4. Discussion
The present study is the first to examine emotion awareness,
emotion regulation, and social functioning in schizophrenia. Our
findings indicate that compared to healthy individuals, people
with schizophrenia display significantly lower emotion awareness
as indexed by having more difficulties identifying and
describing their own feelings. Likewise, individuals with schizophrenia
display deficits in emotion regulation as characterized by
a significantly higher use of suppression and lower use of
reappraisal. Most importantly, our findings indicate that among
individuals with schizophrenia, difficulties with emotion awareness
are strongly predictive of poorer social functioning after
controlling for age and neurocognitive functioning.