Abstract
Previous research suggests that deficits in attention-emotion interaction are implicated in schizophrenia symptoms. Although disruption in auditory processing is crucial in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, deficits in interaction between emotional processing of auditorily presented language stimuli and auditory attention have not yet been clarified. To address this issue, the current study used a dichotic listening task to examine 22 patients with schizophrenia and 24 age-, sex-, parental socioeconomic background-, handedness-, dexterous ear-, and intelligence quotient-matched healthy controls. The participants completed a word recognition task on the attended side in which a word with emotionally valenced content (negative/positive/neutral) was presented to one ear and a different neutral word was presented to the other ear. Participants selectively attended to either ear. In the control subjects, presentation of negative but not positive word stimuli provoked a significantly prolonged reaction time compared with presentation of neutral word stimuli. This interference effect for negative words existed whether or not subjects directed attention to the negative words. This interference effect was significantly smaller in the patients with schizophrenia than in the healthy controls. Furthermore, the smaller interference effect was significantly correlated with severe positive symptoms and delusional behavior in the patients with schizophrenia. The present findings suggest that aberrant interaction between semantic processing of negative emotional content and auditory attention plays a role in production of positive symptoms in schizophrenia. (224 words)
Highlights
Disconnection between different elements of brain networks or cognitive domains characterizes the schizophrenia diathesis [1,2,3]
Disruption in auditory information processing is considered crucial in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, with an emphasis on auditory hallucinations in diagnostic criteria [23,24] and with various cognitive deficits associated with auditory processing [25,26,27]
Post-hoc paired ttests revealed that response time (RT) for Negative-Neutral and Neutral-Negative (t[23] = 3.25, p = 0.0035; t[23] = 2.40, p = 0.025, respectively) were significantly longer than that for NeutralNeutral word pairs, irrespective of direction of attention in healthy controls (Table 2, Figure 2)
Summary
Disconnection between different elements of brain networks or cognitive domains characterizes the schizophrenia diathesis [1,2,3]. Deficits in attention-emotion interaction as well as those in each domain have repeatedly been investigated in patients with schizophrenia [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Patients with schizophrenia show significant deviations in this interference effect of emotionally negative stimuli [4,7,9]. Visually presenting language stimuli has often been utilized to examine the interaction between attention and emotional processing in patients with schizophrenia (reviewed in [22]). Taken together, investigating the interaction between emotional processing of auditorily presented language stimuli and attention on auditory perception would bring novel and significant findings in the pathophysiology of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia
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