A special role of negative emotion in children and adolescents with schizophrenia and other psychoses

Emotional impairments are apparent at an early stage in schizophrenia. While emotion processing has been studied intensively in adult patients, investigations focusing on children and adolescents with psychoses are rare. Emotion probes for mood induction and emotion discrimination that have been standardized in healthy subjects and applied to adult schizophrenia patients were evaluated in young patients (11–20 years). Twenty children and adolescents with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders as well as twenty healthy volunteers matched for age, gender and parental education were examined. Results reveal successful mood induction in both patients and healthy volunteers, but with more negative affect prominent in patients. While a reduced ability to discriminate negative emotional faces emerged in patients than in controls, this difference failed to reach statistical significance. The similarities between test results of children and adolescents compared with those of adults demonstrate that both tests proved to be useful when applied to younger ages. Negative affect seems to be differentially affected, a finding that which may be already evident in the early course of schizophrenia.