SOCIAL CUE RECOGNITION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA UNDER VARIABLE LEVELS OF AROUSAL

This study examined social cue recognition in patients with schizophrenia as a function of moderate arousal and concurrent attention and encoding deficits. The patterns differ for paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics. Nonparanoid and paranoid schizophrenics were compared with normals and a group of nonschizophrenic chronic mentally ill (CMI) adults on a social cue recognition task under low and moderate arousal conditions. Results indicated that paranoid schizophrenics performed within the same range as normals. However, nonparanoid schizophrenics and CMI adults performed significantly below normals on cue recognition in both low and moderate arousal cue conditions. Moreover, moderate arousal cue recognition was significantly greater than the low arousal condition for these groups, suggesting that the increase in arousal enhanced performance. These findings have relevance for understanding the attention deficit in social situations seen in patients with schizophrenia. © 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation.