In daily life, people often need to understand and infer the thoughts and feelings of others to better communicate and interact with them. Empathy is the process of transmitting and understanding the emotions of others in specific situations, and the effective acquisition of information is the key to accurate empathy. As the main channel for information transmission in daily life, audiovisual channels may affect an individual's empathy ability. Schizophrenia patients have impaired empathy, but whether the impact of visual/auditory context would be altered in schizophrenia patients and people with high social anhedonia remained unclear.

Drs. Raymond Chan and Yi Wang from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Psychology and their collaborators administered the adapted Empathic Accuracy Task to investigate the empathy performance of 50 patients with schizophrenia and 50 healthy controls, and 59 individuals with high social anhedonia and 60 healthy controls when watching positive and negative emotional videos, and to evaluate the effect of audiovisual channel information on empathy through three audiovisual conditions (audio-only, audio-visual, and audio-avatar), and further analyze whether the abnormal performance of schizophrenia patients in these tasks is associated with their clinical symptoms.

Their findings showed that schizophrenia patients exhibited poorer performance than controls in cognitive and affective empathy in the positive-valenced context. Moreover, schizophrenia patients performed worse than controls in both audio-visual and audio-avatar visual conditions, but comparable to controls in the audio-only condition. On the other hand, schizophrenia patients exhibited poorer performance than controls in cognitive empathy in the negative-valenced context. Moreover, schizophrenia patients performed worse than controls in audio-only and audio-visual conditions. Individuals with high social anhedonia also exhibited lower cognitive empathy than controls in positive-valenced contexts, and lower cognitive empathy and empathic motivation in negative-valenced contexts. Together, these findings suggested that both schizophrenia patients and individuals with high social anhedonia exhibited cognitive empathy impairments. However, cognitive empathy impairments observed in schizophrenia patients may be affected by the presentation modality and emotional valence. On the other hand, schizophrenia patients exhibited affective empathy impairments under positive-valenced context only, while individuals with high social anhedonia exhibited relatively intact affective empathy.

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Philip K. H. Wong Foundation. Wang M, Zhu GH and Yang J contributed equally to this study. Wang Y and Chan RCK are the co-corresponding authors of this study.

This study entitled "Differential impacts of audio-visual information on empathic accuracy in people with schizophrenia and high social anhedonia" was published on March 23 in Psychological Medicine.