Neural Correlates of Emotion Regulation in Patients with Schizophrenia (2016)

Undergraduates: Kelly Duffy, Elizabeth Andersen

Faculty Advisor: Aysenil Belger
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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Emotion regulation, which is one's ability to cognitively alter the perception and/or emotional impact of a stimulus or event, has been repeatedly shown to be deficient in patients with schizophrenia. Further, previous EEG studies have found abnormal neural activity during tasks meant to induce emotion regulation, specifically in the inability of patients to modulate the response of the Late Positive Potential (LPP), an ERP component thought to index sustained, motivated attention. The present study aims to replicate this finding using a subtle emotion regulation paradigm developed by Kisley and colleagues, as well as expand upon the current knowledge base by evaluating frontal theta activity using time-frequency analysis. The study evaluated evoked power (ERSP) and inter-trial coherence (ITC) in frontal theta in both patients and controls, and found that controls had increased early frontal theta ERSP and decreased later frontal theta ERSP, suggesting that ERSP may subserve emotion regulation, and that this is deficient in patients. Contrary to hypotheses, LPP magnitude was actually increased to positively-, rather than negatively-, framed negative emotional stimuli, suggesting that the congruency between framing and stimulus affect may strongly influence neural activity during evaluation of stimuli, and this appears to vary between patients and controls.