Changing facial affect recognition in schizophrenia: Effects of training on brain dynamics

Abstract

Deficits in social cognition including facial affect recognition and their detrimental effects on functional outcome are well established in schizophrenia. Structured training can have substantial effects on social cognitive measures including facial affect recognition. Elucidating training effects on cortical mechanisms involved in facial affect recognition may identify causes of dysfunctional facial affect recognition in schizophrenia and foster remediation strategies. In the present study, 57 schizophrenia patients were randomly assigned to (a) computer-based facial affect training that focused on affect discrimination and working memory in 20 daily 1-hour sessions, (b) similarly intense, targeted cognitive training on auditory-verbal discrimination and working memory, or (c) treatment as usual. Neuromagnetic activity was measured before and after training during a dynamic facial affect recognition task (5 s videos showing human faces gradually changing from neutral to fear or to happy expressions). Effects on 10–13 Hz (alpha) power during the transition from neutral to emotional expressions were assessed via MEG based on previous findings that alpha power increase is related to facial affect recognition and is smaller in schizophrenia than in healthy subjects. Targeted affect training improved overt performance on the training tasks. Moreover, alpha power increase during the dynamic facial affect recognition task was larger after affect training than after treatment-as-usual, though similar to that after targeted perceptual–cognitive training, indicating somewhat nonspecific benefits. Alpha power modulation was unrelated to general neuropsychological test performance, which improved in all groups. Results suggest that specific neural processes supporting facial affect recognition, evident in oscillatory phenomena, are modifiable. This should be considered when developing remediation strategies targeting social cognition in schizophrenia.

Same clock, different time read-out: Spontaneous brain oscillations and their relationship to deficient coding of cognitive content

“…In the SZ group 3 patients were left-handed, and 3 were ambidextrous, as assessed by the German version of the Edinburgh Handedness Questionnaire (Oldfield, 1971). The samples partly overlapped with those reported in (Popov et al, 2011;Popov et al, 2013;Popova et al, 2014) assessed during auditory and visual tasks, but there is no overlap in the MEG analyzed for the present report.…”

Deficient attention modulation of lateralized alpha power in schizophrenia

“…Again, this could be verified by experimentally modifying one element and measuring the other. We have used this approach showing cognitive training-induced changes in alpha power modulation (Popov, Rockstroh, Weisz, Elbert, & Miller, 2012;Popov et al, 2015;Popova, Popov et al, 2014).…”

Social impairment in schizophrenia

“…Importantly, training-related increases in these regions predicted improvement on a standardized behavioral test of emotion processing. Programs that just include computerized facial emotion training are also associated with neural changes in fMRI [35] and electrophysiological measures, including ERP changes in a parietal-temporal-occipital network implicated in face processing [36], and MEG-related increases in alpha power, which is related to facial emotion recognition [37]. …”