Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on September 30, 2009
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2009 35(6):1095-1107; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp109
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Sensory Contributions to Impaired Emotion Processing in Schizophrenia
2 Schizophrenia Research Center, Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY
3 Department of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY
4 Department of Psychology, City University of New York, New York, NY
5 Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
6 Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University, Bronx, NY
7 Neuropsychiatry Section, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, and the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; 140 Old Orangeburg Road, Orangeburg, NY 10962; tel: 845-398-6537, fax: 845-398-6545, e-mail: butler{at}nki.rfmh.org.
Both emotion and visual processing deficits are documented in schizophrenia, and preferential magnocellular visual pathway dysfunction has been reported in several studies. This study examined the contribution to emotion-processing deficits of magnocellular and parvocellular visual pathway function, based on stimulus properties and shape of contrast response functions. Experiment 1 examined the relationship between contrast sensitivity to magnocellular- and parvocellular-biased stimuli and emotion recognition using the Penn Emotion Recognition (ER-40) and Emotion Differentiation (EMODIFF) tests. Experiment 2 altered the contrast levels of the faces themselves to determine whether emotion detection curves would show a pattern characteristic of magnocellular neurons and whether patients would show a deficit in performance related to early sensory processing stages. Results for experiment 1 showed that patients had impaired emotion processing and a preferential magnocellular deficit on the contrast sensitivity task. Greater deficits in ER-40 and EMODIFF performance correlated with impaired contrast sensitivity to the magnocellular-biased condition, which remained significant for the EMODIFF task even when nonspecific correlations due to group were considered in a step-wise regression. Experiment 2 showed contrast response functions indicative of magnocellular processing for both groups, with patients showing impaired performance. Impaired emotion identification on this task was also correlated with magnocellular-biased visual sensory processing dysfunction. These results provide evidence for a contribution of impaired early-stage visual processing in emotion recognition deficits in schizophrenia and suggest that a bottom-up approach to remediation may be effective.
Keywords: visual / magnocellular / gain control / contrast / spatial frequency