Emotion in the daily lives of schizophrenia patients: context matters.

Research has shown that people with schizophrea report experiencing similar levels of emotion compared to people without schizophrenia when presented with evocative stimuli (Kring andMoran, 2008). However, people with schizophrenia also report experiencingmore negative emotion in response to putatively neutral or positive evocative stimuli (Cohen and Minor, 2008) and more trait negative emotion than healthy controls (Horanet al., 2008),highlighting the fact that emotions differ in daily life contexts where the ambiguity of events and stimuli are much greater. Experience sampling (ESM) studies have found that people with schizophrenia report being alone more often, more negative and slightly less positive emotion, and daily life stress is associated with negative emotion than people without schizophrenia (Myin-Germeys et al., 2003; 2001; 2000). In the current study, we examined the linkage between specific environmental contexts and emotional experiences. People with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (n=15) and healthy controls (n=12) reported on their emotion and environmental context several times a day over the course of a