Modulation of affective face processing deficits in Schizophrenia by congruent emotional sounds

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder resulting in prominent impairments in social functioning. Thus, clinical research has focused on underlying deficits of emotion processing and their linkage to specific symptoms and neurobiological dysfunctions. Although there is substantial research investiga...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 2014-04, Vol.9 (4), p.436-444
Main Authors: Müller, Veronika I, Kellermann, Tanja S, Seligman, Sarah C, Turetsky, Bruce I, Eickhoff, Simon B
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Adult
Analysis of Variance
Discrimination (Psychology)
Electroencephalography
Emotions
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Facial Expression
Female
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Original
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Perceptual Disorders - etiology
Photic Stimulation
Reaction Time
Schizophrenia - complications
Statistics as Topic
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Summary:Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder resulting in prominent impairments in social functioning. Thus, clinical research has focused on underlying deficits of emotion processing and their linkage to specific symptoms and neurobiological dysfunctions. Although there is substantial research investigating impairments in unimodal affect recognition, studies in schizophrenia exploring crossmodal emotion processing are rare. Therefore, event-related potentials were measured in 15 patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy controls while rating the expression of happy, fearful and neutral faces and concurrently being distracted by emotional or neutral sounds. Compared with controls, patients with schizophrenia revealed significantly decreased P1 and increased P2 amplitudes in response to all faces, independent of emotion or concurrent sound. Analyzing these effects with regard to audiovisual (in)congruence revealed that P1 amplitudes in patients were only reduced in response to emotionally incongruent stimulus pairs, whereas similar amplitudes between groups could be observed for congruent conditions. Correlation analyses revealed a significant negative correlation between general symptom severity (Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale-V4) and P1 amplitudes in response to congruent audiovisual stimulus pairs. These results indicate that early visual processing deficits in schizophrenia are apparent during emotion processing but, depending on symptom severity, these deficits can be restored by presenting concurrent emotionally congruent sounds.
ISSN:1749-5016
1749-5024
DOI:10.1093/scan/nss107