Enhanced Punishment Responses in Patients With Schizophrenia: An Event-Related Potential Study

Abstract

It is well known that abnormal reward processing is a characteristic feature of various psychopathologies including schizophrenia. Reduced reward anticipation has been suggested as a core symptom of schizophrenia. The Monetary Incentive Delay Task (MID) is frequently used to detect reward anticipation. The present study aims to evaluate the amplitude and latency of event-related potential (ERP) P300 in patients with schizophrenia (SCH) compared to healthy controls during the MID task. Twenty patients with SCH and 21 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) were included in the study. ERP P300 amplitude and latency values were compared between groups using an MID task in which reward and loss cues were presented. Relations between P300 and clinical facets were investigated in the patient group. SCH group had enhanced mean P300 amplitudes and delayed peak latency in the punishment condition compared with HC. These higher responses were also associated with negative symptoms. SCH group showed altered reward processing as being more sensitive to loss of reward conditions as firstly evidenced by electrophysiological methods, possibly due to abnormality in various systems including social withdrawal, social defeat, and behavioral inhibition system.

Early and late contingent negative variation (CNV) reflect different aspects of deficits in schizophrenia

“…Each condition consisted of 150 trials (40 for incentive and 110 for nonincentive cues). More detailed information about the task was given in our group's previous study (Akgül et al, 2023).…”

“…The monetary incentive delay (MID) task, which is an effective experimental paradigm, is run to evaluate the neural activity which includes reward and loss anticipation and outcome (Knutson et al, 2000). It is shown that sensitivity to reward or punishment influences motivated behaviour (Cooper et al, 2014;Corr & McNaughton, 2012;Unger et al, 2012) and is reported to be effective in showing differentiation between SZ patients and healthy controls (Akgül et al, 2023;Bedwell et al, 2016;Clayson et al, 2019;Leroy et al, 2020;Zeng et al, 2022). Additionally, researchers also investigated changes in motivational processing in terms of CNV in patients with SZ (Catalano et al, 2021(Catalano et al, , 2022Lin et al, 2020) and reported blunted CNV in the patient group and altered motivation-related EEG activity.…”