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Emotional interference and attentional control in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders: The special case of neutral faces.
- Source :
-
Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry [J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry] 2023 Dec; Vol. 81, pp. 101892. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Jul 05. - Publication Year :
- 2023
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Abstract
- Background and Objectives: Schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) are characterized by impaired emotion processing and attention. SSD patients are more sensitive to the presence of emotional distractors. But despite growing interest on the emotion-attention interplay, emotional interference in SSD is far from fully understood. Moreover, research to date has not established the link between emotional interference and attentional control in SSD. This study thus aimed to investigate the effects of facial expression and attentional control in SSD, by manipulating perceptual load.<br />Methods: Twenty-two SSD patients and 22 healthy controls performed a target-letter discrimination task with task-irrelevant angry, happy, and neutral faces. Target-letter was presented among homogenous (low load) or heterogenous (high load) distractor-letters. Accuracy and RT were analysed using (generalized) linear mixed-effect models.<br />Results: Accuracy was significantly lower in SSD patients than controls, regardless of perceptual load and facial expression. Concerning RT, SSD patients were significantly slower than controls in the presence of neutral faces, but only at high load. No group differences were observed for angry and happy faces.<br />Limitations: Heterogeneity of SSD, small sample size, lack of clinical control group, medication.<br />Conclusions: One possible explanation is that neutral faces captured exogenous attention to a greater extent in SSD, thus challenging attentional control in perceptually demanding conditions. This may reflect abnormal processing of neutral faces in SSD. If replicated, these findings will help to understand the interplay between exogenous attention, attentional control, and emotion processing in SSD, which may unravel the mechanism underlying socioemotional dysfunction in SSD.<br />Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.<br /> (Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 1873-7943
- Volume :
- 81
- Database :
- MEDLINE
- Journal :
- Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 37429124
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2023.101892