Messinger, Julie (5/13) Cognitive-affective processes in schizophrenia: the attentional-blink and olfactory hedonics (Paul Michael Ramirez, Ph.D.; Philip Wong, Ph.D.; Lewis A. Opler, M.D., Ph.D.; Dolores Malaspina, M.D., M.S.P.H)
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the neural emotional (ventral) system is impaired in schizophrenia using two proxies of amygdala function. Twenty-seven schizophrenia patients and 27 healthy control subjects participated in a study at NYU School of Medicine/Bellevue Hospital and completed an attentional-blink task and a combined assessment of odor identification and olfactory hedonics ratings. Psychiatric symptoms in the schizophrenia patients were assessed using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Results indicated that schizophrenia patients, as compared to healthy controls, detected fewer emotional images under both lag conditions. Schizophrenia patients did not differ from healthy controls in their overall range of hedonic ratings of odorants or in their ratings of neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant odorants. Additionally, male and female schizophrenia patients did not significantly differ from male and female healthy controls in their range of olfactory hedonic ratings. Finally, schizophrenia patients did not differ from healthy controls in terms of visual hedonics ratings; however, healthy controls reported significantly higher arousal ratings for neutral and positive stimuli compared to the schizophrenia patients. These results add to the growing, but mixed, body of literature on emotion processing in schizophrenia and highlight potential dysfunction in the amygdala's modulation of emotion, attention, and cortical processing.
