A new study by Chinese scientists reveals the differential impacts of audio-visual information on empathy accuracy in people with schizophrenia and high social anhedonia.

The study, led by Drs. Raymond Chan and WANG Yi from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators, was published in Psychological Medicine on March 23.

Empathy involves transmitting and understanding the emotions of others in specific situations, and effectively acquiring information is key to accurate empathy. As the main channel for information transmission in daily life, audiovisual inputs may significantly modulate an individual's ability to empathize.

To test whether the visual/auditory modality would modulate empathy in schizophrenia patients and people with high social anhedonia, the researchers administered an 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.

"We evaluated the effect of audiovisual channel information on empathy through three audiovisual conditions (audio-only, audio-visual, and audio-avatar)," said Dr. WANG Yi, corresponding author of the study. "The results help to deepen our understanding of the social cognition impairments of schizophrenia patients and identify the markers for the early detection of at-risk populations."

The researchers found that patients with schizophrenia exhibited widespread impairments in cognitive and affective empathy in both positive and negative emotional contexts. Their deficits were more pronounced in the audiovisual and audio-avatar conditions than in the audio-only condition. In contrast, individuals with high social anhedonia mainly exhibited mainly impaired cognitive empathy and empathic motivation without significant interactive effects of sensory modality.

Together, these findings suggest that both schizophrenia patients and people with high social anhedonia exhibit empathy impairments. The empathic impairments observed in patients with schizophrenia may be affected by presentation modality.

This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Philip K. H. Wong Foundation.