Effortful versus automatic emotional processing in schizophrenia: Insights from a face-vignette task

Abstract

Adaptive emotional responding relies on dual automatic and effortful processing streams. Dual-stream models of schizophrenia (SCZ) posit a selective deficit in neural circuits that govern goal-directed, effortful processes versus reactive, automatic processes. This imbalance suggests that when patients are confronted with competing automatic and effortful emotional response cues, they will exhibit diminished effortful responding and intact, possibly elevated, automatic responding compared to controls. This prediction was evaluated using a modified version of the face-vignette task (FVT). Participants viewed emotional faces (automatic response cue) paired with vignettes (effortful response cue) that signalled a different emotion category and were instructed to discriminate the manifest emotion. Patients made less vignette and more face responses than controls. However, the relationship between group and FVT responding was moderated by IQ and reading comprehension ability. These results replicate and extend previous research and provide tentative support for abnormal conflict resolution between automatic and effortful emotional processing predicted by dual-stream models of SCZ.

Social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia — An ERP study

“…These discrepancies may be explained within a framework of "dual stream" hypothesis, which postulates that patients with schizophrenia may present normal automatic emotional responses, but fail to do so when faced with additional cognitive demands or goal-directed action (Patrick et al, 2015). A paradigm used in the present study required the same movement response for each type of target stimuli and, due to the striking difference between the affective pictures and the repetitive standard pattern, engaged minimal sensory processing.…”

Reading skills deficits in people with mental illness: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Single-Word Reading: Across 10 studies [17,18,21,[29][30][31][32][33][34][35], there was a significant medium-size deficit (Figure 2.3) in SZ relative to HC (Hedge's g=-0.70, df=9, p<0.00001, CI=[-0.94, -0.46]). There was significant heterogeneity within the results (p=0.01, I 2 =58%) but no test performed better than others (p=0.20, I 2 =35.6%).…”

“…Negative values represent a poorer performance of people with schizophrenia in comparison to HC. References: Arnott et al [24]; Curzietti et al [76]; Dondé et al [18]; Gavilán and García-Albea [39]; Hayes and O'Grady [54]; Ho et al [45]; Leonard et al [36]; Light et al [74]; Maj [62]; Martinez et al [41]; Patrick et al [59]; Potter and Nestor [73]; Revheim et al [21]; Revheim et al [17]; Walder et al [22]; Whitford et al [7]. -effect size for a particular study determining the difference between patients and controls.…”

Event-related potentials (ERPs) and hemodynamic (functional near-infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS) as measures of schizophrenia deficits in emotional behavior

“…Higher-level processes involve an ability to make inferences about or contextualize representations that are driven by low-level recognition processes. These two levels may be partially preserved but they may have some difficulties to be connected, generating discordances between emotion experience, expression and recognition ( Regan et al, 2015 ).…”