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Many data suggest a disjunction between decreased emotional expressions and relatively preserved experience of and ability to assess emotions in schizophrenia. Based in an embodied approach of cognition, several studies have highlighted affective stimulus-response congruency effect in healthy subjects that show a direct link between the perception of emotion and associated motor responses. This study investigated whether the categorization of emotional words involves an automatic sensorimotor simulation of approach and avoidance behaviors. We asked 28 subjects with schizophrenia and 28 controls to execute arm movements of approach or avoidance to categorize emotional words, according to their valence (positive or negative). Controls were faster to respond to a positive stimulus with a movement of approach and a negative stimulus with a movement of avoidance (congruent condition) than to perform the inverted response movements (incongruent condition). However, responses of patients with schizophrenia did not differ according to congruence condition. Our results support the apparent non-involvement of covert sensorimotor simulation of approach and avoidance in the categorization of emotional stimuli by patients with schizophrenia, despite their understanding of the emotional valence of words. This absence of affective stimulus-response compatibility effect would imply a decoupling between emotional and bodily states in patients with schizophrenia.

International audience; The MCQ is a seven-factor scale that measures individual differences in the tendency to select particular strategies and to overcome perceived or real memory losses. Our aim was to establish a French version of the MCQ and to evaluate its psychometric properties in a lifespan perspective. We first tested the underlying factor structure of the MCQ in a large sample of 749 adults from aged from 18 to 92 years.The results showed that the factor structure of the French version corresponded well with the one obtained in English-, Dutch- and Spanish-speaking samples, supporting the cross-national robustness of the MCQ. We confirmed a seven-factor order model that supports the construct validity of the questionnaire. The reliabilities of the scales were good (α > .70) to acceptable (α = .66 and .62). Criterion validity was verified by means of significant correlations between health composites and MCQ subscales. Gender and Age affected most of the MCQ subscales but not the Level of Education (LE).The MCQ revealed to be a heuristic tool for assessing daily compensatory behaviors that are developed in order to achieve successful aging. Thus, regression-based normative data and a user-friendly computer program were provided to facilitate scoring and norming by clinicians and researchers who need to assess daily compensatory behaviors.

We examined whether anxiodepressive patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy could be differentiated from those with depression but without epilepsy on tasks that investigate attentional bias toward and explicit judgment of emotional stimuli. Eight depressive patients, eight anxiodepressive patients with epilepsy, and eight controls participated in the present study. Anxiodepressive with epilepsy and depressive patients had comparable depression scores and the same cognitive profile. Two distinct emotional tasks were used: the decision lexical task and the number comparison task. Three emotional connotations were presented: neutral, positive, and negative. The pattern of results showed an attentional bias toward negative words and pictures in depressive patients and only toward negative words in anxiodepressive patients with epilepsy. Moreover, depressive patients explicitly judged negative stimuli with lower intensity and anxiodepressive patients judged neutral stimuli with higher intensity. The present study specifies the emotional functioning in depression with or without left temporal lobe epilepsy.