This study evaluated (a) whether chronic, medicated schizophrenia patients show deficits in emotion recognition compared to nonpatients, and (b) whether deficits in emotion recognition are related to poorer social competence. Two emotion recognition tests developed by S. L. Kerr and J. M. Neale (1993) and Benton's Test of Facial Recognition (A. Benton, M. VanAllen, K. Hamsher, & H. Levin, 1978) were given to patients with chronic schizophrenia and nonpatient controls. Patients' social skills, social adjustment, and symptomatology were assessed. Like Kerr and Neale's unmedicated patients, these patients performed worse than controls on both emotion recognition tests and the control test. For patients, facial perception was related to the chronicity of illness and social competence. Chronicity of illness may contribute to face perception deficits in schizophrenia, which may affect social competence. Recent research has evaluated whether schizophrenia patients have impairments in emotion recognition. The findings have been inconsistent: some studies reported differences (Kerr & Neale, 1993), but others did not (Novic, Luchins, & Perline, 1984). Discrepant findings may be partly due to the variety of methods used to study emotion recognition, which has made it impossible to compare the results across different studies. Also, many measures have been developed for a single study, with little attention given to their psychometric properties and cross-validation. An exception to this problem is a set of instruments recently developed by Kerr and Neale (1993) for the assessment of emotion recognition in schizophrenia patients:

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Comparing groups of 36 veteran telephone counselors with 36 matched age and sex control subjects on the CPI revealed substantial differences on a number of scales. Subsequent development of weighted formulae via regression analysis led to very accurate predictions as to which individuals were telephone counselors or controls. Various cutoff scores and their uses are discussed.

The Clock Drawing Test, a task sensitive to cognitive decline in neurological groups, was administered to 27 patients with schizophrenia. Clock drawings were scored for over-all global performance and the frequency of specific qualitative errors. Mean global performance scores indicated a small proportion of the sample was below the threshold typically used to identify dementia, and the patients displayed qualitative Clock Drawing deficits not fully represented in the global performance measure. Qualitative analyses indicated that size errors, graphic difficulty, and spatial planning problems were most common. Lastly, duration of illness was not related to global performance, suggesting that the latter might not reflect deterioration but the stable trajectory of impairment that may be constant through the schizophrenia illness.

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