Social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia — An ERP study

• Negative social stimuli engages more attention than any other type of stimuli.
• Patients with schizophrenia react to affective social stimuli same as controls.
• ERPs to affective social stimuli are linked to symptoms in schizophrenia.

BackgroundDespite social cognitive dysfunction that may be observed in patients with schizophrenia, the knowledge about social and nonsocial affective processing in schizophrenia is scant. The aim of this study was to examine neurophysiological and behavioural responses to neutral and negative stimuli with (faces, people) and without (animals, objects) social content in schizophrenia.MethodsTwenty-six patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) and 21 healthy controls (HC) completed a visual oddball paradigm with either negative or neutral pictures from the Nencki Affective Picture System (NAPS) as targets while EEG was recorded. Half of the stimuli within each category presented social content (faces, people).ResultsNegative stimuli with social content produced lower N2 amplitude and higher mean LPP than any other type of stimuli in both groups. Despite differences in behavioural ratings and alterations in ERP processing of affective stimuli (lack of EPN differentiation, decreased P3 to neutral stimuli) SCZ were still able to respond to specific categories of stimuli similarly to HC.ConclusionsThe pattern of results suggests that with no additional emotion-related task demands patients with schizophrenia may present similar attentional engagement with negative social stimuli as healthy controls.