Differential patterns of initial and sustained responses in amygdala and cortical regions to emotional stimuli in schizophrenia patients and healthy participants

Abstract

41Background: We sought to investigate the altered brain responses to emotional stimuli in patients with schizophrenia. Methods: We ana lyzed data from 14 patients with schizophrenia and 14 healthy controls who performed an emotional face matching task. We evaluated brain activity and connectivity in the amygdala and cortical regions during the initial (first 21 seconds of each stimulation block) and sustained (last 21 seconds) stages of an emotional processing task, and we determined changes in amygdala activity across the emotional processing task. Results: The patients with schizophrenia showed similar amygdala activation to the controls during the initial stage of processing, but their activation decreased during the sustained stage. The controls showed increasing amygdala activity across the emotional blocks, whereas activity progressively decreased in the schizophrenia group. The patients with schizophrenia showed increased cortical activity and interconnectivity in the medial frontal and inferior parietal cortex in the initial stage of emotional processing. There was increased activity in the superior temporal cortex and greater connectivity with the inferior parietal cortex in the sustained stage. Performance accuracy was lower in the schizophrenia group in the first part of the block, while their reaction time was longer in the latter part of the block. Limitations: It was not possible to specify the moment at which the switch in amygdala response occurred. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have an initial automatic emotional response but that they need to switch to a compensatory cognitive strategy to solve the task.

Eye-tracking reveals a slowdown of social context processing during intention attribution in patients with schizophrenia

“…Patients might also have used a cognitive compensatory strategy favouring accuracy over speed to maintain performance; this strategy has been involved in the improvement of several cognitive processes in patients with schizophrenia. [30][31][32] However, our results suggest that mentalizing was slowed down in patients with schizophrenia, even when executive contextual control was taken into account. Many studies have reported increased response times during ToM tasks in patients with schizophrenia, [33][34][35] although the specificity of this slowdown to the domain of social cognition has remained unclear.…”

A Pilot Study of Mindfulness-Based Exposure Therapy in OEF/OIF Combat Veterans with PTSD: Altered Medial Frontal Cortex and Amygdala Responses in Social–Emotional Processing

“…Contrasts of responses of each facial expression to shapes were generated for each subject, and then entered into a second-level general linear model treating subject as a random effect (random effects analysis). We utilized the analysis strategy used by multiple previous studies ( 52 – 57 ) to explore the potential specific signature effects of each of the threat faces (fearful and angry) as well as neutral faces separately contrasted to the shapes condition (angry > shapes, fearful > shapes, neutral > shapes). Our approach to model each facial expression (contrasted with shapes) allows us to examine effects of treatment on each face type, and is less potentially ambiguous than using a contrast of emotional faces > neutral faces.…”

Automatic amygdala response to facial expression in schizophrenia: initial hyperresponsivity followed by hyporesponsivity

“…Some authors have found that patients show reduced activation of the amygdala in response to emotional face stimuli, which could be interpreted as an impairment in the processing of affective information [ 5 , 6 ]. On the other hand, others have shown normal activation or even hyperactivation of the amygdala, indicating that patients may suffer from hypersensitivity to emotional faces [ 7 - 9 ].…”