The magnocellular visual pathway and facial emotion misattribution errors in schizophrenia

    Authors

    J. S. Bedwell; C. C. Chan; O. Cohen; Y. Karbi; E. Shamir;Y. Rassovsky

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    Prog. Neuro-Psychopharmacol. Biol. Psychiatry

    Keywords

    Anger; Emotion; Fear; Schizophrenia; Social cognition; Visual processing; SOCIAL COGNITION; VENTRAL STRIATUM; RECOGNITION; EXPRESSIONS; PERCEPTION; DISORDER; LIGHT; DOPAMINE; DEFICITS; VIOLENCE; Clinical Neurology; Neurosciences; Pharmacology & Pharmacy; Psychiatry

    Abstract

    Many individuals with schizophrenia show impairment in labeling the emotion depicted by faces, and tend to ascribe anger or fear to neutral expressions. Preliminary research has linked some of these difficulties to dysfunction in the magnocellular (M) visual pathway, which has direct projections to subcortical emotion processing regions. The current study attempted to clarify these relationships using a novel paradigm that included a red background. Diffuse red light is known to suppress the M-pathway in nonpsychiatric adults, and there is preliminary evidence that it may have the opposite (stimulating) effect in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSDs). Twenty-five individuals with SSDs were compared with 31 nonpsychiatric controls using a facial emotion identification task depicting happy, angry, fearful, and sad emotions on red, green, and gray backgrounds. There was a robust interaction of group by change in errors to the red (vs. green) background for misattributing fear expressions as depicting anger (p=.001, eta(2)=.18). Specifically, controls showed a significant decrease in this type of error with the red background (p=.003, d=0.77), while the SSD group tended to increase this type of error (p=.07, d=0.54). These findings suggest that the well-established M-pathway abnormalities in SSDs may contribute to the heightened misperception of other emotions such as anger, which in turn may cause social misperceptions in the environment and elicit symptoms such as paranoia and social withdrawal. As the ventral striatum plays a primary role in identifying anger and receives efferent input from the M-pathway, it may serve as the neuroanatomical substrate in the perception of anger. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

    Journal Title

    Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry

    Volume

    44

    Publication Date

    1-1-2013

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    88

    Last Page

    93

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000320297400012

    ISSN

    0278-5846

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