Abstract
Schizotypy is associated with poor emotion regulation that is thought to contribute to the development of psychotic symptoms and to indicate a predisposition to schizophrenia. Having focused primarily on the relationship between schizotypy and explicit emotion regulation, existing studies have, until now, neglected to acknowledge the potentially important role of implicit emotion regulation. Our aim in the current study was to investigate implicit emotion regulation deficits in schizotypy. To this end, we used a newly developed Priming-Identification (PI) ERP paradigm, consisting of a priming phase and an emotion identification phase, to test 30 individuals with schizotypy and 30 healthy controls while also acquiring EEG data. During the priming phase, we aimed to manipulate emotion regulation goals (i.e., to bring about an intended emotional state) by presenting a category of words related to emotion regulation alongside a category of control words. Associated brain responses occurring during the subsequent stage were indexed according to three ERP components: N170, early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP). Results showed that, in the control group, priming words associated with emotion regulation led to enhancements in the early N170 amplitude and the middle EPN during expression identification. The same pattern was not observed in the schizotypy group. In summary, our results suggest the presence of deficits in the early and middle stages of the implicit emotion regulation process among individuals with high schizotypal traits.
Highlights
Schizotypy is associated with poor emotion regulation that is thought to contribute to the development of psychotic symptoms and to indicate a predisposition to schizophrenia
It has been found that patients with schizophrenia tend to overuse suppression as an emotion regulation strategy, which may lead to a subsequent maladaptive reappraisal of emotion[6]
Most research to date has focused on the association between explicit emotion regulation processing and the schizophrenia spectrum disorder, little is known about the role of the implicit form of emotion regulation and the presence of potential deficits to this process
Summary
Schizotypy is associated with poor emotion regulation that is thought to contribute to the development of psychotic symptoms and to indicate a predisposition to schizophrenia. In one study by Foti and Hajcak[14], rather than being explicitly told to use reappraisal or to alter their negative beliefs about a stimulus, participants were given brief descriptions that would make the presentation of subsequent images either more or less negative These results indicate that this kind of implicit manipulation can moderate negative emotion at both behavioral and neurological levels. Despite the significant findings revealed by these implicit emotion regulation studies, the paradigms used are limited in a number of ways They are either not able to manipulate the goals of emotion regulation, that is, they concern only behavioral patterns without addressing neural mechanisms, or they investigate only late ERP components but not early and middle components
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