Abstract
Successful social functioning requires adaptive forms of emotion awareness and regulation.
However, despite well-documented deficits in social functioning in individuals with
schizophrenia, little is known about emotion awareness and regulation in this population.
Therefore, we compared emotion awareness and regulation in individuals with schizophrenia and
healthy controls, and then, within the schizophrenia group, we examined their impact on social
functioning. Forty-four individuals with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls completed
measures of emotion awareness, emotion regulation, and social functioning, in addition to control
measures, including neurocognitive functioning. Compared to controls, individuals with
schizophrenia displayed significant deficits describing and identifying their emotions and used
significantly less reappraisal and more suppression to regulate their emotions. Among the
schizophrenia group, better social functioning was associated with the ability to identify, and in
particular to describe emotions, better emotion management, as well as greater use of reappraisal
and less use of suppression. A hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that, after
controlling for age and neurocognition, difficulties describing feelings accounted for 35% of the
social functioning variance. The present study highlights the importance of emotion awareness and
regulation in schizophrenia, pointing to their substantial influence on social functioning above and
beyond the impact of neurocognitive functioning.
Keywords
Social Cognition; Emotion Processing; Alexithymia; Neurocognition; Negative Symptoms;
Suppression; Reappraisal