Yu Miaomiao, Dong Bo, Qian Feilong, Liu Jingfang, Wu Xiaogang
School of Education, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, China.
Suzhou Social Welfare General Hospital, Suzhou, China.
Front Psychiatry. 2025 Sep 1;16:1593548. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1593548. eCollection 2025.
The interaction between attention and emotion is one of the key questions in schizophrenia, but the mechanisms of how emotional information affects selective attention in schizophrenia are still unclear.
The present study employed a cue-back-to-fixation procedure to manipulate the valence and emotional arousal intensity of stimuli presented at either cued locations (Experiment 1) or target locations (Experiment 2). The present study examined the impact of emotional arousal intensity on the inhibition of return (IOR)-a phenomenon characterized by faster responses to previously unattended relative to attended locations-in individuals with schizophrenia, during two distinct attentional phases: attentional disengagement and attentional reorientation.
The results showed significant IOR effects for both schizophrenia (Experiment 1a and 2a) and control groups (Experiment 1b and 2b) regardless of the emotional stimuli with different arousal intensities presented at both the cued and target locations. However, as compared with negative low arousal stimuli or neutral low arousal stimuli, significantly larger IOR effect size for control groups was found when negative high arousal stimuli were presented in cued location and for schizophrenia groups was found when negative high arousal stimuli were presented in target location.
These results may underly the mechanism of attentional deficit for schizophrenia towards different arousal intensities of emotional stimuli. During the attentional disengagement phase, schizophrenia patients are more likely to filtered out those high-arousal stimuli that endanger life while control group participants experience enhanced perceptual processing towards them; during the attentional reorientation phase, schizophrenia patients display "hyperfocusing" on those life-threatening high-arousal stimuli while the control group manifest an "attentional blindness" phenomenon to avoid these threatening stimuli. Meanwhile, we also interpreted our findings in light of an alternative theory of salience dysregulation.
注意力与情绪之间的相互作用是精神分裂症的关键问题之一，但情绪信息如何影响精神分裂症患者的选择性注意力的机制仍不清楚。
本研究采用线索-回到注视点程序来操纵在线索位置（实验1）或目标位置（实验2）呈现的刺激的效价和情绪唤醒强度。本研究在两个不同的注意力阶段，即注意力脱离和注意力重新定向阶段，考察了情绪唤醒强度对精神分裂症患者返回抑制（IOR）的影响，IOR是一种对先前未注意位置的反应比对注意位置的反应更快的现象。
结果显示，无论在线索位置和目标位置呈现何种唤醒强度的情绪刺激，精神分裂症组（实验1a和2a）和对照组（实验1b和2b）均有显著的IOR效应。然而，与负性低唤醒刺激或中性低唤醒刺激相比，当线索位置呈现负性高唤醒刺激时，对照组的IOR效应量显著更大；当目标位置呈现负性高唤醒刺激时，精神分裂症组的IOR效应量显著更大。
这些结果可能揭示了精神分裂症患者对不同唤醒强度情绪刺激注意力缺陷的机制。在注意力脱离阶段，精神分裂症患者更有可能过滤掉那些危及生命的高唤醒刺激，而对照组参与者对这些刺激的感知加工增强；在注意力重新定向阶段，精神分裂症患者对那些危及生命的高唤醒刺激表现出“过度聚焦”，而对照组则表现出“注意力盲视”现象以避免这些威胁性刺激。同时，我们也根据显著性失调的另一种理论对我们的发现进行了解释。
