Department of Neuroscience and Medicine, INM-1, Research Center Jülich, Leo-Brandt-Straße, D-52428 Jülich, Germany.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2014 Apr;9(4):436-44. doi: 10.1093/scan/nss107. Epub 2012 Sep 13.
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.
精神分裂症是一种导致社交功能明显受损的精神障碍。因此，临床研究的重点是情绪处理的潜在缺陷及其与特定症状和神经生物学功能障碍的联系。尽管有大量研究调查单模态情感识别障碍，但精神分裂症中探索跨模态情感处理的研究很少。因此，研究人员测量了 15 名精神分裂症患者和 15 名健康对照组在评定快乐、恐惧和中性面孔的表情时同时受到情绪或中性声音的干扰的事件相关电位。与对照组相比，精神分裂症患者对所有面孔的 P1 和 P2 振幅均显著降低，而与情绪或并发声音无关。分析这些效应与视听（不）一致性的关系表明，患者的 P1 振幅仅在对情绪不一致的刺激对中降低，而在一致条件下可以观察到两组之间相似的振幅。相关分析表明，一般症状严重程度（简明精神病评定量表-V4）与对一致的视听刺激对的 P1 振幅呈显著负相关。这些结果表明，精神分裂症患者的早期视觉处理缺陷在处理情绪时很明显，但根据症状严重程度，通过呈现同时出现的情绪一致的声音，可以恢复这些缺陷。
