Both bipolar and schizoaffective patients have deficient social skills persisting even during the remission of the clinical symptoms. These deficits may represent impediments for the social reintegration and recovery of these patients.

The purpose of the study was to assess and compare emotion recognition abilities of schizoaffective and bipolar patients during remission.

The study was conducted between 2014 and 2016 on remitted outpatients, diagnosed with either bipolar disorder (n = 38) or schizoaffective disorder (n = 32), according to ICD 10 criteria, and a healthy control group (n = 65). In order to evaluate patients’ ability of understanding the emotional expressions of other people, we used the revised version of the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test (“Eyes test”).

The patient group consisted of 41 (58.6%) women and 29 (41.4%) men, with a mean age of 43.57 years (SD = 10.56). The control group was comprised of 25 males (38.5%) and 40 females (61.5%), with a mean age of 42.03 years (SD = 11.07). We found statistically significant differences (P = 0.003) between the patient groups and the control group regarding emotion recognition abilities (poorer emotion recognition skills than the control group in both bipolar and schizoaffective patients). Patients with schizoaffective disorder gave significantly more incorrect answers in the “Eyes test” than bipolar patients (P = 0.015). Although not statistically significant, women had better emotion recognition abilities than men, both in the patient sample and the control group.

Schizoaffective patients have more severe emotional deficits than bipolar patients during euthymic periods.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.