The impact of social content and negative symptoms on affective ratings in schizophrenia

Abstract

The anhedonia paradox has been a topic of ongoing study in schizophrenia. Previous research has found that schizophrenia patients report less enjoyment from various activities when compared to their healthy counterparts; however, the two groups appear to have similar in-the-moment emotional ratings of these events (Gard et al., 2007; Herbener et al., 2007; Horan et al., 2006). This study examined these in-the-moment experiences further, by assessing whether they differed between social and non-social experiences. The data were collected from 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 53 matched healthy controls in the greater Chicago area. In-the-moment emotional experience was measured by self-reported arousal and valence ratings for social and non-social stimuli taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Clinical ratings for patients were gathered by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. A series of ANOVAs revealed that controls were more aroused by the social than nonsocial unpleasant stimuli, whereas patients did not show this distinction. Further, regression analyses revealed that negative symptom severity uniquely predicted lower arousal responses to unpleasant social, but not nonsocial, stimuli. Our results indicate that both subject and stimulus factors appear to contribute to differences in emotional responses in individuals with schizophrenia.

Social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia — An ERP study

“…To the best of our knowledge, only three other studies analysed ratings for social and nonsocial affective stimuli in patients with schizophrenia separately. Yet, while no effects of sociality on arousal ratings were found by Peterman et al (2015), a result congruent with the one observed here was reported by Bodapati and Herbener (2014) who observed that patients with schizophrenia demonstrate more blunted emotional responses to negative social stimuli compared to healthy controls. In another behavioural study the effects of the social content on the ratings of affective stimuli were compared between patients with schizophrenia, patients with…”

“…Both behavioural (Aminoff et al, 2011;Bodapati and Herbener, 2014) and physiological (Peterman et al, 2015) studies documented differences between patients' and controls' responses to social and nonsocial affective stimuli, thus there is a strong rationale to hypothesise discrepant neural patterns in both groups in reaction to the two types of the stimuli.…”

Social Preference and Glutamatergic Dysfunction: Underappreciated Prerequisites for Social Dysfunction in Schizophrenia

“…Healthy controls rated negative social stimuli as more arousing compared with negative nonsocial stimuli; but this effect was not observed in patients [28]. In a study of threat-related detection, healthy controls showed an expected threat-superiority effect (i.e.…”

The Complex Affective Scene Set (COMPASS): Solving the Social Content Problem in Affective Visual Stimulus Sets

“…Within this framework, visual social (i.e., human) content, such as human faces and bodies, has special status in the competition for prioritized processing. For example, faces or bodies are fixated first in naturalistic scenes (e.g., Fletcher-Watson, Findlay, Leekam, & Benson, 2008;Rosler, End, & Gamer, 2017), faces attract gaze in experimental tasks even at a cost (Cerf, Frady, & Koch, 2009), and only responses to social stimuli reflected the effects of anhedonia in people with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls (e.g., Bodapati & Herbener, 2014). However, unbalanced representation of social and nonsocial information in affective stimulus sets has limited the clear determination of effects as attributable to, or independent of, social content.…”