Psychiatry

SOCIAL COGNITION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Associate Professor Melissa Green, PhD.

NHMRC Biomedical Career Development Fellow School of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine

University of New South Wales, Australia.

Themes for discussion:

1. Gestalt processing: holistic ‘integration’ of social and emotional information from various sources – problems with this may affect social/emotion perception as well as emotion regulation

2. Cross-modality integration of contextual cues: involves both cognitive and social cognitive information; implications for neural circuitry

3. Emotion regulation: aberrant physiology Vs. intact emotional experience

Integration of contextual cues in social cognition

Integration of contextual cues in social cognition

Visual attention to context

Schizophrenia Healthy Control

Avoidance of contextual information in Scz

Green, M.J., Waldron, J.H., Simpson, I., & Coltheart, M. (2008). Visual processing of social context during mental state perception in schizophrenia. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, 33(1), 34-42.

SCZ are delayed in directing attention to contextual cues

p<.001

Green, M.J., Waldron, J.H., Simpson, I., & Coltheart, M. (2008). Visual processing of social context during mental state perception in schizophrenia. Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience, 33(1), 34-42.

22 SCZ and 22 healthy control participants

28 story-face pairs discrepant in emotion content

SCZ judged expression based on facial information or unrelated emotions (51%) versus controls (38%)

DISCREPANT STORY-FACE TASK

ANGER >>> FEARA man is returning to his new car in the parking lot and sees some kids running around waving hubcaps in the air. When he gets to the car his hubcaps are missing…

Integration of contextual information across modalities

Green, Waldron, & Coltheart (2007), Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 12(3), 259-280

SOURCE: Morris, Sparks, Mitchell, Shannon Weickert, Green. (2012). Cortico-limbic decoupling during emotion regulation in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Translational Psychiatry. 2, e90

EMOTION REGULATION

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Image RatingsSubjective AFFECT RATINGS

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* = p < .05

** = p < .01

MRI scan as stressor

SOURCE: Girshkin, L., O’Reilly, Quidé, Y., Teroganova, N., Rowland, J.E., Schofield, P.R., Green. M.J. (2016). Diurnal cortisol variation and cortisol response to an MRI stressor in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Psychoneuroendocrinology, available online.