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The impact of emotional faces on social motivation in schizophrenia

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Abstract

Impairments in emotion recognition and psychosocial functioning are a robust phenomenon in schizophrenia and may affect motivational behavior, particularly during socio-emotional interactions. To characterize potential deficits and their interplay, we assessed social motivation covering various facets, such as implicit and explicit approach-avoidance tendencies to facial expressions, in 27 patients with schizophrenia (SZP) and 27 matched healthy controls (HC). Moreover, emotion recognition abilities as well as self-reported behavioral activation and inhibition were evaluated. Compared to HC, SZP exhibited less pronounced approach-avoidance ratings to happy and angry expressions along with prolonged reactions during automatic approach-avoidance. Although deficits in emotion recognition were replicated, these were not associated with alterations in social motivation. Together with additional connections between psychopathology and several approach-avoidance processes, these results identify motivational impairments in SZP and suggest a complex relationship between different aspects of social motivation. In the context of specialized interventions aimed at improving social cognitive abilities in SZP, the link between such dynamic measures, motivational profiles and functional outcomes warrants further investigations, which can provide important leverage points for treatment. Crucially, our findings present first insights into the assessment and identification of target features of social motivation.

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Notes

  1. As patients were treated in very heterogeneous polypharmacy, we have conducted exploratory analyses contrasting those nine patients with antipsychotic monotherapy to the other 18 receiving additional medication. The only near-significant effect was a trend (p = .095) for longer RTs in the joystick task for those receiving also other psychotropic medication compared to those receiving only antipsychotics.

Abbreviations

SZP:

Patients with schizophrenia

HC:

Healthy controls

BAS:

Behavioral activation system

BIS:

Behavioral inhibition system

PANSS:

Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale

RT:

Reaction time

ARES:

Action Regulating Emotion Systems Scale

TMT:

Trail Making Test

MWT:

Mehrfachwortschatztest [German]

BDI:

Beck Depression Inventory

ANCOVA:

Analysis of covariance

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Acknowledgments

SR and BD are supported by JARA-BRAIN. The authors thank Pia Hoffmann, Nina Trojan, Dr. Werner Brosch, Manfred Kornberger, Dr. Maria Doppelbauer-Dragschitz, Dr. Eleonore Miller-Reiter and Dr. Friedrich Schmidl for their assistance and support of data collection and patient recruitment. The authors declare no conflict of interest and assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Medical Faculty, RWTH Aachen, Pauwelsstr. 30, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Sina Radke & Birgit Derntl

  2. JARA – Translational Brain Medicine, Jülich/Aachen, Germany

    Sina Radke & Birgit Derntl

  3. Otto-Wagner Spital, Vienna, Austria

    Vera Pfersmann

  4. Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Jülich, Jülich, Germany

    Birgit Derntl

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  1. Sina Radke
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  2. Vera Pfersmann
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  3. Birgit Derntl
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Correspondence to Sina Radke.

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Radke, S., Pfersmann, V. & Derntl, B. The impact of emotional faces on social motivation in schizophrenia. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 265, 613–622 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-015-0589-x

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