The Deficit of Multimodal Perception of Congruent and Non-Congruent Fearful Expressions in Patients with Schizophrenia: The ERP Study.

Galina V Portnova,Natalya V Zakharova,Aleksandra V Maslennikova,Olga V Martynova

doi:10.3390/brainsci11010096

Abstract

Emotional dysfunction, including flat affect and emotional perception deficits, is a specific symptom of schizophrenia disorder. We used a modified multimodal odd-ball paradigm with fearful facial expressions accompanied by congruent and non-congruent emotional vocalizations (sounds of women screaming and laughing) to investigate the impairment of emotional perception and reactions to other people’s emotions in schizophrenia. We compared subjective ratings of emotional state and event-related potentials (EPPs) in response to congruent and non-congruent stimuli in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. The results showed the altered multimodal perception of fearful stimuli in patients with schizophrenia. The amplitude of N50 was significantly higher for non-congruent stimuli than congruent ones in the control group and did not differ in patients. The P100 and N200 amplitudes were higher in response to non-congruent stimuli in patients than in controls, implying impaired sensory gating in schizophrenia. The observed decrease of P3a and P3b amplitudes in patients could be associated with less attention, less emotional arousal, or incorrect interpretation of emotional valence, as patients differed from healthy controls in the emotion scores of non-congruent stimuli. The difficulties in identifying the incoherence of facial and audial components of emotional expression could be significant in understanding the psychopathology of schizophrenia.

Highlights

IntroductionThe emotional expressions of fear can be perceived and identified significantly more than other emotions and are the least affected in variable clinical populations
According to the previous findings in multimodal emotional perception, we aimed to assess the ability of patients with schizophrenia to match the compliance of emotional stimuli, presented simultaneously in visual and auditory modalities using congruent and non-congruent emotional sounds, to fearful expressions
Patients had longer latency of negative component around 50 ms (N50) for both congruent (Mann–Whitney U Test; z = 2.8, p = 0.004) and non-congruent stimuli (z = 2.6, p = 0.008), lower amplitude of N50 for non-congruent stimuli (z = −2.9, p = 0.001), larger amplitude of P100 for non-congruent sessed as being happier by patients than by subjects of the control group (z = 2.6, p = 0.008); controls had 2.2 ± 1.8 scores on the scale “happy,” assessing non-congruent stimuli, versus the 5.3 ± 2.1 scores in patients

Summary

Introduction

The emotional expressions of fear can be perceived and identified significantly more than other emotions and are the least affected in variable clinical populations. Patients with variable mental or neurological diseases can correctly emit fearful and angry prosody of speech and fearful facial expression; they show impairment in the discrimination of happy expressions [1,2,3,4]. The perception of fearful facial expressions is usually accompanied by heightened arousal or a negative or aversive subjective experience. It could enhance the visual processing of stimuli, activating the sympathetic nervous system [5]. The other neural basis for visual perception enhancement could include the increased work of the amygdala triggering the brain areas involved in the processes of directed attention and the visual cortex [6]

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