(Open access funding provided by Semmelweis University)
Szakterületek:
Pszichológia
In schizophrenia, deficits in social cognition, such as facial emotion identification,
have a significant impact on patient's daily functioning and quality of life. We analyzed
the beta event-related desynchronization (ERD) associated with emotional facial displays
to understand better both phase-locked (i.e., neural activity and corresponding EEG
response have a fixed latency after the stimulus onset) and non-phase-locked, induced
(i.e. the latency of the response is not fixed) electrophysiological correlates of
emotion recognition. 128 channels of EEG data from 37 patients with schizophrenia
and 40 healthy controls were analyzed. Study groups were matched by sex age, and education.
Participants had to identify facial displays of happiness, sadness, and neutral faces
from the 'Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF)' database. The time window of
300-700 ms was chosen to analyze spectral perturbation in the beta range associated
with the presented emotional faces. Beta desynchronization was observed in both groups.
We observed weaker beta ERD in patients. Weaker beta desynchronization correlated
with poorer emotion recognition performance in the same time window in the patient
group with a maximum correlation at the frontocentral region. Our main finding is
that impaired emotion processing in patients with schizophrenia manifested as weaker
beta desynchronization when perceiving faces reflecting sad and happy emotions or
neutral facial expressions. Furthermore, less prominent beta desynchronization was
associated with poorer emotion recognition performance in patients.
