Emotional Responsivity to the Emotional Words in Patients with Schizophrenia

Objectives: Patients with schizophrenia are reported to exhibited a reduced level of responsivity to highly arousing negative emotional pictures and to demonstrate a threatening bias to facial stimuli. The aim of this study was to investigate whether patients with schizophrenia show impaired and biased responsivity to threatening emotional words stimuli. Methods: Eighteen subjects with schizophrenia (M=10, F=8) and 18 healthy controls (M=8, F=10) were involved in this study. Emotional words stimuli (happy, sad, fearful, angry, surprising, and disgusting words) were selected from a Korean affective words list (Kim et al., Unpublished). All subjects were asked to rate feelings elicited by emotional words, using the seven point Likert scale for each of the six basic emotions. Results: Patients with schizophrenia displayed less emotional responsivity to disgusting and angry words as compared to healthy controls, while there were no significant differences in response to happy, sad, or fearful words. Emotional responsivity bias to disgust and happiness was observed in patients with schizophrenia. Conclusion: Patients with schizophrenia may show reduced responsivity to disgust and anger words stimuli and biased responsivity to disgust and happiness. These findings are in line with previous findings of reduced reactivity to highly arousing emotional picture stimuli, social threatening bias, and Pollyanna tendencird in schizophrenia.ope