Abstract
The level of emotional timing deficit is a critical determinant of daily functions and social interactions in people with schizophrenia. This study demonstrated that people with schizophrenia have significant deficits in emotional time perception. Behaviorally, while the healthy controls overestimated the duration of happy and fearful faces, the patients underestimated the duration of emotional and neutral faces. Accordingly, an online ERP index of timing—the contingent negative variation (CNV) displayed larger amplitudes for emotional faces in the controls, whereas the CNV in the patients only showed overall smaller amplitudes when compared with the controls. In addition, the results of the N170 and the CNV suggest that the emotional processing and timing for facial expressions in schizophrenia might have a pattern of two-stage deterioration. Findings from the present work point to the importance of considering the time dimension of emotional processing in schizophrenia, based on which we are likely to discover aspects of emotional deficits that would be unnoticed in other studies. Furthermore, the perception deviation of the duration of emotional faces in schizophrenia suggests us to consider the magnitude of this temporal deviation as a quantitative biomarker for specific emotional/social dysfunctions in schizophrenia.
Highlights
The past two decades of research on emotional processing in schizophrenic populations has revealed that the impaired processing of emotion, which is evident at the onset of psychosis and persists during acutely symptomatic and remitted states, represents a trait susceptibility marker and a unique endophenotype for schizophrenia[1,2]
Many researchers are currently stressing the importance of characterizing the temporal course of emotional experience to distinguish anticipatory from consummatory responses in schizophrenia, since accumulating evidences reveal that people with schizophrenia do not have a deficit in consummatory pleasure but instead have a deficit in anticipatory pleasure[8,9,10]; and that it is the deficit in anticipatory pleasure that results in a symptom of anhedonia9. (Note: consummatory pleasure is the pleasure being received when individuals are directly engaged in an enjoyable activity; anticipatory pleasure is the experience of pleasure related to future activities9)
The current study examined the interaction of emotion and time perception in schizophrenia
Summary
The past two decades of research on emotional processing in schizophrenic populations has revealed that the impaired processing of emotion, which is evident at the onset of psychosis and persists during acutely symptomatic and remitted states, represents a trait susceptibility marker and a unique endophenotype for schizophrenia[1,2]. Compared to people without schizophrenia, patients with schizophrenia display impaired emotional perception, diminished emotional expression, and a relatively normal level of emotional experience[3,4,5]. (Note: consummatory pleasure is the pleasure being received when individuals are directly engaged in an enjoyable activity; anticipatory pleasure is the experience of pleasure related to future activities[9]) Whereas these results consistently support the notion that people with schizophrenia have difficulty in anticipating emotional events and maintaining their emotional responses and experiences[5], analysis of the complex interplay between emotion and timing remains relatively rare in this population. The present study investigated and compared the behavioral and the event-related potential (ERP) responses of emotional time perception in individuals with and without schizophrenia. It is expected that the emotion-sensitive N170/VPP would show different patterns across emotional conditions between schizophrenic patients and healthy controls; and that the timing-sensitive CNV displays group differences and a significant interaction of emotion by group, reflecting that general time perception and emotion-modulated time perception are both impaired in individuals with schizophrenia
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.
