Nonverbal Communication and Alexithymia in Schizophrenia Patients

Introduction: schizophrenia is accompanied by deficits such as alterations in social perception. Alexithymia, the impairment to express emotions or feelings, is an emotional communicative deficit common to schizophrenia. Objective: to evaluate the ability to perceive social cues, interpersonal attitudes and the communication of intentions by nonverbal expressive channels in patients with schizophrenia when compared with a control group. Method: a cross-sectional, comparative study (102 subjects, aged 18 to 45). The first group consisted of 50 patients with schizophrenia, (48% men) according to DSM-5 criteria. The second group consisted of 52 subjects (51.9% men) without psychopathology or history of mental disorders in first degree relatives, neurological deficits and intellectual disabilities. MiniPONS was used to assess social perception and the TAS-20 scale was used to assess alexithymia. We used χ2 and Student’s t-tests, and an analysis of variance of two factors (group-sex) was used for MiniPONS and TAS scores. We searched for correlations between MiniPONS, alexithymia and PANSS. Results: we found a significant correlation between education and MiniPONS and TAS scores in the schizophrenia group: r = .36, p < .01 and r = -.46, p < .01, but not in the control group: r = .17, p = .41 and r = -.08, p = .71. The schizophrenia group performed worse on the MiniPONS: 39.90, SD = 5.99. Discussion and conclusions: our results show a worse overall performance in nonverbal communication and affect identification in the patient group. These failures exemplify the difficulty of understanding their own emotions.