Altered P3a Modulations to Emotional Faces in Male Patients With Chronic Schizophrenia.

Altered P3a Modulations to Emotional Faces in Male Patients With Chronic Schizophrenia. Clin EEG Neurosci. 2020 Jan 02;:1550059419896723 Authors: Onitsuka T, Spencer KM, Nakamura I, Hirano Y, Hirano S, McCarley RW, Shenton ME, Niznikiewicz MA Abstract Existing evidence suggests that patients with schizophrenia may have a deficit in processing facial expressions. However, the neural basis of this processing deficit remains unclear. A total of 20 men diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia and 13 age- and sex-matched controls participated in the study. We investigated visual N170 and P3a components evoked in response to fearful, happy, and sad faces during an emotion discrimination task. Compared with control subjects, patients showed significantly smaller N170 amplitudes bilaterally (P = .04). We found no significant main effect of emotion of the presented faces (fearful, happy, or sad) on N170 amplitude. Patients showed significantly smaller P3a amplitudes in response to fearful (P = .01) and happy (P = .02) faces, but no significant between-group differences were observed for sad faces (P = .22). Moreover, we found no significant P3a modulation effect in response to emotional faces in patients with schizophrenia. Our results suggest that altered P3a modulations to emotional faces may be associated with emotion recognition deficits in patients with schizophrenia. PMID: 31896289 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Clinical EEG and Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Clin EEG Neurosci Source Type: research