Emotional deficits are an integral feature of schizophrenia (SZ), but our understanding of these deficits is limited. In the present study, we examined whether the severity of emotional deficits reflects difficulty in the cognitive processing of affectively valenced stimuli. Healthy controls (HC; N = 170) and stable outpatients with SZ (N = 245), characterized as either deficit syndrome (DS; N = 62) or non-deficit syndrome (NDS; N = 183), completed an Affective Go/NoGo task requiring discrimination of positively, negatively or neutrally valenced words. Accuracy (d') and response bias (c) were calculated for each of the three conditions, and a series of ANOVAs were carried out to examine group differences. Examination of accuracy revealed significant main effects of group and valence and a significant valence × group interaction, indicating that while affective valence impacted accuracy for the HC and NDS groups, the DS group maintained the same low level of accuracy across all levels of affective valence. Examination of response bias also revealed significant main effects of group and valence and a significant valence × group interaction. Specifically, within the HC and NDS groups, response bias did not differ between negatively and positively valenced words while response bias in the DS group was lowest for neutral, higher for negatively valenced and higher still for positively valenced words. These results suggest that emotional deficits in DS may be directly related to deficits in processing affective information. Moreover, although this deficit is observed across both positively and negatively valenced stimuli, it is most pronounced for positively valenced material.
Keywords: Affective processing; Deficit syndrome; Emotion; Negative symptoms.
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