Alteration of pain recognition in schizophrenia.

Background: Schizophrenia patients display impaired recognition of their own emotions and those of others and deficits in several domains of empathy. The first-person experience of pain and observing others in pain normally trigger strong emotional mechanisms. We therefore hypothesized that schizophrenia patients would display impaired recognition and categorization of both their own pain and the pain of others.

[Pain and schizophrenia: myth and reality].

Introduction: The International Association for the Study of Pain (IAPS), in 1986, defined pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage". Thus, the few studies on this phenomenon conducted on schizophrenic patients did not result in a firm consensus; certain studies showed that such patients seemed to have a higher threshold against pain (hypoalgesia) than healthy subjects, whilst other studies showed that the threshold is the same, but the absence of expressing the pain would be due to the pathology itself (non-expression of the pain, denial). Insensitivity to pain would be the consequence of a complex reaction between a biological sensorial abnormality and the psychopathology of schizophrenia itself (including the affective processes).