Deficits in EMM in long-term compared to short-term memory point toward impaired emotional modulation of memory consolidation. Reduced EMM on implicit, but not explicit, tasks suggests a deficit in unconsciously using emotional content to modulate memory.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) is a non-invasive technique for brain mapping and mostly performed using changes of the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD)-signal. It has been widely used to investigate patients with schizophrenia. Most of the studies examine patients treated with antipsychotic drugs, although little is known about the effects of these drugs on the BOLDsignal. Here we examined studies of patients with schizophrenia treated with different antipsychotics to address the question whether and to what extent antipsychotic drugs in themselves produce BOLD-signal changes. We performed a PubMed-search for the period from 1999 until January 2012 with the search items "schizophrenia" and "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" and "Antipsychotic Agents; or "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" and "Antipsychotic Agents"; or "schizophrenia" and "Antipsychotic Agents" and "FMRI". We extracted articles that examined at least two patient groups with different treatments, or patients examined on different medications at different times and that provided information about drug effects. No common effect of antipsychotics on BOLD-signal was found. However, based on the results for different antipsychotics (haloperidol, olanzapine, quetiapine and risperidone) we found evidence that the affinity to the dopamine (DA) D(2)-receptor may influence BOLD-signal.
Patients with schizophrenia show deficits in core cognitive functions as well as in social cognition. The aim of the present study was to test whether deficits in social cognition influence nonsocial, "cold", cognition. Thirty-five patients with recent-onset schizophrenia (SC) and 30 healthy controls (HC) performed a Simon task with social and simple geometric stimuli. We investigated whether the Simon effect, the slowing of reaction times produced by stimulus incongruities in the task-irrelevant spatial domain, differs between patients and healthy participants as a function of the social nature of the cues. The Simon effect was generated by a schematic drawing of human eyes (social cues) or rectangles (nonsocial cues). Overall, patients had longer reaction times than HC. In the eye-like condition, the Simon effect was significantly stronger for HC than for SC. In HC the Simon effect was significantly stronger in the eye-like than in the rectangle condition. In patients, the Simon effect did not differ significantly between both conditions. Thus, the influence of social cues was greatly reduced in the patient group. Current psychopathology or antipsychotic treatment did not influence results. The present study supports earlier findings of altered processing of schematic social cues in patients with schizophrenia, especially when gaze is task-irrelevant.
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