Historically, anhedonia, or the decreased capacity to experience pleasure, has been considered one of the most important disturbances of emotion in schizophrenia. Anhedonia has been posited as a core deficit which may underlie the debilitating social dysfunction observed in this disorder. Additionally, anhedonia has been thought to be an indicator of the risk for the development of schizophrenia. However, despite the theoretical and clinical significance of anhedonia little is actually known about this symptom or its correlates. Specifically, the relationship between measures of anhedonia and the actual experience of emotion in schizophrenia has not been studied. Furthermore, how anhedonia is related to the social- interpersonal deficits of schizophrenia has yet to be fully investigated. To address these issues the proposed project will evaluate the association between measures of anhedonia and a) the experience of positive and negative affect; b) premorbid adjustment, current social adjustment, and social skill; and c) the perception of interpersonal cues of emotion. The hypothesis that anhedonia is an enduring trait-like deficit in schizophrenia will be evaluated in a longitudinal assessment. The study will evaluate 80 schizophrenics and 40 normal controls at an initial assessment and again at a one-year followup. An innovation of the present study will be that positive and negative affect will be assessed with multiple measures (state and trait) and on multiple occasions to provide a more thorough assessment of emotion than has been conducted to date. Social functioning will be assessed with rating scales of premorbid and current social adjustment as well as with a behavioral role play test. The ability to perceive emotion will be assessed with validated measures comprised of stimuli of facial and vocal affect. Finally, the relationship between attentional and cognitive dysfunction and social impairment will be evaluated. The results of this project will have implications for better understanding the emotional deficits of schizophrenia and the debilitating social-interpersonal impairments associated with this disorder.
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