Emotional Modulation of Cognition in Recent Onset Schizophrenia

Abstract

__Abstract__ The current thesis describes a number of important findings on the interaction between emotion and cognition in male recent onset schizophrenia patients. In healthy controls a general effect of emotional expressions on sustained attention is that it improves reaction time while accuracy decreased after negative, but not after positive emotional expressions. Although recent onset schizophrenia patients have a general attentional deficit, the effect of facial expressions on sustained attention is the same as in healthy controls. Furthermore, despite a general selective attention deficit, the emotional Stroop effect is not statistically different between recent onset schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. The literature on emotional memory modulation in patients with schizophrenia shows contradictory results with two-thirds of the tasks finding no difference between patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls, this can be explained in part by methodological differences. Nevertheless, impaired emotional modulation of memory consolidation and a deficit in unconsciously using emotional content to modulate memory could underlie deficits in emotional memory modulation. In recent onset schizophrenia patients emotional modulation is preserved, both in short and long term memory and for both verbal and visual memory. Social cognition, in the form of gaze cueing, however, is already disturbed in the early phase of schizophrenia