Brain mapping biomarkers of socio-emotional processing in schizophrenia.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Taylor SF
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3245598 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
Brain mapping biomarkers of socio-emotional processing in schizophrenia.
Taylor Stephan F SF MacDonald Angus W AW
Schizophrenia bulletin 20110930 1
The Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) initiative has formed with the expressed intent of identifying constructs and paradigms that would identify biomarkers of psychosis. The manipulation of these biomarkers would serve as targets for treatment interventions. The second phase of CNTRICS consisted of critical discussions evaluating brain mapping (functional neuroimaging and brain electrical activity) paradigms as biomarkers to measure specif ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:We present novel, low-cost and non-invasive potential diagnostic biomarkers of schizophrenia. They are based on the 'mirror-game', a coordination task in which two partners are asked to mimic each other's hand movements. In particular, we use the patient's solo movement, recorded in the absence of a partner, and motion recorded during interaction with an artificial agent, a computer avatar or a humanoid robot. In order to discriminate between the patients and controls, we employ statistical learning techniques, which we apply to nonverbal synchrony and neuromotor features derived from the participants' movement data. The proposed classifier has 93% accuracy and 100% specificity. Our results provide evidence that statistical learning techniques, nonverbal movement coordination and neuromotor characteristics could form the foundation of decision support tools aiding clinicians in cases of diagnostic uncertainty.
| S-EPMC5441525 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Little is known about the time course of the mechanisms involved in the on-line processing of socio-emotional information. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate this issue using vignettes that described prototypical, social scenarios. An initial sentence established the social context and the following target sentence ended with a critical word that informed the reader of the character's socio-emotional response to the situation. Critical words that mismatched rather than matched with a character's expected feelings elicited a larger ERP negativity (N400) ~200-500?ms after word onset, followed by a larger frontal positivity. Dipole source modeling results indicated that an anterior temporal lobe source accounted for the N400-like effect, which we attribute to the increased demands of integrating general knowledge about social situations (e.g. scripts) with personal- and context-specific information. An additional mediofrontal source contributed to the later ERP effect and presumably reflects high-level mindreading functions. Together, these findings indicate that readers rapidly infer and evaluate on-line a character's likely socio-emotional response based on the prototypical information provided by the text.
| S-EPMC3324574 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Some individuals show a congenital deficit for music processing despite normal peripheral auditory processing, cognitive functioning, and music exposure. This condition, termed congenital amusia, is typically approached regarding its profile of musical and pitch difficulties. Here, we examine whether amusia also affects socio-emotional processing, probing auditory and visual domains. Thirteen adults with amusia and 11 controls completed two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants judged emotions in emotional speech prosody, nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., crying), and (silent) facial expressions. Target emotions were: amusement, anger, disgust, fear, pleasure, relief, and sadness. Compared to controls, amusics were impaired for all stimulus types, and the magnitude of their impairment was similar for auditory and visual emotions. In Experiment 2, participants listened to spontaneous and posed laughs, and either inferred the authenticity of the speaker's state, or judged how much laughs were contagious. Amusics showed decreased sensitivity to laughter authenticity, but normal contagion responses. Across the experiments, mixed-effects models revealed that the acoustic features of vocal signals predicted socio-emotional evaluations in both groups, but the profile of predictive acoustic features was different in amusia. These findings suggest that a developmental music disorder can affect socio-emotional cognition in subtle ways, an impairment not restricted to auditory information.
