LEARNING TO SELF-REGULATE INSULA CORTEX MODULATES EMOTION RECOGNITION AND NEURAL CONNECTIVITY IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Abstract

assessing face emotion and complex stimuli recognition and SPEM tasks while their eye movements were recorded. Results: Post treatment improvement was observed (p=0.001) with both remediation groups showing improvement in emotion recognition. Further, paired sample t-test revealed a significant increase in raw scanpath length for the biofeedback group only post treatment (p<0.05). No pre/post change in SPEM performance was reported for either treatment group. Discussion: Training targeting low level visual processes results in gains in emotion recognition, a process highly relevant to psychosocial functioning in schizophrenia. Further, these gains were observed at a psychophysiological level via the normalisation of some visual scanpath parameters for the bottom-up based remediation alone suggesting that treatments targeted at low level functions have significant downstream effects.