Social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia - An ERP study.
Despite social cognitive dysfunction that may be observed in patients with schizophrenia, the knowledge about social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia is scant. The aim of this study was to examine neurophysiological and behavioural responses to neutral and negative stimuli with (faces, people) and without (animals, objects) social content in schizophrenia.



Twenty-six patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) and 21 healthy controls (HC) completed a visual oddball paradigm with either negative or neutral pictures from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) as targets while EEG was recorded. Half of the stimuli within each category presented social content (faces, people).



Negative stimuli with social content produced lower N2 amplitude and higher mean LPP than any other type of stimuli in both groups. Despite differences in behavioural ratings and alterations in ERP processing of affective stimuli (lack of EPN differentiation, decreased P3 to neutral stimuli) SCZ were still able to respond to specific categories of stimuli similarly to HC.



The pattern of results suggests that with no additional emotion-related task demands patients with schizophrenia may present similar attentional engagement with negative social stimuli as healthy controls.
Department of Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland. Electronic address: lukasz.okruszek@psych.uw.edu.pl.
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Okruszek
Third Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Warsaw, Poland; Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Warsaw, Poland.
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Wichniak
Third Department of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry and Neurology, Warsaw, Poland.
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Jarkiewicz
Department of Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
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Schudy
Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, Institute for Neural Computations, University of California, San Diego, United States; Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland.
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Gola
Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland.
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Jednoróg
Laboratory of Brain Imaging, Neurobiology Center, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw, Poland.
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Marchewka
Department of Neuropsychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.
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Łojek
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult
ERP; Emotion; Schizophrenia; Social cognition