emotion
recognition defi cits.