From neural signatures of emotional modulation to social cognition: individual differences in healthy volunteers and psychiatric participants

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that early emotional signals provide relevant information for social cognition tasks. The goal of this study was to test the association between (a) cortical markers of face emotional processing and (b) social-cognitive measures, and also to build a model which can predict this association (a and b) in healthy volunteers as well as in different groups of psychiatric patients. Thus, we investigated the early cortical processing of emotional stimuli (N170, using a face and word valence task) and their relationship with the social-cognitive profiles (SCPs, indexed by measures of theory of mind, fluid intelligence, speed processing and executive functions). Group comparisons and individual differences were assessed among schizophrenia (SCZ) patients and their relatives, individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), individuals with euthymic bipolar disorder (BD) and healthy participants (educational level, handedness, age and gender matched). Our results provide evidence of emotional N170 impairments in the affected groups (SCZ and relatives, ADHD and BD) as well as subtle group differences. Importantly, cortical processing of emotional stimuli predicted the SCP, as evidenced by a structural equation model analysis. This is the first study to report an association model of brain markers of emotional processing and SCP.

Functional Connectivity and Temporal Variability of Brain Connections in Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Bipolar Disorder

“…In agreement with previous studies (e.g. Torralva et al [5]), we found that both ADHD and BD subjects showed deficits in verbal memory and executive function [4,5,6,28]. Attentional lapses and performance variability [50] are core characteristics of ADHD that may be related to DMN abnormalities [51,52].…”

“…The frequent co-occurrence of bipolar disorder (BD) and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults usually manifests itself as shared clinical symptoms [1,2,3] and similar cognitive impairments [4,5,6]. It is therefore an important scientific and medical challenge to develop novel physiological markers to thoroughly differentiate these disorders from one another.…”

Changes in event-related potentials in patients with first-episode schizophrenia and their siblings

“…Overall, siblings were less able to correctly recognize three kinds of facial expression compared to the healthy controls, but this difference was not statistically significant. Ibanez et al also found that the accuracy of facial expression recognition showed a poorer, but non-significant performance in relatives of patients with schizophrenia compared to controls [26]. The siblings, who are at higher risk of developing schizophrenia, may have some degree of impairment in facial expression recognition but the ethology results may be harder to detect.…”

Situated affective and social neuroscience

“…Moreover, they provide new evidence for the interaction among low and high-level cognition, emotion, and social domains (Moll and Schulkin, 2009; Pessoa, 2009; Alguacil et al, 2013; Ibanez et al, 2013, 2014; Ruz et al, 2013; Baez et al, 2014b). In the same vein, part of the evidence presented shows that our emotional arousal biases our decisions in the social world (Beauregard, 2007; Heatherton, 2011).…”