Negative priming in amphetamine psychosis

Amphetamine abuse may lead to a psychotic state, its symptomatology being very similar to what is seen in paranoid schizophrenia. Failure of attentional inhibition of irrelevant information is thought to be associated with the psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia. Negative priming (NP) paradigm is believed to measure this impairment. Several studies have shown impaired NP in schizophrenia. In the present study a spatial NP task was used to assess attentional inhibition in a group of amphetamine-induced psychosis patients. Nineteen patients with amphetamine-induced psychotic disorder and 20 healthy subjects participated in this study. Severity of psychotic symptoms was measured prior to testing using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). Patients showed no deficit in NP, and the amount of their NP effect was not significantly different from healthy subjects. Besides, we did not find any correlation between the amount of NP effect and severity of symptoms. Our results may indicate that cognitive mechanisms underlying NP might not be affected in amphetamine psychosis.