Previous research investigating the emotion recognition ability in patients with schizophrenia has mainly focused on the recognition of facial expressions. To broaden our understanding of emotional processes in patients with schizophrenia, this study aimed to investigate whether these patients experience and process other emotionally evocative stimuli differently from healthy participants. To investigate this, we measured the cardiac and subjective responses of 33 male patients (9 with and 24 without antipsychotic medication) and 40 male control subjects to emotion-eliciting pictures. Cardiac responses were chosen as an outcome measure because previous research has indicated that these are linked with attentional and emotional processes and provide a more objective measure than self-report measures alone. The differences in cardiac responses between patients and controls were limited to medicated patients: only the medicated patients showed significantly decreased cardiac orienting responses compared with control subjects, regardless of picture contents. These results indicate that medicated patients directed less attention towards emotion-eliciting pictures than controls. Decreased attentional resources while processing emotional evocative stimuli could lead to incorrect appraisals of the environment and may have detrimental emotional and social consequences, contributing to chronic stress levels and an increased risk for cardiovascular disease. 1. Introduction An extensive amount of research papers has been published on the impaired emotional functioning of patients with schizophrenia. Most of this research has focused on the impaired ability of these patients to recognize emotions from facial expressions [1], which is crucial for forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships [2, 3], and patients with schizophrenia are known to experience difficulties with social functioning [4, 5]. Although schizophrenic patients seem impaired in their ability to recognize and express emotional facial expressions, they do appear to experience emotions in a way similar to healthy controls. Several studies have found that patients and controls did not differ in their subjective ratings of pleasantness and arousal when presented with emotion-eliciting pictures [6–9]. In two other studies, schizophrenic patients reported that they experienced the same amount of pleasant emotions as healthy controls, but greater amounts of unpleasant emotions in response to emotion-eliciting stimuli [10, 11]. It has also been found that schizophrenic patients experience less
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