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Objectives The purpose of this study was to assess the influence of non-emotional and emotional distracters on working memory maintenance in schizophrenic patients and to demonstrate the associated brain areas. Methods 16 schizophrenic patients and 16 healthy controls underwent 3.0T fMRI during a face recognition task with non-emotional (novel face pictures) and emotional (fear-provoking pictures) distracters. The paradigm consisted of 20 trials with the sequence “encoding – maintenance – distracter – retrieval”. As the encoding, three different human faces sequentially appear once on a quartile coordinate. Subjects were instructed to look at the distracters and maintain the memory for the encoded faces. In the retrieval, participants were presented either the previously encoded face or a new face, asked whether they recognize the face. We compared the accuracy and the brain activation maps by SPM 8. Results The accuracies were lower in schizophrenic patients than controls with non-emotional (52.6% and 65.4%, respectively, p Conclusions There was significant difference of neuroanatomy associated with the effects of non-emotional and emotional distracters in schizophrenia. Working memory of schizophrenic patients was significantly influenced by emotional distracters.