Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the effects of task demand context on facial affect appraisal in schizophrenia.

ABSTRACT: Schizophrenia patients display impaired performance and brain activity during facial affect recognition. These impairments may reflect stimulus-driven perceptual decrements and evaluative processing abnormalities. We differentiated these two processes by contrasting responses to identical stimuli presented under different contexts. Seventeen healthy controls and 16 schizophrenia patients performed an fMRI facial affect detection task. Subjects identified an affective target presented amongst foils of differing emotions. We hypothesized that targeting affiliative emotions (happiness, sadness) would create a task demand context distinct from that generated when targeting threat emotions (anger, fear). We compared affiliative foil stimuli within a congruent affiliative context with identical

SUBMITTER: Leitman DI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3023083 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature