Identification of emotional facial expression and emotional prosody (i.e. speech melody) is often impaired in schizophrenia. For facial emotion identification, a recent study suggested that the relative deficit in schizophrenia is enhanced when the presented emotion is easier to recognize. It is unclear whether this effect is specific to face processing or part of a more general emotion recognition deficit.

We used clarity-graded emotional prosodic stimuli without semantic content, and tested 25 in-patients with paranoid schizophrenia, 25 healthy control participants and 25 depressive in-patients on emotional prosody identification. Facial expression identification was used as a control task.

Patients with paranoid schizophrenia performed worse than both control groups in identifying emotional prosody, with no specific deficit in any individual emotion category. This deficit was present in high-clarity but not in low-clarity stimuli. Performance in facial control tasks was also impaired, with identification of emotional facial expression being a better predictor of emotional prosody identification than illness-related factors. Of those, negative symptoms emerged as the best predictor for emotional prosody identification.

This study suggests a general deficit in identifying high-clarity emotional cues. This finding is in line with the hypothesis that schizophrenia is characterized by high noise in internal representations and by increased fluctuations in cerebral networks.