Emotional deficit is a core feature of schizophrenia linked to social withdrawal and poor outcome. Emotional experiences directly impact bodily states via the musculoskeletal, respiratory, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and endocrine systems. Conversely, bodily sensations are central to emotions. More broadly, bodily sensations form the core of self experiences. Although bodily self-disturbances and impaired emotion recognition are both central to schizophrenia, the bodily experience of emotions in relation to schizophrenia has not been extensively examined.
Individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and demographically matched controls (CO) participated in the EmBODY task to generate bodily sensation maps that correspond to bodily activation and deactivation experienced during 14 emotional experiences. Symptoms in patients were measured with SANS and SAPS.
In the bodily maps, SZ showed less emotional embodiment compared to CO, suggesting a reduced range of bodily experience of emotion. In particular, SZ reported less activation for positive emotions and less deactivation for negative emotions than CO.