Aberrant attentive and inattentive brain activity to auditory negative words, and its relation to persecutory delusion in patients with schizophrenia

Norichika Iwashiro,1 Yosuke Takano,1 Tatsunobu Natsubori,1 Yuta Aoki,1 Noriaki Yahata,1,2 Wataru Gonoi,3 Akira Kunimatsu,3 Osamu Abe,3 Kiyoto Kasai,1 Hidenori Yamasue4 1Department of Neuropsychiatry, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan; 2Department of Molecular Imaging and Theranostics, National Institute of Radiological Sciences, National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology, Chiba-city, Chiba, Japan; 3Department of Radiology, Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan; 4Department of Psychiatry, Hamamatsu University School of Medicine, Higashi-ku, Hamamatsu City, Japan Background and purpose: Previous research has suggested that deficits in emotion recognition are involved in the pathogenesis of persecutory delusion in schizophrenia. Although disruption in auditory and language processing is crucial in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, the neural basis for the deficits in emotion recognition of auditorily presented language stimuli and its relation to persecutory delusion have not yet been clarified. Patients and methods: The current functional magnetic resonance imaging study used a dichotic listening task for 15 patients with schizophrenia and 23 healthy controls matched for age, sex, parental socioeconomic background, handedness, dexterous ear, and intelligence quotient. The participants completed a word recognition task on the attended side in which a word with emotionally valenced content (negative/neutral) was presented to one ear and a different neutral word was presented to the other ear. Participants selectively attended to either ear. Results: The whole brain analysis detected the aberrant neural activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus in the patients with schizophrenia compared to that in the controls (P