A method for receiving a signal in a wireless communication system includes: receiving and demodulating a signal transmitted by using a quadrature spatial modulation technology to obtain a complex symbol; and decoding the complex symbol with a spherical decoding detection algorithm. Decoding includes, for the ith layer of a constellation symbol, discarding the constellation symbol if a calculated radius of the ith layer is greater than a minimum radius of the ith layer; otherwise updating the minimum radius of the ith layer according to the calculated radius; where i is a natural number in a range between Nr and 1; Nr is the number of receiving antennas; and for each constellation symbol that is not discarded, taking a sum of the radii of respective layers of the constellation symbol as the radius of the constellation symbol, and selecting a constellation symbol with the smallest radius as a symbol obtained from the decoding.