Objective: There has been controversy as to whether patients with schizophrenia display an emotion specific impairment or not. To resolve this disagreement, the implicit tasks for the emotional evaluation of the positive and negative stimuli were done in patients with schizophrenia.
Methods:Patients with schizophrenia and normal controls were requested to press a positive or a negative key according to the intrinsic valences of black and white photographs and to the color of blue or green filtered stimuli.
Results:In normal controls, the performances in both the positive and the negative trials were significantly less accurate when the intrinsic trial valence was incongruent to the assigned color response valence than when it was congruent. Under the same conditions, however, patients with schizophrenia performed significantly more inaccurately for the positive trials than when it was congruent, but not for the negative stimuli.
Conclusion:These findings suggested that patients with schizophrenia might suffer from differential impairment of negative emotion at a relatively early emotional processing stage. (Schizophrenia Clinics 2003;6:132-136) |
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