| S-EPMC5057155 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Laughter is a fundamental communicative signal in our relations with other people and is used to convey a diverse repertoire of social and emotional information. It is therefore potentially a useful probe of impaired socio-emotional signal processing in neurodegenerative diseases. Here we investigated the cognitive and affective processing of laughter in forty-seven patients representing all major syndromes of frontotemporal dementia, a disease spectrum characterised by severe socio-emotional dysfunction (twenty-two with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, twelve with semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, thirteen with nonfluent-agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia), in relation to fifteen patients with typical amnestic Alzheimer's disease and twenty healthy age-matched individuals. We assessed cognitive labelling (identification) and valence rating (affective evaluation) of samples of spontaneous (mirthful and hostile) and volitional (posed) laughter versus two auditory control conditions (a synthetic laughter-like stimulus and spoken numbers). Neuroanatomical associations of laughter processing were assessed using voxel-based morphometry of patients' brain MR images. While all dementia syndromes were associated with impaired identification of laughter subtypes relative to healthy controls, this was significantly more severe overall in frontotemporal dementia than in Alzheimer's disease and particularly in the behavioural and semantic variants, which also showed abnormal affective evaluation of laughter. Over the patient cohort, laughter identification accuracy was correlated with measures of daily-life socio-emotional functioning. Certain striking syndromic signatures emerged, including enhanced liking for hostile laughter in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, impaired processing of synthetic laughter in the nonfluent-agrammatic variant (consistent with a generic complex auditory perceptual deficit) and enhanced liking for numbers ('numerophilia') in the semantic variant. Across the patient cohort, overall laughter identification accuracy correlated with regional grey matter in a core network encompassing inferior frontal and cingulo-insular cortices; and more specific correlates of laughter identification accuracy were delineated in cortical regions mediating affective disambiguation (identification of hostile and posed laughter in orbitofrontal cortex) and authenticity (social intent) decoding (identification of mirthful and posed laughter in anteromedial prefrontal cortex) (all p < .05 after correction for multiple voxel-wise comparisons over the whole brain). These findings reveal a rich diversity of cognitive and affective laughter phenotypes in canonical dementia syndromes and suggest that laughter is an informative probe of neural mechanisms underpinning socio-emotional dysfunction in neurodegenerative disease.
| S-EPMC8438290 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Research on emotional processing in schizophrenia suggests relatively intact subjective responses to affective stimuli "in the moment." However, neuroimaging evidence suggests diminished activation in brain regions associated with emotional processing in schizophrenia. We asked whether given a more vulnerable cognitive system in schizophrenia, individuals with this disorder would show increased or decreased modulation of working memory (WM) as a function of the emotional content of stimuli compared with healthy control subjects. In addition, we examined whether higher anhedonia levels were associated with a diminished impact of emotion on behavioral and brain activation responses. In the present study, 38 individuals with schizophrenia and 32 healthy individuals completed blocks of a 2-back WM task in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning session. Blocks contained faces displaying either only neutral stimuli or neutral and emotional stimuli (happy or fearful faces), randomly intermixed and occurring both as targets and non-targets. Both groups showed higher accuracy but slower reaction time for negative compared to neutral stimuli. Individuals with schizophrenia showed intact amygdala activity in response to emotionally evocative stimuli, but demonstrated altered dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and hippocampal activity while performing an emotionally loaded WM-task. Higher levels of social anhedonia were associated with diminished amygdala responses to emotional stimuli and increased DLPFC activity in individuals with schizophrenia. Emotional arousal may challenge dorsal-frontal control systems, which may have both beneficial and detrimental influences. Our findings suggest that disturbances in emotional processing in schizophrenia relate to alterations in emotion-cognition interactions rather than to the perception and subjective experience of emotion per se.
| S-EPMC3160211 | biostudies-other
Project description:There is considerable need to develop tailored approaches to psychiatric treatment. Numerous researchers have proposed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) biomarkers to predict therapeutic response, in particular by measuring task-evoked subgenual anterior cingulate (sgACC) and amygdala activation in mood and anxiety disorders. Translating this to the clinic relies on the assumption that blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) responses in these regions are stable within individuals. To test this assumption, we scanned a group of 29 volunteers twice (mean test-retest interval=14.3 days) and calculated the within-subject reliability of the amplitude of the amygdalae and sgACC BOLD responses to emotional faces using three paradigms: emotion identification; emotion matching; and gender classification. We also calculated the reliability of activation in a control region, the right fusiform face area (FFA). All three tasks elicited robust group activations in the amygdalae and sgACC (which changed little on average over scanning sessions), but within-subject reliability was surprisingly low, despite excellent reliability in the control right FFA region. Our findings demonstrate low statistical reliability of two important putative treatment biomarkers in mood and anxiety disorders.
