Emotional Self-Report, Socioemotional Memory, and Anhedonia in Schizophrenia

A secondary analysis of recognition memory and clinical data from people with schizophrenia (N = 112) and healthy control participants (N = 118) was carried out to assess the relationship between the capacity to remember stimuli of varied social and emotional content and anhedonia. Across all participants, no significant zero-order correlations were observed between memory ability and anhedonia. Analysis of memory performance revealed a content (social vs. non-social stimuli) by emotional valence (positive vs. neutral vs. negative) interaction, such that among social images, negative ones were remembered most frequently, whereas among non-social images, negative images were remembered least frequently. This pattern did not differ by diagnosis. In a hierarchical multiple regression, after controlling for diagnosis and disease severity, memory for social images explained a significant proportion of variance in anhedonia. Implications for the Strauss and Gold model of anhedonia and the Accessibility Model of Emotional Self-Report are discussed.