Impaired perception of negative emotional prosody in schizophrenia

This paper aims to report on the perception of emotional prosody, in schizophrenia and to discuss its relationship with perfomance on neurocognitive measures. It consists of a comparison of 20 clinically stable schizophrenia patients with 20 healthy, controls. Schizophrenia patients were impaired in emotional prosody perception, in particular in the perception of negative emotions. This impairment could not he explained on the basis of task difficulty or, a general impairment in the decoding of speech intonation. Emotional prosody, perception correlated moderately strongly with neurocognitive measures. We did not find a negative bias in the perception of emotional prosody.