Neuronal Correlates of Facial Emotion Discrimination in Early Onset Schizophrenia

Abstract

Emotion discrimination deficits represent a well-established finding in schizophrenia. Although imaging studies addressed the cerebral dysfunctions underlying emotion perception in adult patients, the question of trait vs state characteristics is still unresolved. The investigation of juvenile patients offers the advantage of studying schizophrenia at an age where influences of illness course and long-term medication are minimized. This may enable a more detailed characterization of emotion discrimination impairments and their cerebral correlates with respect to their appearance and exact nature. A total of 12 juvenile patients with early onset schizophrenia and matched healthy juveniles participated in this study. fMRI data were acquired during an emotion discrimination task consisting of standardized photographs of faces displaying happy, sad, angry, fearful, or neutral facial expression. Similar to findings in adult patients, juvenile patients exhibited reduced performance specificity whereas sensitivity was unaffected. Independent of the valence, their processing of emotional faces was associated with hypoactivations in both fusiform gyri and in the left inferior occipital gyrus. In addition, hyperactivations in patients were found in the right cuneus common to happy, angry, and fearful faces. Further, most distinct changes were present in juvenile patients when processing sad faces. These results point to a dysfunction in cerebral circuits relevant for emotion processing already prominent in adolescent schizophrenia patients. Regions affected by a decrease in activation are related to visual and face processing, similar to deficits reported in adult patients. These changes are accompanied by hyperactivations in areas related to emotion regulation and attribution, possibly reflecting compensatory mechanisms.

The neural network sustaining the crossmodal processing of human gender from faces and voices: An fMRI study

“…Moreover, it appears that the impairments in the recognition of the emotions might be due to distinct neuro-functional impairments such as a deficit of the connectivity between several brain regions in autism (the amygdala and the associative temporal and prefrontal gryi, Monk et al, 2010), or a hypo activation of the visual regions in other pathological conditions such as schizophrenia (Seiferth et al, 2009). It seems thus that a common symptom -the impairment of the processing of emotions -might be due to different neuro-functional deficits.…”

Blunted brain activation in patients with schizophrenia in response to emotional cognitive inhibition: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

“…Emotional processing deficits involving social cognition are associated with poor functional outcomes (Hooker and Park, 2002) and negative symptoms in patients with SZ. Behavioral studies suggest that patients with SZ tend to misinterpret neutral faces as negative emotional faces (Kohler et al, 2003;Cohen and Minor, 2010;Habel et al, 2010) and are impaired in processing emotional aspects of facial expressions affected for specificity (correct rejection of a non-target emotion) but not sensitivity (correct identification of a target emotion) (Schneider et al, 2006;Seiferth et al, 2009;Habel et al, 2010). Several brain regions are thought to be involved in face recognition: the inferior occipital gyrus for early perception of facial features; the superior temporal sulcus for changeable aspects of face-perception; the lateral fusiform gyrus for invariant aspects of face-perception; the amygdala, insula, and limbic system for assessment of emotion; the anterior temporal cortex for personal identity, name, and biographical information (Haxby et al, 2000); and the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices for appraising the emotional significance of stimuli and guiding social decisions and behavior (Adolphs et al, 2000;Damasio, 2005).…”

Individual differences in cardiac vagal tone are associated with differential neural responses to facial expressions at different spatial frequencies: An ERP and sLORETA study

“…7 A scatterplot indicating the negative correlation between HRV (y-axis) and LPP activity in response to HSF neutral faces at Cz (x-axis). r 0 .34, p < .05 Table 3 Brain regions showing significant differences in P100, N170, and N200 source activity between high and low resting HRV participants in response to BSF, HSF, and LSF fearful and neutral faces (Seiferth et al, 2009). Similarly, participants with low resting HRV showed heightened activity in the cuneus in response to HSF as well as LSF fearful faces.…”