Neural Bases of Emotional Experience Versus Perception in Schizophrenia

e w b I t used to be called cold versus hot cognition, two terms that referred to tasks that either intentionally used stimuli devoid of social or emotional content to reduce unexpected confounds cold) versus tasks that intentionally addressed social and emoional processing (hot). Now following impressive advances in basic ehavioral neuroscience, this latter area is sometimes called social ognitive and affective neuroscience (SCAN), or simply social cogition. There is clearly an increased focus in the social cognition of chizophrenia as evidenced by published papers and conference resentations. The emergent research focus over the past decade as been driven by several factors, including the following: 1) inreased support for social cognition’s role in functional outcome in chizophrenia; 2) a greater understanding about the factors that ead to development of particular clinical symptoms, such as paraoia; 3) new evidence on the stability of social cognitive impairent across phases of illness; 4) increasing support for psychopharacologic and psychosocial interventions for social cognitive mpairment; and 5) a growing application of neuroimaging methds from SCAN to identify aberrant neural substrates in schizophreia (1,2). It is this last area involving SCAN methods that is the focus f the meta-analysis by Taylor et al. (3). As an indication of rapid growth in this area, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) meta-analysis by Taylor et al. (3) is the third one involving social cognitive paradigms in schizophrenia to appear in a 1-year period (4,5). It differs from the previous meta-analyses that focused on emotion perception because it also considers emotional experience. These domains are rarely studied together. Emotion perception is the most studied aspect of social cognition in schizophrenia and usually involves the identification of emotions displayed in static faces (6). Patients consistently show trouble with identification, matching, and discrimination of emotional faces relative to controls. Electrophysiology (EEG) and fMRI approaches are able to examine neural underpinnings for explicit tasks, as well as implicit paradigms (e.g., the physiologic response to fearful versus neutral faces while subjects are asked to identify the gender of faces). Emotional experience, in contrast to emotion perception, asks the subjects to look inward and evaluate their own responses to evocative stimuli. Although somewhat counterintuitive, the findings from rating scales, interviews, and EEG show lack of differences between groups. Patients appear to experience emotional stimuli to the same extent as healthy persons, even though they rate higher on anhedonia scales. Although the results from Taylor et al. (3) are not specifically framed as such, they can be interpreted in terms of two broad social cognitive processes: lower-level bottom-up versus higher-level topdown (7,8). Lower-level social cognitive processes involve recognizing