| S-EPMC5553850 | biostudies-other
Project description:±3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is a popular recreational drug that enhances sociability and feelings of closeness with others. These "prosocial" effects appear to motivate the recreational use of MDMA and may also form the basis of its potential as an adjunct to psychotherapy. However, the extent to which MDMA differs from prototypic stimulant drugs, such as dextroamphetamine, methamphetamine, and methylphenidate, in either its behavioral effects or mechanisms of action, is not fully known. The purpose of this review is to evaluate human laboratory findings of the social effects of MDMA compared to other stimulants, ranging from simple subjective ratings of sociability to more complex elements of social processing and behavior. We also review the neurochemical mechanisms by which these drugs may impact sociability. Together, the findings reviewed here lay the groundwork for better understanding the socially enhancing effects of MDMA that distinguish it from other stimulant drugs, especially as these effects relate to the reinforcing and potentially therapeutic effects of the drug.
| S-EPMC8753974 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundSex, emotion, and reproduction are fundamental and tightly entwined aspects of human behavior. At a population level in humans, both the desire for sexual stimulation and the desire to bond with a partner are important precursors to reproduction. However, the relationships between these processes are incompletely understood. The limbic brain system has key roles in sexual and emotional behaviors, and is a likely candidate system for the integration of behavior with the hormonal reproductive axis. We investigated the effects of kisspeptin, a recently identified key reproductive hormone, on limbic brain activity and behavior.MethodsUsing a combination of functional neuroimaging and hormonal and psychometric analyses, we compared the effects of kisspeptin versus vehicle administration in 29 healthy heterosexual young men.ResultsWe demonstrated that kisspeptin administration enhanced limbic brain activity specifically in response to sexual and couple-bonding stimuli. Furthermore, kisspeptin's enhancement of limbic brain structures correlated with psychometric measures of reward, drive, mood, and sexual aversion, providing functional significance. In addition, kisspeptin administration attenuated negative mood.ConclusionsCollectively, our data provide evidence of an undescribed role for kisspeptin in integrating sexual and emotional brain processing with reproduction in humans. These results have important implications for our understanding of reproductive biology and are highly relevant to the current pharmacological development of kisspeptin as a potential therapeutic agent for patients with common disorders of reproductive function.FundingNational Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Wellcome Trust (Ref 080268), and the Medical Research Council (MRC).
| S-EPMC5272173 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Abnormalities in emotional prosody processing have been consistently reported in schizophrenia and are related to poor social outcomes. However, the role of stimulus complexity in abnormal emotional prosody processing is still unclear.We recorded event-related potentials in 16 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 16 healthy controls to investigate: 1) the temporal course of emotional prosody processing; and 2) the relative contribution of prosodic and semantic cues in emotional prosody processing. Stimuli were prosodic single words presented in two conditions: with intelligible (semantic content condition-SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition-PPC).Relative to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients showed reduced P50 for happy PPC words, and reduced N100 for both neutral and emotional SCC words and for neutral PPC stimuli. Also, increased P200 was observed in schizophrenia for happy prosody in SCC only. Behavioral results revealed higher error rates in schizophrenia for angry prosody in SCC and for happy prosody in PPC.Together, these data further demonstrate the interactions between abnormal sensory processes and higher-order processes in bringing about emotional prosody processing dysfunction in schizophrenia. They further suggest that impaired emotional prosody processing is dependent on stimulus complexity.
| S-EPMC5590837 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Schizophrenia is associated with abnormalities in emotional processing and social cognition. However, it remains unclear whether patients show abnormal neurophysiological responses during fast, online appraisals of the emotional meaning of social information. To examine this question, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected while 18 schizophrenia patients and 18 demographically matched controls evaluated 2-sentence vignettes describing negative, positive, or neutral social situations. ERPs were time locked to a critical word (CW) in the second sentence that conferred emotional valence. A late positivity effect to emotional (vs neutral) CWs was seen in both groups (in controls, to negative and positive CWs; in patients, to negative CWs only). However, the controls showed a greater late positivity effect to the negative and positive (vs neutral) CWs than the schizophrenia patients at mid-posterior (negative vs neutral) and at right posterior peripheral (positive vs neutral) sites. These between-group differences arose from reduced amplitudes of the late positivity to the negative and positive CWs in the patients relative to the controls; there was no difference between the 2 groups in the amplitude of the late positivity to the neutral CWs. These findings suggest that schizophrenia is associated with a specific neural deficit during the online evaluation of emotionally valent, socially relevant information.
| S-EPMC3004190 | biostudies-literature