Multisensory integration of emotionally valenced olfactory-visual information in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls.
BACKGROUND
Patients with schizophrenia frequently have deficits in social cognition, and difficulties in the discrimination of emotional facial expressions have been discussed as an important contributing factor. We investigated whether this impairment is aggravated by difficulties relating the observed facial expression to contextual information, as is often provided by emotionally valenced crossmodal stimulation.


METHODS
We investigated the effects of odorant primes on the accuracy and speed of emotional face recognition. Healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia were exposed to 2-second odorant stimuli: vanillin (pleasant), ambient air (neutral) and hydrogen sulfide (unpleasant). The odours were followed by an emotional face recognition task, in which participants determined if a face showed happiness, disgust or neutral affect.


RESULTS
Controls showed improved performance in the categorization of disgusted faces after all types of odour stimulation irrespective of the emotional valence. However, in controls, the response time for happy faces was slower after presentation of any odour. Schizophrenia patients showed an attenuated effect of olfactory priming on disgust recognition, which resulted in the increased performance differences between the groups. This effect was particularly strong for the unpleasant odour.


CONCLUSIONS
The study design did not allow us to fully differentiate between the effects of perceived odour intensity and valence. A possible contribution of cognitive deficits on the observed effects should be investigated in future studies.


CONCLUSIONS
Our results provide novel evidence for a special connection between the presentation of odorant cues and the accuracy of recognition of disgusted faces in healthy controls. This recognition advantage is disturbed in patients with schizophrenia and appears to contribute to the observed deficit in emotional face recognition.
Seubert
Janina
J
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule, Aachen University, Germany. jseubert@upenn.edu
Loughead
James
J
Kellermann
Thilo
T
Boers
Frank
F
Brensinger
Colleen M
CM
Habel
Ute
U
D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D004644:Emotions; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D009812:Odorants; D055696:Olfactory Perception; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology