Affect Regulation in Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disease, characterised by psychosis (delusions and hallucinations), apathy (a lack of motivation), social withdrawal, and cognitive impairment, which result in impaired functioning in different areas, such as work, school, independent living, and interpersonal relationships (Mueser and McGurk, 2004). Apart from the above-mentioned deficits, these patients also experience emotional disturbances, which have received increasing attention over two past decades (Edwards et al., 2001; Pinkham et al., 2007). For example, schizophrenic patients are impaired in their ability to recognize emotional facial expressions (Loughland et al., 2002). The abnormalities in emotion identification and emotional behaviour have been found to be associated with the poor social functioning observed in patients with schizophrenia (Borod and Madigan, 2000). It is still unclear whether the impairment in affect perception is a specific emotional deficit or whether it is related to a more generalized impairment in perception and attention (Bozikas et al., 2004)

Emotional startle modulation in male patients with recent-onset schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia suffer from both cognitive as well as emotional disturbances, leading to reduced social functioning and quality of life. This study investigated the ongoing emotional states of medicated and antipsychotic-free patients and healthy controls using an emotional startle paradigm. During positive, neutral and negative emotional pictures, aversive acoustic startle stimuli were presented at 4 different probe latencies (300, 800, 1300 and 3800 ms) from picture onset. In both patients and controls, positive pictures, and more specifically erotic pictures, elicited significantly smaller eye blinks compared with startle stimuli presented during neutral and negative pictures. With regard to the subjective ratings, medicated patients rated erotic pictures significantly less pleasant and the adventure, nature, and household pictures as significantly more arousing than healthy control subjects. The present results indicate the need to further investigate emotional responding to specific picture contents, with specific focus on the sexual needs and expectations of schizophrenic patients, so as to eventually improve the quality of life in these patients