0 Bach, D. Buxtorf, K. Grandjean, D. Strik, W. K. 2009 Psychological Medicine 39 6 927-938 paranod schizophrenia, prosody, appraisal <div align="justify">Identification of facial affect and affective prosody is often impaired in schizophrenia. Evidence on deficits in individual emotion categories is contradictory. A recent study suggested that the relative deficit in schizophrenia is enhanced when the presented emotion is easier to recognize. We used clarity-graded affective prosodic stimuli without semantic content to investigate whether this effect is specific to face processing, or part of a more general affective recognition deficit. Twenty-five in-patients with paranoid schizophrenia, 25 healthy control participants and 25 depressive in-patients performed an affective prosody identification task and facial affect tasks. Patients with paranoid schizophrenia performed worse than both control groups in identifying affective prosody with no specific deficit in individual emotion categories. This deficit was only present in high-clarity but not in low-clarity stimuli. Performance in facial control tasks was impaired as well, with facial affect discrimination being a better predictor of affective prosody identification than illness-related factors. Of those, negative symptoms emerged as best predictor for affective prosody identification. This study provides further evidence for a general deficit in identifying high-clarity emotional cues. We discuss this finding in light of the hypothesis that schizophrenia is characterized by high noise in internal representations and by increased fluctuations in cerebral networks.</div>