Abstract
Aberrant emotional salience attribution has been reported to be an important clinical feature in patients with schizophrenia. Real life stimuli that incorporate both positive and negative emotional traits lead to affective asymmetry such as negativity bias and positivity offset. In this study, we investigated the neural correlates of emotional salience attribution in patients with schizophrenia when affective asymmetry was processed. Fifteen patients with schizophrenia and 14 healthy controls were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing an emotion judgment task in which two pictures were juxtaposed. The task consisted of responding to affective asymmetry condition (ambivalent and neutral) and affective symmetry conditions (positive and negative), and group comparisons were performed for each condition. Significantly higher activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus was observed for the ambivalent condition than for the other conditions in controls, but not in patients. Compared with controls, patients showed decreased activities in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and putamen for the ambivalent condition, but no changes were observed for the neutral condition. Multiple prefrontal hypoactivities during salience attribution of negativity bias in schizophrenia may underlie deficits in the integrative processing of emotional information. Regional abnormalities in the salience network may be the basis of defective emotional salience attribution in schizophrenia, which is likely involved in symptom formation and social dysfunction.
Highlights
Salience refers to the state or quality of an item that makes it stand out relative to its neighbors [1,2,3]
To explore neural representations related to salience attribution during affective asymmetry in schizophrenia, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was performed during the emotion judgment task in patients with schizophrenia and controls
Both groups interpreted the emotional salience of the stimuli as a negative trait, which could be interpreted as ‘negativity bias.’
Summary
Salience refers to the state or quality of an item that makes it stand out relative to its neighbors [1,2,3]. Accurate appraisal of salience in the environment is central to organisms’ survivals in that salience detection facilitates learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited perceptual and cognitive resources on the most pertinent subset of the available sensory data [4]. Salience is of great importance in social cognition [5]. It has been suggested that patients with schizophrenia experience a state of aberrant salience attribution [6,7,8], and that patients’ attribution of incentive salience to irrelevant stimuli contributes to the formation of delusions or hallucinations [7]. Previous studies of aberrant salience attribution have shown that patients with schizophrenia tend to imbue emotionality to neutral stimuli. In face recognition tests, patients with schizophrenia felt more negative emotion towards neutral faces [13]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
