Affective priming in schizophrenia with and without affective negative symptoms

Abstract

In the present study automatic perceptual sensitivity to facial affect information was examined in chronic schizophrenic patients. An affective priming task including subliminal and supraliminal presentations of sad and happy facial affect was administered to schizophrenia patients with a flat affect expression (n = 30), schizophrenia patients suffering from anhedonia (n = 30), schizophrenia patients not suffering from anhedonia or flat affect (n = 28), and a group of healthy controls (n = 30). Subjects had to judge valence of neutral Chinese ideographs. Anhedonic and flat affect patients but not patients without affect symptoms were found to be sensitive to negative facial affect on an automatic processing level. None of the schizophrenic patient groups but healthy controls showed a subliminal valence-congruent priming effect based on positive facial affect. Anhedonia as assessed by standardised psychiatric rating was related to a subliminal sensitivity to negative facial expression and a valence-inverted perception of positive facial expression. This pattern of results is largely consistent with predictions derived from Meehl's model of anhedonia. The aversive automatic perception of positive facial expression primarily found in anhedonic patients but also in schizophrenic control patients could lie in structural disturbances concerning the regulation of intimacy and distance.

Semantic processing of emotional words in depression and schizophrenia

“…Another of the studies included individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, as language disturbance (e.g., abnormal associations) is a hallmark of this illness and should be associated with N400 abnormalities (Adams et al, 1993;Hokama et al, 2003;Kiang et al, 2007;Kostova et al, 2003Kostova et al, , 2005Ohta et al, 1999;Sitnikova et al, 2002;Strandburg et al, 1997). Moreover, there is evidence of abnormal emotion processing in schizophrenia Bell et al, 1997;Berenbaum et al, 2008;Dougherty et al, 1974;Kring and Moran, 2008;Suslow et al, 2003). Hence, schizophrenia is a relevant comparison group for MDD and may highlight the sensitivity of the task in detecting N400 anomalies.…”

Intact implicit processing of facial threat cues in schizophrenia

“…However, recent evidence indicates that the ability to implicitly process emotion may be retained (Suslow et al, 2003) or even enhanced (Höschel & Irle, 2001) in individuals with the disorder, despite considerable difficulty explicitly processing emotional expressions (Bediou et al, 2005; Green et al, 2008; Li et al, 2010). For instance, using an incidental learning task, van’t Wout and colleagues (2007) found that both participants with and without schizophrenia were slower to identify the gender of faces with emotional expressions compared to faces with neutral expressions.…”

Affective processing in positive schizotypy: Loose control of social-emotional information

“…The degree of misattribution of neutral facial expressions as angry in a sample of individuals at increased risk of schizophrenia correlated with reduced inhibitory control of prepotent responses (van Rijn et al, 2011). In most studies demonstrating exaggerated influences of affective primes on subsequent emotional or social judgments or greater interference with cognitive processes in patients with schizophrenia or nonclinical individuals with high levels of schizotypal symptoms, only negative, but neither positively valenced nor neutral primes had an effect (Hooker et al, 2011;Höschel & Irle, 2001;Karcher & Shean, 2012;Mohanty et al, 2008;Suslow et al, 2003). It was also demonstrated that patients with positive schizophrenia symptoms showed faster early, probably pre-attentive stimulus processing of aversive stimuli (Pause, Hellmann, Güder, Aldenhoff, & Ferstl, 2008).…”

“…Evidence for this has been provided, for instance, by priming studies demonstrating an exaggerated influence of negatively valenced affective primes on subsequent emotional or social judgments of facial stimuli in patients with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls (Hooker et al, 2011;Höschel & Irle, 2001;Suslow, Roestel, & Arolt, 2003). The extent of the priming effect by negative emotional information was positively correlated with the patients' levels of positive schizophrenic symptoms (Hooker et al, 2011).…”